Showing posts from category military.
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Is Foreign Aid Worth the Cost?
›“Is foreign aid worth the cost? That’s not really the question unless you’re Ron Paul,” quipped Carol J. Lancaster, dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, at the Wilson Center on January 23. “The real questions are: What do we want to accomplish with our foreign aid? Where should it go? And in what form?” [Video Below]
Lancaster noted that following World War II, foreign aid became “a two-pronged instrument – one as an instrument of the Cold War and the other as an extension of American values.” It has been a very “intense marriage” between the two, he said, “with one side up and the other side down at different times, as any marriage tends to be.” Truman convinced Congress to provide aid to Greece and Turkey in 1948 to combat communism, and he was able to gain approval for the Marshall Plan by “scaring the wits out of Congress” about the communist threat.
Aid Under Fire
Congressman Donald Payne (N.J.), who is the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Africa, agreed that the Cold War was the principal reason for our foreign aid programs after World War II, as we provided hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to our supporters around the world. But, “It’s different today,” he added. “Since the end of the Cold War, more funds are going for humanitarian and development assistance, but it is still directly linked to our national interests. One in five American jobs are tied to U.S. trade, and the growth of our trading partners is our growth as well.”
Payne cautioned that there is “a new group in the House of Representatives who think we should step out of the world. They’ve told their constituents they are going to cut the budget, and foreign aid is an easy target.” Payne noted that polls show the American people think one-quarter or more of the federal budget goes to foreign aid when it is little more than one percent.
Nevertheless, there has been bipartisan support for former President Bush’s HIV/AIDS initiative in Africa which is showing remarkable results in reducing deaths from the disease. Payne added that aid to Africa is showing results in the number of economies that are doing well despite the global economic downturn.
Payne expressed frustration with the inability to enact a foreign aid authorization bill in the last several Congresses because the measures became weighted down with all manner of policy riders that were both partisan and controversial. Consequently, our foreign relations operations are solely dependent on the annual appropriations bills which tend to become encumbered as well with troublesome riders.
The Dangers of “Nation Building”
Charles O. Flickner, Jr., a 28-year Republican staff member on the Senate Budget Committee and then the Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee in the House, presented a more skeptical view, saying foreign aid is not worth the $35 billion it is costing us each year, even though some of the programs have been successful and should be continued. The biggest problem in recent years, he said, has been the amount of money wasted on projects in Iraq and Afghanistan without adequate planning or execution. Money was being virtually shoveled out the door in amounts the host countries did not have the capacity to absorb, said Flickner, and as a consequence we have witnessed a lot of failed projects and corruption.
Smaller projects, which the U.S. government and private aid donors are better at, have a greater chance for success because they do not overwhelm the capacities of host countries. He cited some of the scholarships and technical training programs available for foreign nationals as being among the most worthwhile in building internal leadership capacity for the future in developing countries.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran agreed on the amount of wasted aid dollars being spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he has covered as a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. He told the story of a small, dirt-poor town in Afghanistan he visited in where the bazaar was bustling with new shops and goods, and people were freely spending money on modern electronics, motor bikes, and clothes. The town was the beneficiary of a massive U.S. aid program that provided seed money for farmers to grow crops and created day labor jobs for the residents of the area. A contractor was authorized to spend $30 million on the economic development of the town during the U.S. counterinsurgency surge and that came to roughly $300 per person. It was clear to the USAID official on the ground and to the reporter that the experiment would not be sustainable over the long-term, even though there was a temporary sense of economic activity and prosperity.
Future Vulnerabilities
The panel seemed to agree that it was unfair to blame USAID for these failures since they were thrown into situations overnight they were not prepared to manage in countries that were not capable of absorbing the assistance being directed at them – all in the midst of ongoing conflict. The real test of whether the new directions being charted by the Obama Administration will work will be on the smaller, more manageable projects in which the host countries have a greater role in shaping and implementing.
