Rusty pivot points

My appetite for writing about the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review got satiated with my first comment about a draft that circulated in Congress. I saw good intentions to amp up civilian operations and some movement of the deck chairs, but little in the way of novelty or resources.

Colleagues at CSIS see more in the exercise than I did, so I refer you to them for their commentary called “Pivot Points.” I certainly agree that Secretary Clinton evinces serious commitment and enthusiasm to changing the way business is done, especially in building more unity of effort between State and USAID, but some of what they see as new I see as old wine in new bottles.

The supposedly strengthened role of ambassadors, for example, is an old standby that is codified already in “Chief of Mission Authority,” which makes American ambassadors on paper the modern equivalent of absolute monarchs vis-a-vis other government agencies (the one important exception being deployed military forces).  But try to use that authority in a way that another agency really doesn’t like and you’ll discover what many absolute monarchs discovered:  authority depends on consent of the governed. It is the rare agency that cannot outbox the State Department once the issue comes stateside.

Another example:  there really is nothing new in the notion that AID will lead in humanitarian crises and State will lead in political and security crises.  That is the way it has always been done in practice, even if no one had really written it down.  And many crises, even the natural disasters, have elements of both.

Nor is the concept of partnerships, in particular public/private ones new, though I admit that the word is used a whole lot more today than when foreign assistance was mainly a government-funded enterprise. What changes with the weakening government effort that justifies more frequent use of the word?

The devil is in the details, as my CSIS colleagues point out.  Let’s wait to see what is really implemented.

For a view more similar to mine than that of CSIS, see Patricia DeGennaro’s “A Missed Opportunity at the State Department.”