One would imagine that a national investment that pays dividends in the forms of greater national security, economic growth, and revitalized American values would be a wise investment in the future of our country. Yet the International Affairs budget -- which funds America's vital development and diplomacy programs -- is...

The Haiti earthquake has produced an overwhelming humanitarian response from governments and people everywhere. This disaster has occurred in one of the world's poorest countries, a nation whose infrastructure and governmental institutions were fragile to begin with. The relief challenge is extraordinary, requiring the removal of bodies, the treatment of...

"Most of the coverage of President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize award focused on the irony of it all. Here was a man with a brief record of accomplishment in his first year of office, a President of the United States, inheriting and now commanding two wars, receiving a prize for...

While many Americans are worrying about not gaining weight during the holiday season, one-sixth of our planet's population is in danger of malnutrition, not obesity. As the U.N. World Food Program recently reported, more than a billion people do not get enough food to be healthy. Even more alarmingly, as...

Conservative critics have observed a lack of passion in the delivery of the President's decision on Afghanistan. This is one I may agree with them on. Frankly, I wanted to see a very sober Commander in Chief rather than one who pursued this fateful decision with arrogant self confidence. Afghanistan,...

"Out with the old; in with the new." This aphorism has produced some strange results over the years as one administration succeeds another as the curator of American foreign policy.

In the Reagan era, for example, it was forbidden to use the phrase "human rights," a term identified...

More than eight months after President Obama took office, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) remains without an Administrator. While an announcement could happen imminently, the agency -- and indeed the entire US government -- has lacked a politically-empowered figure dedicated solely to U.S. global development policy during a...