Delivered by, J. BRIAN ATWOOD, Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development
Address to the conference, "New Directions In U.S. Foreign Policy", at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, November 2, 1995
I want to thank my friend Dennis Pirages and the University of Maryland for inviting me here today. This is such a good audience, such a good cross section of the foreign policy community. It is a real privilege to have the opportunity to share some real concerns with this group.
In the past several months, the Clinton Administration has begun to find solutions to some of the world's more intractable problems. Few thought we would be able to convene peace talks among the combatants of the former Yugoslavia. Fewer still thought this would be done under U.S. auspices on U.S. soil.
Few predicted that during the Clinton Administration Israeli - Palestinian and Israeli - Jordanian peace agreements would be reached. And a comprehensive settlement is itself within reach in the region.
I spent more time on the issue of Haiti during the transition between the Bush and Clinton Administrations than on any other subject (with the possible exception of Somalia). Today, despite bumps in the road, the policy is working. Human rights abuses are down, people have hope for a better future in Haiti and the economic and political transition is for the most part on track.
There are of course other accomplishments but I did not come here today to tout the Administration's achievements. Rather, I came here to acknowledge that the frustration level remains high over our nation's foreign policy. I came to suggest some possible causes for that frustration - causes that relate more to the state of our political debate and the state of the intellectual discussion held within this community, a community of academics and professionals of which I have been proud to be a part.
We have traditionally looked to the community represented in this room to shape the new paradigms, to provide the conceptual framework. But we are not getting what we should expect. Perhaps in the foreign policy community we reflect the confusion of the American community at large, perhaps a desire to hold on to old structures and methods, or perhaps an inclination to seek the center between increasingly extreme poles. Whatever the cause, I believe we have become less imaginative and excessively reactive as a community.
We react, mostly negatively, to the extreme budget cuts. To the trend toward isolationism. To the new pessimism advanced by the sky - is-falling crowd. To the prospects for peace in Bosnia, or democracy in Russia or development in Africa. We have become clever, intelligent naysayers. But I believe we are all left with an empty feeling - we fear that the post-Cold War world defies a compelling policy framework that is worthy of consensus.
Part of our problem may be that we are allowing ourselves to accept what seem to be insurmountable constraints. Who among us would propose a policy initiative that would actually cost money to implement. Who wants to stand up to the nativist sentiments that seem to advocate at one and the same time unilateralism and non-interventionism. Who wants to advocate active American leadership when domestic issues and budget balancing dominate our political debates. Realities such as these have never faced our community before, but today when coupled with the complexity of the international scene, they seem to have forced us either into a reactive state or into nostalgia for a simpler world.
You are beginning to understand my tactic here. Identify yourself with your audience and then insult everyone in the room. In fact, I am trying to provoke myself as well. It's the only way I can keep my sanity as I wrestle everyday with the challenges that in my everyday governmental life are all too real.
Let me continue with some equally provocative statements that might stimulate the next George Kennan to step forward.
First, we seem collectively to have lost our ability to do objective, non-ideological analysis of the challenges we face. Perhaps in the age of information overload, it is necessary to scream out our point of view to get attention.
Thus, if you are a journalist like Robert Kaplan, you use pyrotechnic drama to describe "The Coming Anarchy." Kaplan describes a world that is already beginning to resemble the most crime-ridden urban ghetto in America. If you are the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation you advance unsubstantiated assertions whose sole purpose seems to be to place your adversary on the defensive - assertions such as "foreign aid has never worked," or, "foreign aid has actually slowed development," or, "foreign aid creates unhealthy dependency." Even half truths and rationalizations by prominent organizations cannot be ignored in a town searching for ways to rationalize budget cuts. And they succeed. I spend valuable time and effort nowadays answering ridiculous assertions.
If you are my good friend Bill Maynes, looking as always to contribute provocatively to the Washington debate, you suggest Congress has a right to reorganize the Executive Branch. Bill points to other efforts such as those by Hubert Humphrey to create an Arms Control Agency. Come on Bill. Hubert Humphrey's motive to create a positive force for arms control cannot be equated with the motives of Senator Helms. I respect Senator Helms' right to legislate. I respect his position. But we should all oppose his long-held desire to kill foreign policy missions such as arms control and development. And that is exactly what his consolidation plan would do, sooner or later.
If you are Henry Kissinger, you write op-ed pieces, whose central purposes seems to justify the skepticism advanced by the congressional majority about every possible Administration initiative. Today's world is not the neat tri-polar place that Henry seemed to manipulate so well. Nation-states are breaking apart, governments have less control, even the notion of nation-state carries a different meaning.
I could cite other examples to illustrate my point, but enough is enough.
Let me move to my second argument: We remain reluctant in this community to accept a broader definition of national security even when the facts cry out for such a definition. I am generalizing of course, but foreign policy and military professionals remain wedded to the notion that the word "strategic," for example, has a particular meaning. Does a country, or a government, constitute a potential military threat to the United States? Does instability in a particular region - Europe or the Persian Gulf - risk disrupting key markets or energy supplies?