Lancaster listed four vulnerabilities in the future course of U.S. foreign aid that should be avoided, including trying to merge our various interests through the State and Defense Departments with our aid programs in countries like Pakistan, where the institutions are weak and corrupt; the danger of creating an entitlement dependency through funding of HIV/AIDS drugs, where we will be guilty of causing deaths if we reduce funding; the danger of attempting to undertake too many initiatives at once, such as food aid, global health, climate change, and science and technology innovations, while simultaneously trying to reform the infrastructure of USAID; and trying too hard to demonstrate results from aid given the difficulty of disentangling causes and effects and gauging success over too short a time frame.
Event Resources:
Don Wolfensberger is director of the Congress Project at the Wilson Center. -
Ethan Goffman, SSPP Blog
Securing a Sustainable Future: The Military Takes On a New Mission
›January 25, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Ethan Goffman, appeared on the Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy blog.
In a time of polarized politics in the United States, over the environment and just about everything else, an overlooked development is how much the military, as well as the national security apparatus, has taken on climate change and other environmental challenges. “Environment and Security” was thus a profoundly important choice of theme for the 2012 National Conference on Science, Policy, and the Environment, held last week in Washington, DC. With the early effects of climate change apparently already occurring, notably in an increase in natural disasters and in a new northwest passage through the Arctic, those responsible for our security can’t afford to sit around and engage in speculation that climate change is caused by sunspots or isn’t really occurring. It is the military’s job, after all, to take action against potential threats rather than getting immersed in domestic politics.
The concern with climate change is the next step in a widening of the concept of security from strict military matters, to include such interrelated strands as food and water access, public health, and the environment. Much of the military has already acknowledged that armed force alone won’t make us safe. “Energy security, economic security, environmental security, and national security are all inextricably linked. Address one and you need to think of the others,” explained Vice-Admiral Dennis McGinn at the conference.
One obvious linkage is the connection of our oil dependency with security risks that can easily draw us into conflict in politically unstable parts of the world. Just how much the recent wars in the Middle East are about oil, and how much about a clash of civilizations, is a matter of considerable debate, although undoubtedly both factors play a part. The Iranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, choking outgoing oil deliveries, underscores vulnerability on the energy issue. From another angle, in Afghanistan, the military experienced the fragility of supply lines for a force strongly dependent on large quantities of oil. The Air Force, in particular, is working on algal jet fuel to free us from such reliance. And the Navy’s need for more icebreakers and other capacity shows concern regarding shipping and resource exploitation enabled by the melting of Arctic ice and the new passage.
Continue reading on the SSPP blog.
Photo Credit: Sherri Goodman and Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, courtesy of Sean Peoples/Wilson Center. -
The Legacy of Little America: Aid and Reconstruction in Afghanistan
›In 2007, the United States built a $305 million diesel power plant in Afghanistan – the world’s most expensive power plant of its kind. Yet the facility is rarely used, because the impoverished country cannot afford to operate it.
This ill-fated power plant does not represent the only time America has lavished tremendous amounts of money on development projects in Afghanistan that have failed to meet objectives. At a December 7 presentation organized by the Wilson Center’s Asia Program and co-sponsored with the Middle East Program and International Security Studies, Rajiv Chandrasekaran discussed Washington’s expensive attempts to modernize southern Afghanistan’s Helmand River Valley from the 1940s to 1970s – and the troubling implications for U.S. development projects in that country today.
From Morrison Knudsen to USAID
According to Chandrasekaran, a Wilson Center Public Policy Scholar and Washington Post journalist, the story begins after World War II, when Afghanistan’s development-minded king, Zahir Shah, vowed to modernize his country. He hired Morrison Knudsen – an American firm that had built the Hoover Dam and the San Francisco Bay Bridge – to construct irrigation canals and a large dam on the Helmand River. Shah’s view was that by making use of the Hindu Kush’s great waters, prosperity would emerge and turn a dry valley into fertile ground.
