The real budget losers won’t be military
After several days of Casey Anthony, Carmeggedon, and Rebekah Brooks, my TV finally produced something worth watching: the U.S./Japan women’s World Cup match. The two fading powers of the late 20th century produced a super ball game, which should remind us that even in decline great powers have a lot of clout left.
This is the trick the Americans need to learn in foreign policy. Britain lost its empire more than 30 years ago but still punches above its weight. Its military prowess is not the only reason. The Foreign Office and the Department for International Development are serious operations. I am not a great admirer of the Quai d’Orsay. If you want to see a Foreign Ministry other than the British one that makes a difference, visit The Hague, capital of another lost empire.
Jim Lindsay in yesterday’s Washington Post was in full angst over the impact of how the debt issues are handled and the impact on the U.S. military. That is not what worries me. I’ll bet the Defense Department gets a relatively small cut, after a decade of having its budget doubled, without counting war expenditures. The Obama Administration and House Republicans have both proposed -3.5%, but the Senate is likely to insist on a smaller number.
It is the State Department and USAID that are likely to get whacked. They have finally produced a blueprint for dealing with current national security challenges that begins to make sense: the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. What are the odds of much of it being implemented in the current budget environment? Sure, they can move a few people around, but there is no hope for Foggy Bottom without a top to bottom reform that would require a good deal of money. House Republicans proposed a 43% cut in the 150 account (“international affairs”) relative to the Administration’s dead-on-arrival 2012 proposal. That’s likely worse than what will actually happen, but the State Department and AID are in for a shock.
One reason is that half the country thinks they already have a lot of money–25% of the Federal budget, and wants that reduced to 10% (see http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/nov10/ForeignAid_Nov10_quaire.pdf). The real number is well under 1.5%, and declining for several decades. Could it be that State and AID have not handled their relationship with the American people as well as the Pentagon has?
A friend commented after the soccer game, “the Japanese have had an even worse year than we’ve had. It’s good they won.” I did not agree–I wanted the Americans to win. But like my friend I’ll be cheering for the civilian underdogs in the budget battles. They’ve had a bad couple of decades. It is time to correct the absurd imbalance between the military arm of our government, which is healthy and well-exercised, and the civilian arm, which is weak and getting weaker.
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By sheer coincidence, the Serbian papers have recently published some articles on a poll done on the foreign aid their country receives and public perceptions of it.
It was assumed by most respondents that Japan is the largest donor – based mainly on the buses (93 of them, was it?) they donated to the Belgrade system – and that Russia is also a major donor. In fact, the largest donor is the EU and the US is second (though pretty far back), with Germany third. (Japan is 7th.) Russia has not given them anything, but people assume that Mother Russia must have been generous, I suppose. EU and US money goes mainly to improving governance and general budget support, – things that nobody ever sees, and that the papers don’t write about, since the government doesn’t want to talk about it. (There was a report in Blic once about some help being given to Serbian dairy farmers – they have a milk shortage in the country, off and on, – but the help was for management skills, not cow purchases.) In any case, readers comment on such articles that the West owes them $30 billion for the destruction caused by the bombing, for which they never received reparations, so that none of this aid counts, anyway. (Isn’t it the losers who generally end up paying reparations?) So the aid is unappreciated by the Serbs and resented (as part of the USAID budget) by large parts of the American public. And on top of it all, Americans are widely seen (not just in Serbia) as always blowing their own horn over all the good they claim they are doing. Diplomats obviously have to grow thick skins early in their careers.
The Chinese earn a lot of good-will in Africa by going in and quickly putting up soccer stadiums, while the West does … what is it, exactly? Maybe it’s time for a review of what we get out of foreign aid (viewed in the longest of terms, for all I care). If there’s a payoff, it needs to be publicized. Americans used to trust their government to do the right thing and not worry about the details, but the mood is souring, and if they want to know what they’re getting for their money, the modest types are going to lose out. Countering “we’re protecting the country from enslavement by foreign powers” is apt to be a challenge, though.