Richard Nixon - United States foreign policy for the 1970's - International Economic Policy

Purposes

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As the Peterson Task Force pointed out, "there is not one U.S. foreign assistance program but several. They serve different purposes and should be weighed on their individual merits." We divided them into three categories:

• Security assistance, the purpose of which is to promote our national security by supporting the security of other nations.
• Humanitarian assistance, which embodies the traditional compassionate concern of the American people for victims of poverty, natural disaster and political upheaval wherever they may be.
• Development assistance, which strengthens our ties with the two thirds of the human race in the lower income countries whose overriding national objective is economic and social development.

I therefore proposed to create separate organizational arrangements for each of these categories. This would enable us to fix responsibility and measure achievement more clearly-in order to end the confusion in - our present approach which lumps all three purposes together in composite programs. The close relationships among these three types of assistance would of course remain important, and more effective coordination among them would be a key element in our new approach.

Our proposed new international security assistance program and our humanitarian aid efforts are discussed elsewhere in this report.

Let me explain the thinking behind our new programs for development assistance here.

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