Unfortunately, problems arose from the start. The region’s soil was not only shallow, but also situated on a thick layer of subsoil that prevented sufficient drainage. When the soil was irrigated, water pooled at the surface and salt accumulated heavily. Yet despite these challenges, King Shah was determined to continue the massive enterprise. And so, increasingly, was the U.S. government – particularly when Washington began to fear that if it did not support this project, the Soviets would.
In 1949, the United States provided the first installment of what would amount to more than $80 million over a 15-year period. With this aid in hand, Morrison Knudsen not only completed the canals and dam but also constructed a new modern community. Americans called the town Lashkar Gah, but Afghans christened it “Little America.” It boasted a movie theater, a co-ed swimming pool, and a tennis court. Children listened to Elvis Presley records, drank lemonade, and learned English at Afghanistan’s only co-ed school.
However, problems continued to proliferate. Afghans in Lashkar Gah – many of whom had been lured away from their ancestral homelands on the promises of better harvests – did not experience greater farm yields. In the 1960s, the Afghans severed their contract with Morrison Knudsen, and began working directly with U.S. government agencies, including the new U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The result was some fairly productive farms, but, due in great part to waterlogging and soil salinity, the objective of transforming the region into Afghanistan’s breadbasket was not attained. U.S. funding slowed in the 1970s, and the grand experiment officially ended in 1978, when all Americans pulled out of Lashkar Gah following a coup staged by Afghanistan’s Communist Party.
“We Need To Find a Middle Ground”
What implications does all this have for U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan today? Chandrasekaran offered several lessons for American policymakers. One is “beware the suit-wearing modern Afghan” who claims to speak for his less-development-inclined countrymen. Another is to be aware that “there is only so much money that the land can absorb.” Finally, it is unrealistic to expect patterns of behavior to change quickly; he noted how Afghans in Lashkar Gah continued to flood their fields even when advised not to do so.
These lessons are not being heeded today, according to Chandrasekaran. He cited a USAID agricultural project, launched in late 2009, that allocated a whopping $300 million to just two provinces annually, with $30 million spent over only a few months. He said that while this effort may have generated some employment, the immense amounts of money at play fueled tensions among Afghans. Furthermore, contended Chandrasekaran, the program “focused too much on instant gratification and not on building an agricultural economy.”
In conclusion, Chandrasekaran insisted that foreign aid is essential in Afghanistan (and at the recently concluded Bonn Conference, Afghan President Hamid Karzai agreed, calling for financial assistance to continue until 2030). He described past aid efforts as either “starving the patient” or “pumping food into him.” We need to find a middle ground, he argued, and said that working on more modest projects with small Afghan nongovernment organizations is one possibility. The problem, he acknowledged, is that Washington is under pressure to spend ample quantities of money, and therefore depends on large implementing partners – no matter the unsatisfactory results.
Michael Kugelman is program associate with the Asia Program at the Wilson Center. -
Book Preview: In ‘War and Conflict in Africa’, GWU Scholar Skeptical That Natural Resources Play a Leading Role
›November 30, 2011 // By Elizabeth Leahy MadsenWhile there is widespread agreement that the incidence of conflict in Africa is high, scholars and development agencies alike debate its driving forces and how to move toward solutions. Paul Williams, associate professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University and collaborator with the Wilson Center’s Africa Program, recently published a book that aims to both quantify African conflicts and devise a framework of their causes. In War and Conflict in Africa, Williams evaluates which factors explain the frequency of conflict in Africa during the post-Cold War era and how the international community has tried to build peace and prevent future conflict.
Although there have been promising trends toward establishing peace and democracy in some African countries, the continent still accounts for about one-third of all armed conflicts annually – more than Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas combined. International responses to these events range from focused humanitarian and conflict resolution efforts, to new regional organizations and global strategic and defense partnerships.
