Reconstruction –
Despite our efforts to sustain global peace and expand prosperity, the world has been, and remains, an increasingly unstable place. In recent years the challenges of political instability, economic inequality, and environmental degradation have resulted in the largest migration flow of humanity that the world has experienced since at least the Second World War and perhaps in all of history. Whether people be fleeing persecution, seeking economic opportunity, or rebuilding after force majeure events, the demand for humanitarian relief and longer-term development assistance remains an immediate unquenchable thirst.
Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has been the leader in meeting those assistance needs abroad; but as recent events have demonstrated, we need not look past our own borders to find significant humanitarian and development challenges. Hurricane Maria's destruction across the island of Puerto Rico in September 2017 demonstrated the United States' need to re-examine how we provide not only humanitarian assistance and recovery to our own citizens following catastrophic events, but also how we promote long-term resiliency and growth as well as local ownership of recovery and development.
Outside our borders but still close to home, the decades of combined neglect, benign incompetence, misdirected good intentions and lack of domestic ownership have resulted in Haiti being a case study in both the opportunities and failures of international aid and assistance. Repetitively afflicted by both natural disasters and man-made tragedies, Haiti has become a state both unable and unwilling to free itself from the grip of international aid and assistance anytime soon.
The tragedies of Haiti and Puerto Rico, and similar cases across the world, do not happen isolation, however. Like the winds that blow across them and the ground that shakes beneath their people's feet, global political, social and economic currents also impact how aid and development reach persons, communities, and countries in need. The new National Security Strategy has made clear that the United States will put its needs first; and, while we will continue to be the leader, at least for now, in bilateral assistance, the time has come for other entities, both governments and organizations, to shoulder greater responsibility. While always quietly understood in the past, assistance is now to be tied much more explicitly to our own economic and national security interests than to our own benevolence.
The efforts of the United States to provide assistance through an industry of reconstruction, having reached its apex during the height of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, now finds itself at an inflection point. We must now consider how to more effectively deliver the tools of humanitarian assistance, resiliency and development to those in need, in a manner that more evenly distributes the burdens among governments, organizations, and private firms while simultaneously breaking the chains of dependency and ensuring our own security. While the success of the United States in adapting to this new reality is not yet determined, there is no doubt that the winds will continue to blow, the earth will shake, people will be on the move, and the need for assistance will be relentless.
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