WASHINGTON -- As a measure of the challenges Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton will confront at Foggy Bottom, consider that arguably the most forceful advocate for the State Department in recent years has been the secretary of defense (see GSN, Dec. 2, 2008).
(Jan. 9) -
U.S. Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton faces challenges in restoring the department's primacy in foreign affairs (Jim Watson/Getty Images).
In speeches and interviews, Defense Secretary Robert Gates constantly points out the absurdity of a superpower having more people playing in military bands than serving as diplomats. Currently, the government spends $16 on military programs for every $1 invested in diplomacy. Even excluding supplemental spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush administration's final budget raises defense spending by almost $40 billion next year -- a net increase that rivals the size of the State Department's entire annual budget. And while the Pentagon is increasing the size of U.S. ground forces by more than 90,000 troops, State has failed to win congressional approval for just 1,150 additional Foreign Service officers.
"The problem is that the civil side of our government -- the Foreign Service and foreign-policy side, including our aid for international development -- [has] been systematically starved of resources for a quarter of a century or more," Gates said in a Dec. 17 interview with Charlie Rose. "We have not provided the resources necessary, first of all, for our diplomacy around the world; and second, for communicating to the rest of the world what we are about and who we are as a people."
Correcting that acute imbalance in American "hard" and "soft" power is likely to prove the single greatest challenge for the next secretary of State. Its corrosive impact on foreign policy is already evident in a series of troubling trends and statistics. U.S. public diplomacy has failed to dispel rising anti-Americanism around the world. In a 2008 Pew Global Attitudes survey, for instance, support for the United States was down an average of 25 percentage points between 2000 and 2008 in 12 of 15 countries polled.
The inability of the State Department to assume its lead role in coordinating overseas reconstruction and stabilization efforts is also well documented. The government's own recent draft report, "Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience," details how bureaucratic turf wars between State and Defense, as well as a lack of oversight, planning, coordination, and development capacity, all contributed to a $117 billion reconstruction failure in that country. The report offers little hope that the bilions of dollars of reconstruction funds being funneled into Afghanistan will be spent any wiser.
A Hollow Force
In an October report called "A Foreign Affairs Budget for the Future: Fixing the Crisis in Diplomatic Readiness," a panel of experts outlines how the United States' diplomatic capacity has been "hollowed out" since the fall of the Berlin Wall by deep cuts in resources and personnel, and by a sharp rise in missions and responsibilities following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Sponsored by the Stimson Center and the American Academy of Diplomacy, the report calls for hiring an extra 4,735 Foreign Service members and 2,350 nationals overseas, representing a nearly 50-percent increase in State Department personnel levels.
"The core issue is really institutional capability," said Chester Crocker, a professor of strategic studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and a former assistant secretary of state. "For example, the Bush administration set up a coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization at State to manage this critical transition between war and peace, and then made the office a farce by woefully underfunding and understaffing it, even though the State Department budget is a rounding error for the Pentagon."
There's also an ideological factor in the State Department's problems that the Obama administration will have to confront, Crocker said. "A lot of people in Washington think foreign policy is a contact sport where you get what you want with military muscle, and diplomacy is about limp-wristed diplomats pushing cookies at embassy socials. That's crap!" he said. "This isn't about 'hard power' versus 'soft power.' It's about 'smart power' that connects the dots between our brains, muscles, and dollars to craft integrated responses to strategy. Without smart power we'll continue to be good at blowing things up, and to struggle with the more complicated mission of winning the peace. There's also the problem that there's no domestic constituency for the State Department, while the Defense Department has built this massive constituency of bases and defense contractors that stretches into every state in the union."
A Long Decline
Many experts point to the end of the Cold War and the determination of the Bush 41 and Clinton administrations, and successive Congresses, to realize a "peace dividend" as the start of the State Department's current decline. During the 1990s, for instance, U.S. spending on international affairs was reduced by approximately 30 percent in real dollar terms. The two core State Department competencies of public diplomacy and international development aid were hit especially hard: The U.S. Information Agency and the U.S. Agency for International Development saw their staffs cut by 24 percent and 40 percent, respectively. In the same period, the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia meant that the State Department needed to staff 20 more embassies in newly independent countries in Eastern Europe.
Between 2001 and 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's Diplomatic Readiness Initiative partially halted the decline by creating more than 1,000 diplomatic positions. However, the diplomatic surges in Iraq, Afghanistan, and neighboring countries quickly absorbed those increases. In Baghdad alone the department now has to staff the largest U.S. embassy in the world. In the post-9/11 period, staff positions and funding have also increasingly migrated to the diplomatic security force and to the physical hardening of embassies around the world. The result is a personnel shortfall of 2,000 people in core diplomatic functions.
As the president of the American Foreign Service Association and an active Foreign Service officer, John Naland has seen the impact of those shortfalls firsthand. "I'm being posted to Iraq starting next summer, and I'll go with only three weeks of training and no Arabic language skills because with every department so short-staffed, no one can afford for their people to break away for extensive training or education classes," he said in an interview. As further proof, a 2006 General Accountability Office found that 26 percent of positions requiring language expertise were filled by people who were not qualified.
"So we're really facing a crisis in human capital," Naland said. "The good news is that President-elect Obama was the first presidential candidate in my memory who talked about the need to increase the size of the Foreign Service during the campaign, and Hillary Clinton has the reputation of fighting for what she believes in. That's cause for optimism, but they'll have their work cut out for them."
Setting Priorities
After first increasing diplomatic staffing levels, the next secretary of state should focus on building development, reconstruction, and stabilization capacity that has proven so critical in failing states and post-conflict scenarios, many experts say. Even under current plans to double the Foreign Service officer corps at the U.S. Agency for International Development from 1,000 to 2,000, the agency will still be manned at levels far below its Vietnam-era force of 11,000 USAID officers.
"Just about everyone agrees USAID needs to be elevated in capability, and some think it should become a separate Cabinet department," said Ambassador Thomas Pickering, who chaired the advisory group that oversaw "A Foreign Affairs Budget for the Future." "I think it's best to leave USAID at State, albeit with significant autonomy, because the required engineers, program managers, and technical experts have quite a different skill set than the traditional Foreign Service officer."
To bolster the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, the Bush administration has already proposed establishing a 250-person active Civilian Response Corps and a 2,000-person Reserve to give State an expeditionary force of development and reconstruction experts for post-conflict and nation-building situations, as well as for major natural disasters. Congress, however, has repeatedly failed to authorize the necessary funding for the initiative.
In lobbying to break that logjam, Clinton would find unlikely allies across the Potomac. If such a force of reconstruction experts had been available for the U.S. military's "clear, hold, and build" operations in Iraq, for instance, and had led to the withdrawal of a single military division from that country just one month early, it would have saved taxpayers $1.2 billion. That amount is far more than the cost of fielding the force in the first place. More important, if a robust U.S. diplomatic corps can avoid the next war, it would save thousands of soldiers' lives and trillions of dollars.
"The United States is profoundly underinvested in preventive and post-conflict capabilities that logically reside in the State Department, whose costs pale in comparison to the blood and national treasure we will have to spend if the military gets involved in a conflict," said a senior officer on the Pentagon's Joint Staff. "In a way, we address our international aid and security assistance worldwide the same way the United States addresses health care. We ignore cost-effective preventive measures, and then treat the symptoms in the emergency room once they manifest themselves in scourges like terrorism, insurgencies, and war. Every single combatant commander around the world will tell you that we need a 'whole of government' approach that early on involves civilian responders with economic, political, development, and judicial expertise. That would be much smarter than waiting until the next crisis erupts and sending the military in again to try and fix everything."