Jan Egeland, former UN humanitarian relief chief, offers a thoughtful report card for where we are as a community of developed nations in dealing with those most in need around us. Egeland notes the decline (there has been a decline) in conflicts and suffering since the end of the cold war. He now puts the number of lives in the balance at only a billion.

He recounts interactions he has had with Senators McCain and Obama, and with President Clinton in his role as a freelance promoter of international relief, and he sees in these experiences hope -- and a hope for investment -- for the humanitarian agenda in a new U.S. administration. He also notes that such an investment is long overdue:

Every year since the invasion in 2003 America has spent six times more in Iraq alone than the United Nations system has had to invest on all peace, human rights, relief, development and environmental efforts around the globe. The annual 120 billion dollars spent in Iraq is nearly twenty times more than the cost of all the successful UN humanitarian and peace-making operations in Angola, the Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Burundi, Ivory Coast, Northern Uganda, the Middle East and East Timor combined. The cost of unilateralism and effectiveness of multilateralism is not known to the American tax-payer, or to UN member states.

The next US administration may change this. As a UN official I had good meetings with Senators McCain and Obama and worked closely with President Bill Clinton on tsunami relief. I believe the benefits of global partnerships will be very clear to the next administration.