Global Health and Foreign Policy

Feldbaum, Harley; Lee, Kelley; Michaud, Joshua

States engage in development assistance (including development assistance for health) for multiple reasons and with differing levels of commitment, but there is typically an explicit or implicit recognition of the value of such assistance to countries' foreign-policy objectives (6, 7) . In 1961, when US President John F. Kennedy created the US Agency for International Development, he explicitly acknowledged the US security interest in providing aid to ward off the collapse of developing-country governments, which ''would be disastrous to our national security, harmful to our comparative prosperity, and offensive to our conscience'' (8) . The United States and other countries continue to frame development aid in a foreign-policy context by linking aid to national security and economic interests (9, 10) .