Seven of the 16 current UN peacekeeping missions operate in Africa, more than any other continent. The UK government has elected to spend nearly one-third of its development assistance in conflict-affected areas, and more than half of its “focus” countries are in Africa. In 2008, the Department of Defense created the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), whose commander, General Carter Ham, in a speech to Congress earlier this year, described “an insidious cycle of instability, conflict, environmental degradation, and disease that erodes confidence in national institutions and governing capacity,” as motivation for American military attention. “This in turn often creates the conditions for the emergence of a wide range of transnational security threats,” he said.
Evaluating the Ingredients of Conflict
Williams rejects earlier theses that attribute conflict across the continent to a single factor, such as the boundary legacies of colonialism, greed, or ethnicity. Instead, he characterizes African conflicts as “recipes” composed of case-specific mixes of factors, many of which are underlying and only some of which are sufficient triggers for conflict. “Collier is wrong,” Williams explained in an email interview. “Governance structures are always an important part of the buildup to war.”
Five “ingredients” of conflict are examined in-depth: neo-patrimonial governance structures; natural and human resources; sovereignty and self-determination; ethnicity; and religion. Among these, the book presents a fairly skeptical view of resources, ethnicity, and religion as immediate drivers of conflict. This assessment that environmental and identity issues are not sufficient to generate conflict on their own aligns with the book’s overarching argument: The decisions of political actors can instigate conflict or motivate peace from virtually any context, manipulating factors such as ethnicity and religion for their own advantage.
Effects of Natural Resources Are “Open-Ended”
A widely publicized thread of peace and conflict studies posits that resources, either when scarce or abundant, have an important role in triggering wars. A 2009 UN Environment Programme report found that 40 percent of all internal conflicts since 1950 “have a link to natural resources.” Recent peer-reviewed research has suggested that certain environmental changes increase the likelihood of civil conflicts or are directly responsible for it. Yet the question remains a source of much debate. For his part, Williams asserts that natural resources alone are insufficient to cause conflict.
War and Conflict in Africa presents several reasons that researchers and policymakers should avoid linking resources directly to conflict without considering the influence of intervening factors. Chief among them is that the value of any resource is socially constructed – no stone or river carries worth until humans decide so. Therefore, Williams argues that “it is political systems, not resources per se, that are the crucial factor in elevating the risk of armed conflict.”
The book suggests that two extant theories successfully demonstrate the connection between resources and conflict. The first body of research finds that conflict is more likely in regions that face a combination of resource abundance and a high degree of social deprivation. The second theory suggests that the link between resources and conflict lies in bad governance, whether exploitative or unstable. Both theories have explanatory power for Williams’s central line of thinking: Resources can be either a blessing or a curse, depending on leadership.
“Inserted into a context where corrupt autocrats have the advantage, resources will strengthen their hand and generate grievances,” he writes (p. 93). “Inserted into a stable democratic system, they will enhance the opportunities for leaders to promote national prosperity.”
Population and the Environment
Williams does accede that particular resource factors – land and demography, for example – may play a more significant role than others in conflict, but calls for more research. In a brief discussion of population age structure, the book suggests that there is no single relationship between demography and conflict but multiple ways that the two can relate. Williams mentions the theory that “large pools of disaffected youth” with few opportunities can raise the risk of volatility. However, he then notes other research showing that the most marginalized members of certain African societies are less likely to participate in political protests and more likely to tolerate authoritarian rule than those who are better off.
“The most marginalized from society are the truly destitute without patrons and suffering from severe poverty. They may well be inclined to join an insurgency movement once it begins to snowball but they will not usually play a key role in establishing the rebel group in the first place,” Williams said. However, “any time there are large pools of poor and unemployed youth there is the potential for leaders to manipulate them.”
On environmental resources, the book argues that land should be a central feature of quantitative research on the relationship between resources and conflict. Most African economies continue to rely on agriculture, and Williams observes that land has been “at the heart” of many conflicts in the region through a variety of governance-related mechanisms relating to its management and control. He places less emphasis on water scarcity as a potential factor in conflict, noting that the 145 water-related treaties signed around the world in the past decade auger well for cooperation rather than competition.
