ìSixteen Nations to Get Initial Millenium Aid,î by Michael Schroeder, Wall Street Journal, 7 May, p. A14.

Short article in WSJ about start-up of first Millennium Challenge Corp.ís funds flowing from the U.S. to 16 Gap states. This fund is the newest version of U.S. foreign aid, and represents a boosting of our overall aid by 50% over the next three years.

To attract aid from the MCC, your country needs to demonstrate youíre on the right path in terms of political and economic reforms that show youíre synchronizing your internal rule sets with the Coreís emerging collective rule set of free markets, free trade, transparency, democracy, and collective security.

The winners of the first $1b in aid distributed by the MCC are: Armenia, Benin, Bolivia, Cape Verde, Georgia, Ghana, Honduras, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Senegal, Sri Lanka and Vanuatu. While Georgia and Madagascar have had recent bouts on instability, itís interesting to note that the U.S. military really hasnít been to any of these states since the end of the Cold War, save for one small intervention in Georgia.

My point is this: using aid to reward progress in Gap states only makes sense, and those states receiving such aid are likely to be the states in the Gap least likely to see a U.S. military intervention. In other words, shrinking the Gap is a multifaceted affair that does not always involve the U.S. military. This is not about burdening ourselves with empire, but about making good investment choices with both our pubic-sector and private-sector funds, with U.S. military interventions playing only an enabling role in those instances where bad actors preclude the possibility of such flows.