Nicholas Eberstadt is a political economist and demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, known for his work on international development, poverty, and public policy. He contributed to The Weekly Standard over nearly two decades, writing on topics including foreign aid, humanitarian crises, and domestic social policy. His articles frequently offered critical assessments of aid programs and government interventions both abroad and at home.
May 22, 2014, marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” address, delivered at the spring commencement for the University of Michigan. That speech remains the most ambitious call to date by any president (our current commander in chief included) to use the…
Over six months into President Obama's term of office, there is still no head for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), America's main foreign aid agency. Nor is there yet a CEO at the Millennium Challenge Corporation (Washington's newer, arguably more flexible foreign assistance…
Of all the disappointments for which the George W. Bush administration will be remembered, perhaps none is as bitter as the failure of its North Korea policy. Despite its intermittent tough talk about Kim Jong Il and his regime, the Bush team's record with Pyongyang these past eight years is a…
Port-au-Prince
Seoul
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION is not famous for patience with its critics. But for the sake of national security, the new Bush team should listen to constructive criticism of its policies--in particular, its policy for the North Korean nuclear crisis. The current U.S. approach to the North Korea problem…
E.H. CARR'S powerful little book The Twenty Years' Crisis presciently argued in 1939 that the events leading Europe to war were not sudden and new, but rather two decades in the making; that interwar Europe's crisis was rooted in power politics, framed by the insatiable ambitions of revisionist…
THE SPECTACLE of some 100 heads of state and 50,000 conferees gathering these past two weeks in Johannesburg for a fractious and even raucous U.N. summit on sustainable development may have left the impression of healthy intellectual ferment in the world of development economics. Alas, on the big…
IN CONTEMPORARY political debate, there is no surer way to discredit and delegitimize a policy than to establish that it injures women and children. Over the past year, a chorus of critics have lodged just this accusation at the Bush administration's foreign aid policy. According to their charges,…
My great-grandfather Eduard, who had the fine judgment to make America his home, is still vividly remembered in family lore. He was, among other things, a very modern man. His opinions -- he had many of them -- were typically progressive, sometimes strenuously so. He had studied at Heidelberg…
Michael Maren
There is scarcely a nobler quest in the world than the search for solutions to the continuing tragedies of starvation and famine. But perhaps in no other humanitarian venture do people so mistake good intentions for good policy. The subject of world hunger can cause the vision of ordinarily…
Brian Atwood announced the shocking news himself: According to preliminary figures, the United States appeared to have fallen to third place among aid- giving governments in terms of total outlays of "official development assistance." Atwood is administrator of the Agency for International…