Technological and Development Support for the Global Poor
Socially responsible technology development projects aimed at stabilizing and then improving the conditions of the global poor can easily be created from America's scientific and technical base. Many projects already exist, such as the One Laptop Per Child initiative, but these projects are seen as stand-alone initiatives, rather than parts of a coherent policy approach to the developing world.
Target areas could include global access to clean water through simple technologies like solar water pasteurization, development of new appropriate technology power systems, low cost basic medical technologies and so on.
The close analogy to the Air-support-only defensive pacts is that the US would take responsibility for developing and testing these technologies, but would only make the designs available free of charge - essentially providing design and laboratory services, and leaving nations, NGOs and individuals to capitalize the designs and handle resource distribution. This keeps costs down, and makes clear where US responsibility ends, which is an important consideration when considering how to reach outside of our borders on non-military levels.
Another critical area is farming. Roughly 50% of the world's population makes a living by simple farming, mainly using manual and animal labor. One recent study shows that modern organic agriculture techniques could roughly double the food output of these farmers (Perfecto et. al. "Organic agriculture and the global food supply.") Organic agriculture practices could be disseminated using modern ICT. For example, a farmer could send an SMS message to the local American embassy while standing in their field. The GPS data about their location could be correlated with satellite imagery showing the condition of their fields over the previous few years using techniques from precision agriculture, a common first world farming practice. Individualized recommendations could then be delivered. The cost per individual helped is relatively small: the heavy work is done by computers. But the effect on global food security, and on how the US is viewed by perhaps 50% of the world's population is beyond price.
Similar approaches are possible in medicine. Carefully prepared information packs, tailored to the health risks of each climate, geography and lifestyle could be coupled with existing medical expert systems to provide very basic, but still very useful, global health support at relatively low marginal costs. Education is similarly an open door: primary and even secondary education materials, vetted for accuracy and cultural appropriateness, and then translated into many world languages could help countless people at very low cost, and the more educated a population is, the less vulnerable they will be to rumors and propaganda.
http://guptaoption.com/2.long_peace.php
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There is a lot to be done with computers in the developing world.