New wine into old bottles

USIP yesterday morning hosted a meeting on the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR).  I heard a lot of good things in the first hour or so.  Breaking down stovepipes, a concept of national security that requires peaceful and prosperous democratic partners abroad, a commitment to elevate development and civilian capacities generally as a means (equal in importance to military means) towards that end, a shift in emphasis to conflict prevention.  These are all good things.

Unfortunately they are also things we’ve been hearing about for some time.  The QDDR is now more than one and a half years old.  Secretary Clinton has only recently created an office to monitor its implementation.  The USAID Office of Transition Initiatives and Bureau of Humanitarian Response have not received the increased resources hoped for.  The State Department Bureau of Civilian Stabilization Operations, proud offspring of the QDDR, is cutting back its Civilian Response Corps because of budget pressures.

Let me be clear:  I have no doubt about the sincerity and determination of the people pushing for stronger civilian foreign policy instruments.  They are desperately needed.   The Arab Spring has demonstrated the limited utility of military instruments and the vital importance of American civilian capabilities to help with democratic transitions.  Only in Libya, and only in the early stages of the revolution, have conventional military instruments been decisive.  Preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons is requiring a large dose of diplomacy just to get to the point of considering seriously the use of military instruments.  Our understanding of the Iranian domestic political scene is clearly not as comprehensive as it should be.

Civilian requirements are clear enough to me.  But America’s political system is not responding by providing the resources required.  To the contrary, State and AID are facing potentially large cuts to their budgets, cuts far bigger than those being contemplated for the U.S. military.

But I would not suggest that we weaken the military to strengthen the civilian side of our foreign policy.  The first thing that needs to be done is for State and AID to look within themselves for the resources.  State is configured more for the past than for the future.  It has overgrown embassies in places (I’ll mention Rome, since I was deputy chief of mission there) that don’t need them.  AID, shrunken from its Vietnam heyday, still runs most of its programs from headquarters rather than the field.  The division of labor between the two organizations is often unclear.  Rivalry rather than cooperation the norm.

What the QDDR did was to pour new wine into old bottles, something the New Testament discourages:

else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.

I won’t go farther than that, as this is the punch line of my book manuscript. But even the not very perspicacious among you will understand that I’m suggesting we need new institutions, not only good intentions, more staff and new procedures, in order to fulfill the promise of the QDDR.  That though is for another day.