In January 1949, President Harry Truman delivered the first U.S. inaugural address of the cold war. "Each period of our national history has had its special challenges," he declared.

Truman had presided over the first use of atomic power in anger and the founding of the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He had witnessed the descent of the Iron Curtain around Eastern Europe, and had begun aiding reconstruction of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan.  He now urged the formation of what would become the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And he called for the first-ever peacetime foreign aid programme for poor nations.

Thus was born the modern project of foreign aid—the giving of advice, grants, and loans to help poor nations. From the start, its motives were complex—geopolitics, missionary zeal for democracy and capitalism, and a genuine desire to alleviate suffering. Lenin had rightly condemned the West for exploiting poor nations for their resources and enslaving their people. To contain communism, Truman apparently believed, the West had to meet that criticism head-on by aiding, not just exploiting, poorer nations. With a helping hand, he now argued, those nations could become wealthier, democratic, more like the United States. In short, they could "develop."

Half a century later, in April 2000, thousands of protesters from an international movement called Jubilee 2000 locked arms and ringed the very spot where Truman spoke—indeed, ringed the entire U.S. Capitol—to dramatize how lending programmes he fathered had gone badly awry. The human chain, they explained, symbolized the "chains of debt" that financially enslave poor nations to rich ones.  Some poor countries now spend more servicing their debts to rich countries, debts mostly accumulated in the name of development, than they spend on providing basic social services. For example,  in 1977 Zambia devoted 40 percent of its national budget to foreign debt and only 7 percent to basic social services.