Objective analysis would suggest that each of these threats would rise to the level of "strategic" even given what has happened to the Soviet Union. We do not need to exclude these very real considerations in our national security calculus. But global stability is threatened by other factors as well, factors that in some cases might already constitute strategic threats, but will certainly grow into that definition in the near-term future.
One growing threat comes from the failure of nations. This threat emerges from the persistence of destabilizing conditions and weak governance.
Consider for a moment: When the United States fought communism in Korea and Vietnam, when we created NATO as a bulwark in Europe and checked Soviet adventurism in Africa and Asia, what, precisely, did we fear?
The answer is not really simple, but it was and is persuasive: We feared the loss of our freedom. We feared the loss of our markets and the loss of influence. We feared the possibility that even if unconquered, America might be surrounded by hostile forces. And we feared a moral defeat, the defeat of the human spirit, the defeat of our special value system.
So now, with communism dead, and Gorbachev giving lectures, let's ask a few questions:
If nations fall to homegrown warlords, is that any less a setback for international stability?
If our markets vanish from civil war instead of collectivization, does that limit our economic potential any more?
If ethnic cleansing takes the place of the Gulag, are the standards of international politics any less violated?
If tribal machetes take a million lives in Rwanda, is that less a defeat for the human spirit than the million deaths from artillery and starvation on the front lines of the Cold War in Afghanistan?
Communists were unaccountable; that was why Chernobyl happened. But is the pollution from one exploding reactor any more dangerous than the accumulated effluents from burning rainforests and teeming urban centers in the developing world?
Communist hordes? What about hordes of refugees? Communist subversion? What about the subversion caused by drug cartels and international mafias that push aside weak and failing governments?
The foreign policy community recognizes that our national security can be threatened, even in the absence of missiles and bombers. But we hesitate in redefining national security out of fear that we will be seen as fuzzy headed and weak.
Objective analysis - hard-headed thinking - should lead us to conclude that national security today entails more than a defense against missile attack. It involves more than ideological competition. National security policy today must begin with a simple truth: if people elsewhere are destabilizing their regions, flowing across borders as refugees, creating human and environmental catastrophes, than American interests are at risk or will soon be at risk.
To paraphrase the old philosophical question: if a tree falls in a rainforest far away, yes, today we do indeed hear it. We pay the price in global warming and lost species and miracle drugs that are never found. If people in Africa are forced from their homes by conflict, Americans become less secure. We have to feed them or turn our backs. We have to try to restore order or stand aside while chaos spreads. If millions live in poverty, we who live in this global economy are the poorer for their suffering. If rural migrants overwhelm the cities by the tens of millions, we must breathe the air they pollute and drink the water they foul. Their diseases will find us. Their misery will envelop us.
Lest I begin to sound like Robert Kaplan, let me say that the situation we face today is not yet out of control. In some regions, particularly in Africa, it is. But it is growing worse and only pre-emptive investments will enable us to stay ahead of the curve.
Listen to some disturbing facts. Today the international community is spending over $4 billion a year on 42 million refugees and displaced persons, double the number from 1980. We spent $5.4 billion in 1993 on peacekeeping, more than the 45 previous years combined. We have lost forests equal to three times the size of France in the past decade and we are losing 42 million acres of forests every year. And the world's population grows by 90 million people a year. Twenty years from now we will be attempting to manage a world with 2-2.5 billion more people.
Twenty years from now no one will debate the application of the word "strategic." And if we do not invest today, if we do not lead today, the national security of our children will be severely compromised.
To look at the FY 96 foreign affairs budget, one would have to conclude that many in the Congress believe that new challenges can still be addressed by old methods, or failing that, safely ignored. Yet the Defense and Intelligence communities have already taken up the challenges to foreign policy posed by recent events. We would do well to consider their response:
The CIA's Task Force on Failed States recently studied the threat posed by failed and failing states. It identified specific weaknesses that cause nations to collapse: inadequate human capacity, including lack of education, poor health standards, and inadequate housing and social services; the fragility of democracy, especially weak or absent institutions to channel public opinion and defuse social tensions; and economic weakness, especially the absence of trade and the openness to innovation that comes with it, and the lack of policies and institutions that enable a middle class, which is the rudder of any modern state, to emerge and expand.
The CIA focused on development issues because their status illuminates the likelihood of whether a nation will become a Korea or a Somalia. Development is a cross-cutting indicator: the level of infant mortality, for instance, reflects a nation's health standards, its economic progress, its agricultural productivity, its standards of nutrition - especially among the poor - the status of women, even democracy. Infant mortality says much about national spirit, that intangible attitude toward the future: People in developing lands are no different from parents anywhere. In a land where people expect to bury children, pessimism and despair sap daily life like a parasite.
