With an insider’s knowledge, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Tacoma, recently told me that no matter who wins the White House, the United States will dramatically change how and to whom it bestows billions in foreign aid each year.

Smith is a senior member of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee and chairman of the House Armed Services terrorism subcommittee. He ought to know.

he typical path of our foreign aid has been as straightforward as the alphabet. Development and humanitarian assistance led to public goodwill or influence. Another route involved our military. See Iraq for further details.

But mired in debt and coping with two wars, Smith is part of the forward-thinking leadership in Congress that sees foreign-aid reform as a necessary adjustment to changing times. Spending an hour talking with Ethiopia’s ambassador to the U.S., Samuel Assefa, I sensed a reciprocal approach.

Assefa is aware that most Americans equate his country with images of starving people. That has to be galling and perhaps he has enjoyed a schadenfreude-like moment watching America slide into a recession. But like most diplomats, he was, well, too diplomatic to let on.

Instead, Assefa made it clear he carries no hat in his hand. The ambassador is in Seattle to press for private investment, not public aid. In touting coffee and other agricultural exports, Ethiopia is signaling a shift from the dole to deals.

Smart minds think alike. The push in Congress to modernize the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which separated military and humanitarian aid, will result in new strategies for diplomacy, development and defense. Civilian channels will receive greater emphasis than military ones. Good.

When I hear presidential contenders John McCain and Barack Obama arguing over who would talk to Iran’s president and who would snub him, I hear a loud call for revamping our diplomatic toolbox. I can’t be the only parent wanting a president who knows soft diplomacy. I want a thorough exploration of strategies such as foreign aid and trade investments of the kind Ethiopia is touting before a call to scramble the jets.

There is a new world order. Our last eight years were spent waging war and going into debt. We lost our moral and economic authority. On both fronts we owe, we owe, so off to negotiate we go.

Ambassador Assefa knows this better than we fully know it. Our conversation was largely a soft but firmly-delivered lecture laced with authority, arrogance and the assurance that Ethiopia is one of many nations we won’t be able to kick around or toss a few coins to.

Ethiopia’s location in the Horn of Africa makes it a friendly face in an unfriendly neighborhood populated by the likes of Somalia, Sudan and Eritrea. The region is rife with instability and militant insurgencies. The U.S. rightfully fears it could become the next spot to grow Osama bin Laden’s brand of terrorism.

We’ll need a diplomatic approach that rises above the level of the one used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Hypocrisy,” sniffed the ambassador, “has not been [the United States’] most effective strategy.”

This from our ally?

“I wouldn’t call us allies,” Ambassador Assefa pointed out. A mini-lecture later he acknowledge the two countries work cooperatively. But I got his point. When you’re broke and your ethics are in question — as we are — no one wants to acknowledge being a friend.

But as friends go, Ethiopia has been one. Our two countries have shared a close and largely clandestine relationship centered on intelligence sharing about Islamic militants. It is a necessary and important relationship.

It is a complex world out there. A world more difficult to navigate because while our military is still mighty, U.S. motivations are strongly questioned. We’re still a wealthy country, but we have little money to throw about. We need to move about more purposefully and with less of the clumsiness of the past.

Lynne K. Varner’s column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is [email protected]; she blogs on this issue and others at www.seattletimes.com/edcetera