President Obama's New Deal has paved the way for a $787 billion economic stimulus package. The goals include: improving infrastructure, investing in energy projects and providing financial relief for families via tax cuts and increased government benefits. These are admirable domestic goals and should be pursued, but there are also international pursuits that would achieve the goal of stimulating the US economy while at the same time saving thousands, if not millions of lives and also demonstrating a true leadership role against protectionism in the process. I am proposing the raising, training and sustaining of a truly international emergency response force, open to citizens of all nations.
The creation and maintenance of such a force is badly needed on both humanitarian and economic grounds in order to provide effective, prevention based response to genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and natural disasters. Such a force, funded principally by the US, might need to operate under the umbrella of the United Nations, but must not be constrained by the existing veto arrangements that prevail in the Security Council and that make that body so ineffectual.
The force would comprise not only military personnel, but also administrators, police and medical teams. With the bulk of funding coming from the US, raising, training and sustaining such a force could achieve similar positive results in terms of stimulating the US economy, as did World War II - which most historians agree had a more concrete impact on the economy than Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the1930s.
Such a force, operating within an appropriately crafted mandate, would not only save countless lives, but according to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, would have saved the international community nearly $130 billion of the $200 billion it spent on managing conflicts in the 1990s by focusing on conflict prevention or early intervention rather than post conflict reconstruction.
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