The Academy for Educational Development (AED) has announced Steve Moseley is retiring as president and chief executive officer after a remarkable 40 years of service with the organization.  Steve is a true pioneer in the international arena, serving as a key player in expanding U.S. education and exchange efforts around the world and helping to educate and provide opportunity in particular for girls.   Steve has served on the board of the USGLC for many years, and we appreciate his wise advice and counsel.  We wish him well and look forward to continue working with him.  And we want to congratulate USGLC Chairman George Ingram who will step in as the interim president and CEO of AED during this transition.

Must Reads

Who’s In the News
Stephen F. Moseley Announces Retirement as President and CEO of AED (Lea Sloan – AED)
Stephen F. Moseley, under whose leadership AED has become one of the leading non-governmental organizations in the world, announced that he will retire after 40 years of service, the last 23 as its president and chief executive officer.  His retirement will take effect January 15, 2011, when Mr. Moseley will assume the position of president emeritus and remain available to advise the organization. The Board of Directors appointed George M. Ingram, an AED senior vice president, as the interim president and CEO and board member ex officio…Mr. Ingram also serves as the co-chair of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network and as chairman of the U.S. Global Leadership Campaign.

Dear G20: Don’t forget your development agenda (Kofi Annan – Globe and Mail)
With the G20 summit beginning in South Korea on Thursday, two issues stand out for those of us who take an interest in international development. First, the concepts of fairness, balance and the common good have experienced a welcome renaissance as world leaders have had to remind each other of these universal principles to avoid a potentially devastating escalation of their disagreements on currency values and trade imbalances. Second, while it remains to be seen to what extent it will help to bring countries’ contending economic strategies into line, this rediscovery of basic values comes just as the G20 is starting to include international development issues in its deliberations.

Smart Power
What’s missing in Mr. Obama’s democracy rhetoric (Washington Post)
The Obama administration has focused much of its foreign policy on what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton likes to call the “three D’s:” diplomacy, development and defense. A fourth D, democracy, is missing from that formula – and too often it has been absent from President Obama’s strategy. So it has been encouraging to see the emphasis the president has placed on democratic countries and democratic values during his ongoing tour of Asia. In a region where the shadow and the example of autocratic China are formidable, Mr. Obama is visiting four free countries, and in his speeches he is making a strong case for why they are more likely to succeed in the long run.

Taking the re- out of report (Al Kamen – Washington Post)
Speaking of facts, House Republicans, looking hard these days for potential cuts in wasteful federal spending, need not look too far. The State Department inspector general has a suggestion that could save tens of millions of dollars: Congress could stop asking embassies overseas for so many reports – more than 300 in fiscal 2010 – about all manner of issues. “There is considerable overlap, redundancy and duplication among congressionally mandated reports,” according to the IG’s study, released Tuesday. The study estimates that each embassy “spends an average of 1,400 person-hours every year on those reports and another 100 required by the department itself.” The total cost is estimated at more than $50 million a year. And that’s a conservative guess. The instructions for these reports “are often overly long and detailed,” the study concluded, and “the reports themselves have become encyclopedic in detail and length. In both instances, shorter would be better.”

New Afghan policy review won’t make recommendations on policy (Josh Rogin – Foreign Policy)
The White House has begun its next comprehensive review of the war in Afghanistan. But don’t expect it to resolve the political struggle over the course of the war: The review won’t examine policy options and won’t weigh in on how the war effort should be modified going forward. The National Security Staff began what they are calling the “annual Afghanistan-Pakistan review” two weeks ago and is now in the “data collection” phase, a senior Obama administration official told reporters on a conference call Tuesday afternoon. NSS staff went on a 12-day trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Brussels recently to gather data for the review, and reports from various agencies and outposts are due this week. When that step is completed, the second phase of the review will begin.

Politics/Foreign Policy
Economic Crisis Sidelines Fate of the World’s Poorest (Helene Cooper – New York Times)
Last year, after a personal appeal from President Obama in which he cited his own family’s experiences in Kenya, world leaders gathered at the Italian hill town of L’Aquila pledged $20 billion over three years to help millions of the world’s poorest farmers grow enough food to feed themselves — a “landmark achievement” organizers said in a report. A year and a half later, barely $1 billion has come in, mostly from the United States. Canada, Spain, South Korea and the Gates Foundation recently promised around $400 million, but many donors have been shifting old aid pledges into the new fund, and counting them twice. After aid groups examined the numbers of the L’Aquila announcement, they found that only around $6 billion of the $20 billion would be new money, were it to materialize in the next three years.

Rep Ros-Lehtinen: House Can Push Obama Into More Hawkish Foreign Policy (Jason Ditz – Anti War)
The presumptive incoming head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R – FL) today said she believes that the new Republican-dominated House, and her committee in particular, will be able to push President Obama into an even more hawkish foreign policy.“I think it strengthens the president’s hand,” said Ros-Lehtinen saying that a “tough Congress” would allow the president to be more overtly hostile to Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela, whom she called “rogue regimes.” Rep. Ros-Lehtinen also suggested that the new Congress could allow a more “hard line” position with respect to China, making a number of additional demands against the nation with regards to its human rights violations. A number of returning GOP Congresspersons have suggested that they will try to out-hawk President Obama, pushing for more war funding and keeping the wars going as long as possible.

How Tea Partiers Will Change Foreign Policy (Max Fisher – The Atlantic Wire)
Now that a number of Tea Party Republicans have won seats on Congress, political observers have paid close attention to how the newcomers will guide domestic policy, particularly on government spending, whether they will roll back the defense budget, and how their pledges to repeal all or part of health-care reform will play out. But what effect will they have on foreign policy? As President Barack Obama seeks to continue to U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, to escalate in Afghanistan in time for the planned 2011 draw-down, to negotiate Israel-Palestinian peace and deter Iranian proliferation, to continue building ties with Russia and manage China’s rise, how will the Tea Party congressional bloc influence America’s place in the world?

How the G20 Can Fix International Aid (Edward Rees – The Atlantic)
Expected to be high on the agenda of the G20 meeting in Seoul this week is the international aid that rich countries spend on efforts to lift conflict-affected states out of violence, economic collapse, human and material ruin. While many of the problems that these states suffer are homegrown, they are often exacerbated by an ineffective international aid industry that delivers chronically poor results. Yet there’s a promising new approach to transforming the international aid system now in play — and the world’s greatest recipients of international aid are already calling for it. The counterpoint to the G20 is the g7+ group, established in 2008, which consists of Afghanistan, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Chad, Cote D’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Liberia, Nepal, the Solomon Islands, Sierra Leone, Southern Sudan, and Timor-Leste.

Debt Commission to Gates: You can’t keep your $100 billion in savings (Josh Rogin – Foreign Policy)
The bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform released its proposal Wednesday to slash $200 billion from the federal budget by 2015, including $100 billion in cuts to the defense budget. “We have a patriotic duty to come together on a plan that will make America better off tomorrow than it is today,” wrote the co-chairs, former GOP Senator Alan Simpson and Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, in their draft proposal. “America cannot be great if we go broke. Our economy will not grow and our country will not be able to compete without a plan to get this crushing debt burden off our back.”