The "One" campaign against global poverty reports:

The Senate Budget Committee, chaired by Senator Kent Conrad, wants to cut $4 billion from the president's International Affairs Budget -- the part of the budget funding almost all of our anti-poverty work.

This would be terrible policy any day of the week. Recall that on February 12, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told Congress that the global economic crisis was the most serious security challenge facing the United States and that it could topple governments and trigger waves of refugees. Cutting the International Affairs budget means directly attacking the Obama administration's ability to respond to the most serious security challenge facing the United States. In particular, the cut could lead to a freeze in programs that provide life-saving treatment for people with HIV/AIDS.

But attacking the International Affairs budget this week is particularly obscene. President Obama is leaving today for the G-20 "Economic Crisis Summit" in London. The top agenda item is how to counter the effects of the global economic crisis on countries that don't have the capacity to create their own economic stimulus. Cutting the president's international aid request this week will undercut President Obama at the very moment he will be trying to argue for a coordinated international response. Other countries will say: how can you ask us to do more when your Senate is slashing your proposed increase?

As President Obama said last summer:

It is well-known outside the United States that a key obstacle, if not the key obstacle, to Israeli/Palestinian peace is the relationship between Israel and the United States. To say that the U.S. “supports Israel” severely misstates the problem: the key problem is the perception and the reality that the U.S. almost unfailingly protects the Israeli government from the negative consequences of anti-Palestinian policies, such as the recent military assault on Gaza, so that while rhetorically the U.S. is committed to peace, in practice the incentives that have been created and maintained by U.S. policy have had the effect of constantly pushing the Israeli government towards more confrontation with the Palestinians, rather than towards accommodation. Just as a Wall Street banker who expects a U.S. government bailout will take dangerous risks since he is protected from the potential negative consequences of those risks, so Israeli government leaders, faced with choices between “risks for peace” and “risks for war” will tend to choose “risks for war” since the U.S. government is perceived to provide a blanket insurance policy against “risks for war” while no such insurance is perceived to exist for “risks for peace.”

The key immediate question then for people in the United States concerned about Israeli-Palestinian peace is altering the character of the insurance policy. Just as Washington must demand policy changes in exchange for insuring Wall Street banks, so Washington must demand policy changes in exchange for insuring Israeli government policies. In either case, the failure to demand policy changes spreads systemic risk, since the insurance effectively makes the failed policies into policies of the U.S. government.