The Defense Intelligence Agency recently identified the ecological deterioration of Lake Victoria as a cause of potential instability in East Africa. Thirty million people, they reported, were at risk of having their livelihoods and their wellbeing compromised by the threat to this huge lake. Why is that of concern to the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1995? Because if the root causes of the problem go unaddressed, our military forces may be called upon to deal with the consequences a few years hence.
Think about the challenges of managing two billion more people. Somehow, economies that are hamstrung and unproductive today will have to generate hundreds of millions of new jobs. Our natural environment will have to deal with cities - not countries, mind you, but cities - holding the tens of millions of people.
Must we respond? Well, that is my choice. But we can hesitate. We can rationalize away the consequences of avoiding investments. We can call ourselves optimists and assume that human ingenuity will compensate for the lack of resources.
Some, like Patrick Buchanan, would argue that the United States has done enough for fifty years, and that in Robert Frost's words, good fences make good neighbors. I do not believe that the American people share his isolationism, but I do believe that they are tired. They certainly are frustrated with the absence of a peace dividend.
They are disheartened that the end of communism unleashed a wave of new conflicts.
How has the Congress responded? They have not counseled separation from the world, but they have indulged in a sort of backing and filling that is troubling:
They have been outspoken against the unilateral deployment of American forces, yet have failed to adequately fund the United Nations, the best mechanism for multilateral action.
They have talked about emerging markets yet sanctioned precipitous cuts in development assistance, the very thing that helps those markets emerge.
They have acknowledged the dependence of the poorest nations upon the assistance rendered by the World Bank's International Development Association (IDA), yet cut funding and thus diminished the funds that IDA can leverage from $8-9 billion to $2-3 billion.
They have talked about the necessity of American leadership but undercut that leadership in international development, discouraging other nations from greater involvement.
For some years, we have warned that the U.S. would reach a turning point, when its ability and commitment to international engagement would come into question. We now have reached the crossroads.
So now we face a fundamental question of policy: will we continue to react to the demands of a changed and changing world, or will we construct and implement a proactive, preventive diplomacy?
And this is my third and final admonition. Many in the foreign policy community have embraced the goal of preventive diplomacy but not the methods, particularly those that cost money. It is time now to deal with the contradictions. We have had the budget debate. That debate has distracted us in its focus on phony savings plans - plans to merge agencies and cut administrative costs while fully funding important missions. That's just not real. And the talk is about further cutting a foreign affairs account that is vastly underfunded. It is now time to have the policy debate.
Any debate about foreign policy must reflect an objective analysis of the problems we face and the world faces. Only then can we identify the tools and methods that will protect our interests and constructively address the root causes of those problems.
I believe that a debate over how to exercise American leadership to move the international community toward preventative diplomacy will inevitably lead our nation to a renewed awareness of all the tools needed to counter the new strategic threats.
If we are concerned about festering conflicts, then we must invest in programs that help nations build inclusive and representative institutions.
If we want to help nations stave off collapse, then we need to pursue early interventions that prevent problems from becoming crises, and arrest the step-by-step implosion of the political order and the traditional economy.
If we want to help nations resist the lures of autocracy, then we have to fund programs that enable people to empower themselves economically and politically and create a political order that demands accountability.
We also need to concern ourselves operationally, just as we did during the Cold War:
We must seek out allies - not only other donor governments, but the panoply of non-governmental organizations that are playing an evermore - important role in international affairs.
We must put our assets to better use, especially utilizing the influence of the American model and our democratic values. Just as during the Cold War, our ideals remain a central part of our arsenal.
We must seek out economies of scale, sharing technical resources, pooling information and methods, allocating responsibilities, and using regional approaches - everything from early warning systems to election observers - to bolster countries in crisis.
Even where traditional security issues make the primary demand on our time, as in Bosnia or the West Bank and Gaza, a response that combines development assistance with military and political elements will better insure the success of the peace process.
And we must fully fund international institutions that implement our concerns, like the UN and the World Bank, just as we funded NATO. Whatever its imperfections, the United Nations system remains the best way to bring diverse nations together, to exchange ideas, and to pursue collective action that by its very nature civilizes and stabilizes the international environment. The UN embodies our belief that the global community exists, that our world is more than a collection of warring states. It gives substance to the idea that international law is not just words on paper. It is a teaching device and a moral platform. It is indispensable.
And we cannot continue to overtax its resources and underfund its accounts. Reform, yes, but I hope Congress will soon help us abandon our posture of representation without taxation.
You are the creative minds of our foreign policy community. We need your objective analysis, your best thinking. Together, we need to find the courage to redefine national security and the political will to redirect resources to fund that re-definition. We need to break out of the constraints imposed by a debate over the balanced budget and realize that even that goal cannot be reached if we fail to invest in the stability and growth of the global economy. And we need to make preventive diplomacy more than just a comforting theory.
The wise men of the post-World War II period eagerly embraced the challenge. They reshaped American foreign policy and created a new international community. The men and women of our era - the post-Cold War era - owe just as much to our own grandchildren.
Thank you.
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