Humanitarian Aid as Soft Power

When people talk about "power" in an international relations context, it is frequently presumed to refer to the use or threat of military force by one country to influence another. This ignores so-called "soft power," which is the process of using positive incentives to promote peace and cooperation between nations. The United States sponsors many civilian agencies and organizations engaged in propagating U.S. soft power, from the Peace Corps to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. But since 2007, the government called on the United States Navy to project its own form of soft power in the form of roving hospital ships charged with providing medical care to people in developing countries.

The U.S. Navy has a long history of providing emergency medical assistance to countries stricken by disaster (such as during the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami). But ships like the UNSN Comfort (pictured above) are different; instead of providing short-term disaster relief, these ships cruise from port to port in Latin America, West Africa and Southeast Asia with crews of medical professionals, setting up temporary clinics where they treat the local population for anything from flu to heart surgery. In four months, the USNS Comfort was able to provide health services to 98,000 people in 12 Latin American nations. In total, the program costs roughly $250 million, which is less than 1/10th of 1% of the Department of Defence's $613 Billion dolar budget. The U.S. government hopes that this sort of regular aid will forge closer ties between the beneficiary nations and the U.S. Earlier this year, in an effort to improve its image overseas, the People's Republic of China launched their own hospital ship, which is expected to operate in East and Southeast Asia.

Though this program seems like a win-win for the U.S. (who recieves a boost to their public image) and developing countries (who get access to free and advanced medical treatment), there is room for improvement. While the Comfort treated 98,000 people on its first four-month voyage, this is but a miniscule fraction of the 88 million people who live in extreme poverty in Latin America. The number of impovrished people that the hospital ships can reach is necessarily limited by geography. In order to increase the number of people reached by this program, the United States may have to move away from a sea-based system to one able to reach inland. Also, the humanitarian benefits of these cruises are by neccessity brief; reaching 12 countries in four months means that the Comfort was in each port of call but briefly. Proper investment in improving the health of a population takes time, and transient visits by one U.S. Navy ship per year isn't going to make a permenant impact on overall health conditions Latin America or elsewhere. If the U.S. wants to have a long-term impact on the health of these nations, we need to establish permenent contact between our medical systems, provide medical training to local health workers, and provide funding for hospitals in these places to have better access to equipment and pharmaceuticals.

While the U.S. hospital ship program is not a perfect humanitarian effort, the fact that it puts the people in the developing world in contact with Americans doing beneficial work will almost certainly improve our image among the people of the world.