Aid and economic development in the Third World was seen as part of the Cold War fight. In the 1950s, the economist W.W. Rostow penned The Stages of Economic Growth, subtitled “A Non-Communist Manifesto.” It was a riposte to the dependency theory of global underdevelopment, which suggested, based on solid Leninist principles, that the richer West was a cause of the poorer Rest. According to the Dependencias, the Western powers kept all of the manufacturing for themselves, leaving a reserve army laboring unproductively on the smallholder farms of South America, Africa, and Asia. The Stages of Economic Growth was a book about how developing countries could get rich through Western-style capitalism. At that time, in the post-Sputnik era, the Soviet model still looked very attractive as a get-rich quick scheme, and free markets needed some good publicity behind the alternative. On the basis of that book and work with the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, Rostow became Lyndon Johnson’s national security advisor, where he pushed the idea that U.S. aid could be a powerful tool in winning the Cold War.

The fall of the Berlin Wall undermined the Cold War frame for thinking about Africa, Asia, and Latin America. But two subsequent events helped to cement a new framework. First, the terror attacks of 2001 created a growing fear of failed states, fragile states, rogue states, and (even) evil states. Added to the ever-present charitable impulse to help countries facing humanitarian crises thanks to war, famine, or natural disaster was a new national security case: countries festering in poverty and poor governance would breed terror and instability. Financial assistance gained a new role as a result: U.S. aid could be used to support “money as a weapons system” in counterinsurgency operations from Iraq to Afghanistan.

The second event—or series of events—that reframed U.S. thinking about developing countries was the phenomenal economic success of Asian countries, many of which had been helped along the way by earlier U.S. support. First Japan, then South Korea and Taiwan, then countries from Thailand to China entered explosive periods of economic growth. Between 1982 and 1991, South Korea’s annual growth rate was 8.4 percent. China averaged 8.6 percent between 1991 and 2012. Once viewed as allies against the Soviet threat (or at least our enemy’s enemy in the case of China), these nations came to be seen as economic adversaries—not least in the fight for jobs and technological leadership. In the 1990s, Michael Crichton made good money writing a mediocre novel, Rising Sun, about Japan’s impending economic dominance of America. More recently, the fear has been that America is “Becoming China’s Bitch,” according to the bestselling book by Peter Kiernan.

For these reasons, developing countries are now sorted into two groups: charity-case terror threats and emerging economic threats. Africa is usually lumped firmly in the charity-case category, a designation constantly reinforced by television news. According to analysis by Yusuf Kalyango, Jr. and Uche Onyebadi of the University of Missouri, of all of the stories on NBC, CBS, and ABC evening news broadcasts over the period 1980 to 2010, 900 were stories on war, health crises, natural disasters, and terrorism in Africa, compared with 125 on business or economic topics in the region. Between 2002 and 2010, about a quarter of the three networks’ Africa-focused stories mentioned U.S. civilian aid programs, another 14 percent mentioned U.S. military aid or bases, and 13 percent mentioned U.S. celebrities (think Oprah, Madonna, and Angelina). Compare that with the 1 percent that focused on U.S. business or investment relations with a country in the region.