Stressing the importance of U.S. diplomacy and development assistance around the world during a Council on Foreign Relations discussion on Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) said the United States can’t become more secure without being engaged overseas.
Royce and Mark Green, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), also highlighted the importance of administering aid effectively in order to save lives, avert geopolitical fallout, empower foreign countries and ensure homeland security during the discussion.
“[The United States] is not going to be a more secure country here if we’re not engaged overseas in such things as stopping transmission of infectious diseases before they become a pandemic, [and] being engaged diplomatically – and with development – to make certain that those parts of the world that, frankly, are incubators for terror or instability [are] confronted,” said Royce, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
As an example, Royce noted that more than 400,000 Rohingya people had recently fled to Bangladesh as half the villages in northern Rakhine State in Burma were burned to the ground. An international presence is needed there to mitigate radicalization and further geopolitical fallout.
“We have been in these parts of the world, whether they’re on the border of Syria or over in the Philippines after a typhoon, and we’ve been able to push through reforms which lead to a situation of rather than people waiting for four months for (food) to be delivered,” Royce said.
One reform, Royce continued, is a voucher program established under the Global Food Security Act that allows food to be purchased locally more efficiently and at reduced cost in relief situations.
Green, who served four terms in the House of Representatives representing Wisconsin, was U.S. Ambassador to Tanzania under George W. Bush, helped craft the Millennium Challenge Act, and most recently served as president of the International Republican Institute (IRI), said the goal of foreign assistance is to empower governments to overcome challenges and to solve problems independently.
“… I think USAID has to look for ways to build the capacity of countries to take on their own needs, help them get those tools, incentivize the reforms that they need to undertake in order to provide for their own people, so that we’re always standing shoulder-to-shoulder with those in crisis situations, but also helping them to govern themselves and to lead themselves, because that’s … human dignity,” Green said.