Root and branch
Last night’s terrific discussion of Righting the Balance here at SAIS’ Foreign Policy Institute with Tom Pickering and Kristin Lord commenting:
Key issues in the commentary and Q and A:
- How can the case for prevention be made more convincingly?
- How can we make better use of the nongovernmental sector?
- How do we know when enough state-building is enough? How should we decide to terminate missions?
- How do we grown the civilian talent needed?
- How do we prevent the US from turning inward and avoiding international engagement?
- How can the State and AID bureaucracies be reformed without blowing them up?
- Why can’t we do better at whole of government efforts?
- How can we restore diplomacy to a central role in foreign affairs?
That last question might be getting at least a temporary answer from John Kerry’s hyperactivity. If he brings home an Iranian nuclear pause and succeeds even modestly on Israel/Palestine and Syria, diplomacy could be in fashion pretty soon.
As you’ll see if you watch, I took a lot of incoming on the issue of root and branch destruction of AID and State. This I expected, and I don’t really think anyone will try to do what I suggest. I agree with Kristin Lord’s suggestions at the end about changing the State personnel system to reward teamwork. That would be a good thing to do. But my thought experiment is nonetheless valuable: if we started from scratch, what would we need?
If it is, as I think, nothing like what we’ve got, then we’ve got to think much more broadly about what reform of State and AID really entails. It is not adding or deleting a bureau here or there, which has been done many times in recent decades. It is altering the structure and functions of the institution as a whole.
I don’t pretend to have a fully worked out picture of what that would look like, but I find it hard to imagine that it would include the separation between State and AID. And I think our government-funded nongovernmental efforts need amping up. I’d be glad to see others elaborate more fully on what it is we really need from our diplomatic and foreign assistance establishment.
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Great event and discussion. During the Q&A, you responded to a question on State recruitment processes that are applicable related to the inability of State to get career foreign service officers to want to work in one of its newest bureau – Conflict and Stabilization Operations. It would have been interesting to learn what the panel might have commented on this topic.