Williams is also dubious of emerging arguments that climate change could directly increase the incidence of conflict, either through changing weather patterns or climate-induced migration.
“Because armed conflicts are, by definition, the result of groups choosing to fight one another, any process, including climate change, can never be a sufficient condition for armed conflict to occur,” he argued. “Armed conflicts result from the conscious decisions of actors which might be informed by the weather but are never simply caused by it.”
No Simple Formula
Williams is not the only observer to find the narrative that resource shortage (or abundance) precipitates conflict too simplistic. His message to policymakers is a common refrain from academics and analysts seeking to counteract policymakers’ quest for simple formulas: We need more data.
“When deciding how to spend our money, we need to spend more of it on developing systems which deliver accurate knowledge about what is happening on the ground, often in very localized settings,” Williams said. War and Conflict in Africa contributes to a more complex understanding of the political actors and systems that catalyze or prevent conflict and offers a cautionary tale to those who seek only proven, easy predictions.
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and senior technical advisor at Futures Group. She was previously a senior research associate at Population Action International. Full disclosure: She was a graduate student of Paul Williams’ in 2007.
Sources: DFID, Englebert and Ron (2004), Ham (2011), Hsiang et al (2011), Kahl (1998), Leysens (2006),Østby et al (2009), Radelet (2010), Themnér and Wallensteen (2011), UNEP (2009), UN Peacekeeping, Williams (2011)
Image Credit: Conflicts in Africa 2000-09, reprinted with permission courtesy of P.D. Williams, War and Conflict in Africa (Williams, 2011), p.3. -
Panetta: Diplomacy and Development Part of Wider Strategy to Achieve Security; Will They Survive Budget Environment?
›Leon Panetta – newly minted secretary of defense and former director of the CIA – gave one of his first public policy addresses yesterday at the Woodrow Wilson Center addressing national security priorities amidst a constrained budgeting environment (see video here). Under the debt ceiling agreement recently agreed to by Congress, the Pentagon is expected to achieve around $450 billion in spending cuts over the next 10 years.
Most of Secretary Panetta’s speech focused on “preserving essential capabilities,” including the ability to project power and respond to future crises, a strong military industrial base, and most importantly, a core of highly trained and experienced personnel.
But he also touched on the other two “D” s besides defense – diplomacy and development: “The reality is that it isn’t just the defense cuts; it’s the cuts on the State Department budget that will impact as well on our ability to try to be able to promote our interests in the world,” Panetta said in response to a question from ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko:National security is a word I know that we oftentimes use just when it comes to the military, and there’s no question that we carry a large part of the burden. But national security is something that is dependent on a number of factors. It’s dependent on strong diplomacy. It’s dependent on our ability to reach out and try to help other countries. It’s dependent on our ability to try to do what we can to inspire development.
Panetta’s backing of diplomacy and foreign aid as an extension of U.S. national security strategy is a continuation of vocal support by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, and others at the Pentagon, but the bigger issue remains convincing Congress, where the State Department has become a popular target for budget cutters.
If we’re dealing with Al Qaeda and dealing with the message that Al Qaeda sends, one of the effective ways to undermine that message is to be able to reach out to the Muslim world and try to be able to advance their ability to find opportunity and to be able to seek…a better quality of life. That only happens if we bring all of these tools to bear in the effort to try to promote national security.
We’ve learned the lessons of the old Soviet Union and others that if they fail to invest in their people, if they fail to promote the quality of life in their country, they – no matter how much they spend on the military, no matter how much they spend on defense, their national security will be undermined. We have to remember that lesson: that for us to maintain a strong national security in this country, we’ve got to be aware that we have to invest not only in strong defense, but we have to invest in the quality of life in this country.
