The New Containment Strategy in US Foreign Aid.

Within the debate over whether US foreign policy is shaped by geostrategic, realist concerns or by liberal-democratic ideals, the end of the Cold War was assumed by many to represent a turning point in favor of the latter, while the new War on Terror may suggest an era of renewed primacy for the former. This paper seeks to address these two turning points with regard to US foreign aid and the freedom, or lack thereof, of recipient states. In Part One, US aid is sorted according to the Freedom House categories of recipient states, and the resulting graphs are qualitatively analyzed. In Part Two, OLS regression is employed to introduce dummy variables for 1991 and 2001. In Part Three, the authors offer basic, preliminary measures of which countries represent "frontline" states in the Cold War and War on Terror periods. The preliminary findings suggest that the end of the Cold War was not as clear a turning-point for US aid as assumed, but that 9/11 did mark a sharp turn toward renewed primacy for realist, geostrategic policies. The paper concludes with a discussion of the process of creating better measures of "frontline" status in order to improve the analysis in Part Three of this project. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]