Foreign Policy Through Aid: Has United States Assistance Achieved its Foreign Policy Objectives?

In looking at the history of U.S. aid, three general goals emerge: political stability, increased economic liberalization and expanding influence in the aid receiving country. While the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has measures in place to assess the success of its aid endeavors, most U.S. aid, in the form of economic and military aid, is largely unevaluated in terms of achieving these broad foreign policy goals. The results of this study suggest that U.S. military and economic aid fail to achieve these three general foreign policy objectives in a sustainable manner. Conducting a regression analysis of U.S. aid indicates that, in the short term, economic aid does succeed in promoting increased economic liberalization, but the concurrent giving of military aid cancels the effect. In the long term, the giving of economic aid supports the stability of a state’s government, but the U.S. will want to assess what other methods might produce similar and more enduring results at less cost