Our guest blogger is Nina Hachigian, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The G-20 has proven its worth as a global gathering. The leaders didn’t do as much as they could have to address the global economic contraction — a path forward on trade and a real push on green recoveries joined new stimulus in the category of “left undone” — but $1 trillion for the IMF is nothing to sneeze at, and should prevent a great deal of suffering, both here and around the globe. Similarly, opening up the Financial Stability Forum up to G-20 finance ministers and central bankers will, in theory, anyway, give that group a lot more information to work with as it tries to identify vulnerabilities in the global economy going forward.

These 20 plus leaders were able, in the end, to overcome their differences — or at least paper over them over — and take concrete action. To me, that counts as real progress.

There is still much work to be done, both on the global economy and on the G-20. For one, now that it has met twice, its time to start thinking about the rules of the road for this new global body. Chief among them, as my colleagues at CAP and I argue in a new report, is that the membership should evolve. We can’t afford another institution that quickly outlives its usefulness but lingers on in the international system like a bad cough, sucking up time and energy. We propose that every 5 years, beginning in 2014 so we don’t distract from the urgent business at hand, the group reconstitute itself with the top two economies from each of five regions, plus the next ten top economies. That way the relevant players remain at the table. It took a Great Depression level crisis to bring the G-20 to life even though the G-8’s performance had been marginal, at best, for years.

President Obama walked a fine line at the summit. He listened but he also helped forge a consensus. He accepted responsibility but he also led. That is what the world is looking for from American and more such performances of diplomacy and good policy will earn us back some legitimacy in the years to come.

Laura Secor’s article on Obama’s new Iranian charm offensive makes a very good argument for the U.S. offering to take regime change off the table in anticipation of talks. While noting that Iran’s rulers have “no more urgent interest than the regime’s own survival,” Secor recognizes the way that the regime’s “anti-American and anti-Israeli stances bind the hardliners to their small but loyal and heavily armed constituency, and they furnish a pretext for domestic repression.”

To give up this trump card–the non-relationship with the United States, the easy evocation of an external bogeyman–would be costly for the Iranian leadership. It would be a Gorbachevian signal that the revolution is entering a dramatically new phase–one Iran’s leaders cannot be certain of surviving in power.

The Bush administration got this dynamic all wrong when it insisted that Iran meet preconditions before coming to the negotiating table. The working assumption was that the lure of talks with the United States would be powerful enough to impel the Iranians to make a major concession. But what if talking to the United States is itself a concession — perhaps one of the toughest for the Iranians to make? That puts us in the very different, far less advantageous position of needing to offer Iran something it truly wants–like a security guarantee–up front. That’s appeasement, critics might object: How can we give up our trump card right at the outset? It looks bad if you think of it as unilateral disarmament. It looks less bad if you consider that the very act of entering direct talks with us means something for the Iranian regime that it doesn’t mean for us.

This is an important re-framing of the “more ideological than pragmatic?” debate that Secor notes has tended to dominate the U.S. debate over Iran policy. Like Secor, I think the evidence weighs strongly against the idea that Iran is interested in committing suicide, but there’s still a question of whether the very act of formally negotiating with the United States — and thus abandoning a central pillar of state ideology, anti-Americanism — could itself represent an unacceptable form of “regime change” for Khamenei.

In the end, Obama’s Iran outreach may simply not work, but it could effectively demonstrate to the Iranian people and others that the Great Satan is not the recalcitrant party. As newly-minted administration ally Robert Kagan wrote the other day, what’s the harm in trying?

Ben Hubbard is Chief of Staff at ONE, a global advocacy and campaigning organization dedicated to fighting extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa.

It’s hard keeping up with the avalanche of inaccuracies and misinformation coming from Dambisa Moyo, the Zambian-born banker turned aid critic and now author of “Dead Aid.” You can see the growing catalogue that ONE has compiled here.

Yesterday, we caught wind of a Q and A she did with Fast Company magazine where she confirmed what we’ve long suspected: that Moyo has little understanding of the health and poverty fighting programs she routinely criticizes. This time it was PEPFAR, the US anti-AIDS program, which has put over 2 million Africans on life-saving treatment. Here’s what she had to say:

Let’s talk about Pepfar. They’ve increased it to $30 billion for 15 countries. Say every country roughly gets $2 billion. Zambia has 10 million people, so that’s roughly $200 a person. That’s approximately the per-capita income of Zambia — you’re roughly doubling the per capita income. But that has had no meaningful impact on the health sector. $2 billion and you can’t overhaul the system? That seems to me completely absurd. African governments have completely abdicated their responsibility.

If Ms. Moyo had any basic knowledge of the program – or had done a simple Google search — she’d know that last summer the U.S. Congress approved $39 billion in funding over five years for HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis programs under both PEPFAR and the Geneva-based Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. Together, these two programs fund projects in over 137 countries.

PEPFAR is not a perfect program and its supporters have historically been its loudest critics, but no one with any basic knowledge of the program would doubt its groundbreaking (and lifesaving) achievements in just five years. By the end of 2008, PEPFAR was supporting treatment for more than 2 million people in Africa; care for more than 10 million people with HIV worldwide, including more than 4 million orphans and vulnerable children; and providing antiretroviral treatment for pregnant women, allowing nearly 240,000 infants to be born HIV free.

Furthermore, consider that just 10 years ago it cost $10,000 per person per year to treat a patient with AIDS. Treatment is now available for $140 per person per year, a breathtaking improvement in efficiency.

Moyo goes on to say that only a fifth of PEPFAR money reaches the ground.

The dollar amount [of PEPFAR] that hits the individual is 20 cents on the dollar if you’re lucky.

We tend to agree with Ms. Moyo that not enough aid money is hitting the ground, but her suggestion that only 20 cents on the dollar in PEPFAR money is hitting the ground has no basis that we are aware of. We challenge Ms. Moyo to provide evidence of her assertion. Where is the evidence? Rather than making up numbers and misleading the public, we wish Ms Moyo would join us in supporting the new aid transparency initiative we’re backing called Publish What You Fund.

Moyo’s comments would be laughable if the subject matter wasn’t AIDS and the question wasn’t whether the United States and others should continue these successful, life saving programs.