peacefare.net

Hope is where the wild things are

My wife and I hosted a long-scheduled reunion for US Institute of Peace people last night. They were not for the most part current employees but rather people who worked there in 2005. Friday the current employees of the Institute were abruptly, but not unexpectedly, terminated.

I worked at USIP from 1998 to 2010. I left to teach at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. So my regret for what has happened is personal, not just intellectual. Caveat emptor.

A bit of history

The USIP website is now blocked, allegedly for security reasons. You can be pretty sure that isn’t true, but it means a bit of history is in order. Congress created USIP in 1984 during President Reagan’s presidency. It started life mainly as a grant and fellowship giver but evolved into a thinktank .

After the Bosnian war, it went in a new direction. We called it a “do-tank.” USIP tried to apply what had been learned through its grants, fellowships, and scholarship to real-life conflict situations. That started in the Balkans and then expanded to Iraq, Afghanistan, and in the last two decades many other places. Funding came both from direct Congressional appropriations and through the various Administrations, which would sometimes decide USIP could be helpful.

What USIP did

A few stories may be worth the telling. In about 2004, Don Hays–then the deputy High Representative in Bosnia–got the State Department to fund his effort after leaving Bosnia to help the Bosnians negotiate constitutional amendments. I don’t remember the cost, but it was well under $100,000, plus Don’s salary, which State was already committed to paying. The negotiations succeeded, but the constitutional amendments failed in the Bosnian parliament. They missed a two-thirds majority by just two votes. I think it now clear that those constitutional amendments would have vastly improved the situation in Bosnia.

After the invasion of Iraq, USIP requested and received $10 million for peacebuilding work there, focused mainly on preventing sectarian strife and helping establish rule of law. That effort aimed to tamp down a mostly Sunni rebellion against the Shia majority. USIP helped to train a network of Iraqis of all ethnicities who continue to this day to try to prevent sectarian and ethnic frictions from turning violent.

I could continue. USIP worked with amounts of money that were small in Defense Department terms to support US national security objectives in conflict zones abroad. Some of us were politically liberal and some of us were politically conservative, but we all recognized that benefits of preventing violent conflict in places the US had vital interests.

Fast forward

USIP made it through the Bush and Obama Administrations in decent shape financially, though it relied increasingly on transfers through the administration rather than direct appropriations from Congress. It also moved in 2011 to its new building at 23rd and Constitution. Its President, Richard Solomon, raised a lot of private money for the building. He also got the Navy to transfer the land to USIP.

USIP remains a non-governmental organization run by a bipartisan board appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The Administration had three ex-officio members on the Board: the Secretaries of State and Defense as well as the President of the National Defense University.

What Trump is doing

The Trump Administration now claims that the President has fired all the appointed members of the board (Democrats and Republicans, with one independent). The ex-officio members have appointed a new USIP chief executive. Courts will decide whether the Trumpkins can get away with this. But it is a dramatic departure from how USIP has been run in the past. Whether a quorum was required to fire the then acting president of the Institute is unclear.

Trump has not made clear what he intends to do with the Institute. But it won’t be surprising if he tries to close it entirely. That’s what he has done with so many vaguely similar “quangos,” that is quasi-nongovernmental organizations. Their claims to independence are offensive to the right-wing would-be autocrats who believe in the “unitary executive.” They refuse to tolerate any independent institutions, governmental or quasi-governmental. Trump will try to get his patsies on the Supreme Court to validate their views. They are also trying to limit the independence of nongovernmental institutions like law firms and universities.

Hope, or not?

I don’t have much hope for USIP’s future. I do hope its lawyers win in court and get a big settlement for its employees. But by that time the Institute will be nothing more than a shell. A future Administration could rebuild it, but not in the current political environment. Bipartisanship has gone the way of the dodo.

The baton passes now to other institutions worldwide. Europe has an Institute of Peace, as do any number of countries that mimicked USIP, to one extent or another. Hope lies wherever the restraining and suffocating writ of the Trump Administration does not extend. That’s where the wild things are.