Perhaps the more useful question going forward is one of priorities. Clearly there will be (and already is) less money to go around, and the Defense Department is one of the largest outlays, while State is much smaller – the military’s FY 2012 budget request was $670.9 billion; the State Department’s, $50.9 billion. So the question is: when push comes to shove, will Secretary Panetta be able to sustain his support for diplomacy and development budgets if it means larger cuts at DOD?
Sources: Government Executive, Politico, U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of State.
Photo Credit: David Hawxhurst/Wilson Center. -
Gates and Winnefeld: Development a Fundamental Part of National Security
› “As we’ve learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, reconstruction, development, and governance are crucial to any long-term success – it is a lesson we forget at our peril,” said Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in a video address commemorating the U.S. Agency for International Development’s 50th anniversary this fall. Gates was joined by Admiral James Winnefeld, Jr., the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a post on USAID’s Impact blog to reinforce the importance of development and USAID in particular to U.S. national security.
USAID was created on November 3, 1961 as part of a total overhaul of U.S. foreign assistance by President Kennedy. From the start, President Kennedy understood that the agency would play a role not just in development abroad but in improving U.S. security as well.
The agency is marking its 50th anniversary in an environment where development and security are seen as perhaps more linked than ever.
Winnefeld described the work that USAID and the military do as going hand-in-hand, saying that “together, we play a critical role in America’s effort to stabilize countries and build responsive local governance.”
In country after country, Winnefeld said, “USAID’s development efforts are critical to our objective of creating peace and security around the world.” He added that “instability in any corner of today’s highly interconnected world can impact everyone. Development efforts prevent conflicts from occurring by helping countries become more stable and less prone to extremism.”
“For 50 years,” Gates said, “USAID has embodied our nation’s compassion, generosity, and commitment to advance our ideals and interests around the globe. It’s a commitment demonstrated every time this agency works hand-in-hand with communities worldwide to cure a child, build a road, or train a judge.”
“By improving global stability,” Winnefeld concluded, “USAID helps keep America safe.”
Sources: USAID.
Video Credit: USaidVideo. -
Development or Security: Which Comes First?
›“Let’s take an area of conflict of great concern to us: Afghanistan. One of the very concrete questions is, do you invest your development efforts predominantly in the relatively secure parts of Afghanistan, which gives you more security gains in terms of holding them, or in the relatively insecure parts, where you’re most concerned with winning against the Taliban and the battle seems most in the balance?” With that question, Richard Danzig, the chairman of the board for the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), got to the heart of the issues being debated at a recent panel on development assistance and national security.
The discussion, hosted on September 5 by the Aspen Institute in conjunction with the Brookings Blum Roundtable on Global Poverty, brought together Rajiv Shah, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development; Susan Schwab, professor at the University of Maryland and former U.S. trade representative; Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program; and CNAS’ Danzig. Most of the hour-long discussion was spent debating whether assistance could be successful in insecure situations (like Afghanistan), or if a place has to have some kind of stability before assistance can really take root and successfully spur development.
Short vs. Long term
Administrator Shah, not surprisingly, made the argument that development assistance is valuable in either instance. That said, he also strongly cautioned against overpromising what aid in a place like Afghanistan can accomplish, saying that “one big mistake we’ve made is to oversell what any civilian agency can do in an environment where there’s an active military campaign.” He pointed out that “it not only raises the cost of doing the work…but it also puts people at real risk.”
Danzig took a more aggressive tone, saying that “in the great majority of cases I think it is misleading and distortive to argue for development on the grounds that it will predominantly enhance security.” He argued that more often than not, security should be a prerequisite for development: “You need to distinguish cart and horse here…in most instances…the security needs to precede the development.”
Shah and Danzig, who dominated the panel, were more in sync about what development assistance can accomplish in longer-term scenarios, when security and stability are assured. Shah in particular spoke forcefully about development assistance over time, stressing that “in the long view, in the medium term, the development priorities are national security priorities.”
