Trends in US Humanitarian Policy

The US is by far the world’s largest humanitarian donor. In 2000, US relief aid totalled nearly $1.2 billion, around a third of all humanitarian assistance (see Figure 1, overleaf). Despite this predominance, humanitarian aid occupies an increasingly uncertain place in the country’s foreign policy. The percentage of gross national product allotted by the US government to foreign assistance has stood at or below 0.1% – lower than at any time in the past half- century.
During the 1990s, the government experimented with using aid as a lever to effect political change in countries such as Sudan and North Korea. This controversial experiment has since been abandoned, and officials now speak more circumspectly about the capacity of assistance to bolster wider policy aims. Similarly, the enthusiasm for ‘humanitarian intervention’, evidenced under Bill Clinton, has been tempered by his successor, George W. Bush. At home, conflicting constituencies and lobbies, from industry to the Christian Right, exert a complicating influence on the formation of policy, while the institutional architecture of humanitarian assistance is fragmented and badly out of date.