Politics & Power Quote by Lee H. Hamilton

Foreign aid, in Lee H. Hamilton's framing, is never charity. It is leverage dressed up as principle. The sentence reads like procedural common sense - who could oppose "accountability and transparency"? - but its real work is to turn a messy geopolitical tool into a moral conditional: American money should flow only to governments that behave in ways Washington can recognize, measure, and reward.

Hamilton, a longtime congressional power broker and national security hand, is speaking from the late-20th-century bipartisan center where "good governance" became the preferred language for projecting influence without sounding imperial. By tying aid to "market reforms, democracy, and the rule of law", he bundles a specific ideology into a neutral-sounding checklist. "Market reforms" sits first in the trilogy for a reason: it signals an economic worldview (privatization, deregulation, investor friendliness) that is treated as inseparable from political freedom. The subtext is that development and legitimacy are not just internal choices; they are prerequisites for partnership on American terms.

The rhetoric is calibrated to domestic audiences as much as foreign capitals. Conditionality reassures taxpayers and lawmakers that aid isn't wasted or siphoned off by corrupt elites. It also provides a tidy rationale for cutting off inconvenient allies when scandals erupt - or for maintaining support when reforms can be credibly claimed. The tension, of course, is that U.S. strategic interests often rely on precisely the governments least likely to meet these standards. Hamilton's line is aspirational and disciplining at once: a rules-based ideal that also functions as a negotiating posture, a way to moralize hard power without pretending hard power isn't there.