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:

1. How can the case for prevention be made more convincingly?
2. How can we make better use of the nongovernmental sector?
3. How do we know when enough state-building is enough? How should we decide to terminate missions?
4. How do we grown the civilian talent needed?
5. How do we prevent the US from turning inward and avoiding international engagement?
6. How can the State and AID bureaucracies be reformed without blowing them up?
7. Why can’t we do better at whole of government efforts?
8. 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.