In international relations, nation states vie for power and security.politics world They do this through diplomacy and treaties which establish how they should behave towards one another.
If those agreements don’t work, states resort to violence to achieve their goals.
In addition to diplomatic relations and wars, states can also project their interests through soft power. Dialogue, compromise and consensus are all part of soft power.
Foreign assistance, where one country provides money, goods or services to another without implicitly asking for anything in return, is a form of soft power because it can make a needy nation dependent or beholden to a wealthier one.
When President John F. Kennedy established USAID in 1961, he said in a message to Congress: “We live at a very special moment in history. The whole southern half of the world — Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia — are caught up in the adventures of asserting their independence and modernizing their old ways of life.politics world These new nations need aid in loans and technical assistance just as we in the northern half of the world drew successively on one another’s capital and know-how as we moved into industrialization and regular growth.”
He acknowledged that the reason for the aid was not totally humanitarian.
“For widespread poverty and chaos lead to a collapse of existing political and social structures which would inevitably invite the advance of totalitarianism into every weak and unstable area,” Kennedy said. “Thus our own security would be endangered and our prosperity imperilled. A program of assistance to the underdeveloped nations must continue because the nation’s interest and the cause of political freedom require it.” Traditionally, U.S. foreign assistance, unlike the Chinese BRI, has not been transactional. There is no guarantee that what is spent will have a direct impact. Soft power is not quantifiable. Questions of image, status and prestige are hard to measure.
Besides helping millions of people, Samantha Power gave another more transactional reason for supporting U.S. foreign assistance.
“USAID has generated vast stores of political capital in the more than 100 countries where it works, making it more likely that when the United States makes hard requests for other leaders — for example — to send peace keepers to a war zone, to help a U.S. company enter a new market or to extradite a criminal to the United States — they say yes,” she wrote.