Enabling Success
However, Shah did warn that aid could fall short of our goals if it not carried out in a reliable way. “Stability and predictability of finance is the single thing that’s most highly correlated with good outcomes,” he said. When our aid to a country comes and goes unreliably, flowing one year and stopping abruptly the next, it’s much harder to have the kind of positive impact we want it to have, he explained.
“Through the years, where these questions have been debated back and forth, there has been one constant,” said moderator Jessica Tuchman Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “We have always multiplied the objectives vastly beyond the resources – always.”
Video Credit: Aspen Institute. -
‘Dialogue’ TV: Revisiting Mr. Y and “A National Strategic Narrative”
›“We are, what I would call, very non-linear thinkers,” said U.S. Navy Captain Wayne Porter about the white paper he co-authored with U.S. Marine Colonel Mark Mykelby, “A National Security Narrative,” launched by Woodrow Wilson Center President Jane Harman at the Center in April. “We’re almost incapable of restricting ourselves to defense and security in isolation from a much larger perspective,” he told Dialogue TV.
“I think maybe that’s why Admiral Mullen has kept me around – I can offer a perspective that maybe he wouldn’t get from conventional strategists or from conventional planners,” said Porter, who served three out of four tours with the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a special assistant for strategy.
Dialogue host John Milewski sat down with Captain Porter and Robert Litwak, director of International Security Studies and vice president for programs at the Wilson Center, for a discussion about the white paper – published under the pseudonym “Mr. Y” (echoing George Kennan’s seminal “X” article) – and its contention that the United States should move away from an outmoded Cold War-era model of containment, deterrence, and control towards a “strategy of sustainability.”
The narrative has been well received, Porter said: “I think there is an appreciation that it’s a very complex strategic environment that we live in now and that maybe we need to re-look at all of the tools that we could use as a nation to pursue our enduring national interest.”
Inflection Points in History
“The timing of such conversations is cyclical,” said Litwak. “The original ‘X’ article emerged from the end of the Second World War and the advent of the Soviet threat, which required a new conception of international relations that Kennan articulated, as well as the National Security Act of 1947 to line up the U.S. government with this new environment.”
There have also been periods of concern about American decline. “I think what one sees in the current era are both of those trends coming together,” Litwak said:The system is changing – it’s a debatable proposition that the United States is in decline – but we see in the international system rising powers, notably China, as well as transnational trends that are beyond the sovereign control of any single state, which have called into question the nature of the international system…as well as a sense that…there’s something qualitatively different about this recession than the typical economic, cyclical recession and that has to do with the domestic sources of American strength.
These conditions, as well as the source of argument – coming from the military – combined to give particular resonance to the piece, Litwak said.
The Information/Globalization Age
“I think the thing that has changed materially to us is that the information age has brought about an awareness that our environment is completely interconnected,” Porter said. “There’s a complexity to this that can’t be analyzed linearly, that has to have new tools applied.”
“I’d honestly characterize it as significant as the Enlightenment in the 1600s,” he said.
“Certainly we’ve thought in silos and debates have been too often compartmentalized,” Litwak said. “One of the strengths of this piece is that it is truly synthetic – working across the continuum of instruments of power – and talks in a really powerful way about how hard power…has its place, but that the non-military dimensions of American power have been neglected.”
But, Porter said, it’s important to focus on being proactive, rather than reactive:The thing that bothered us most about the strategies that we see every day in our jobs on our side of the river and across the river is that they are almost universally based on anticipating and countering known risk and threat, and our sense is that we have entered an age in which we need to overcome that sense of fear and seize the opportunity to shape the environment of the future as opposed to simply being resilient to it.
As Litwak points out, Secretaries Gates (now former) and Clinton – in the form of the Quadrennial Defense Review, Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, and numerous speaking engagements – have both called for closer integration between State and Defense, more resources for non-military levers of power, and more holistic concepts of security. But unfortunately the greater integration called for in these documents remains unrealized.
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