According to reports, Congresswoman Jane Harman is resigning from her seat in the House of Representatives.

As I indicated earlier, the "thoughtful on national security" wing of the Democratic caucus suffered heavy losses in the midterm election. I worried that with a smaller group of moderate Democrats with which to partner, bipartisanship on national security policy would be that much harder to forge.

It just got a little harder with the departure of Jane Harman. Apparently, her new post will be head of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where she will retain her prominent voice on national policy. But she will be speaking from the outside rather than from the inside.

The reports do not say why she is leaving, but it is no secret that she was on the outs with former Speaker now-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. It is possible that that situation was bearable while Democrats held the majority and became unbearable in the new era. Whatever the reason, it is a loss for the Democratic Party and, I believe, for the country more generally. I wish her every success in her new venture, and I also hope that new voices emerge in the Democratic caucus with her foreign policy sensibility. I just wish I was as confident of the latter as I am of the former.

For an administration that claims there is no conflict between our interests and our values, the Obama administration has sure seemed to have a difficult time balancing U.S. interests in a stable Egypt with the U.S. values of a democratic Egypt.

The administration is in a legitimately tough position deciding how much support to continue giving an authoritarian government that has proved useful to us. But as the protests have worn on, the president, like Secretary Clinton, hit a better balance, calling on the Mubarak government to set in motion a transition to free elections. Vice President Biden was characteristically maladroit, claiming Mubarak was not a dictator and explaining that all the Egyptian protesters were seeking was "a little more opportunity." The Pentagon was characteristically calm and forward leaning, reaching out to the Egyptian defense establishment -- which is indistinguishable from the Egyptian government at its highest levels -- to urge professionalism and restraint.

The Egyptian military has already delivered on the only important near-term military request the United States is likely to make: not using force against the protesters. How might democratization in Egypt affect U.S.-Egyptian military cooperation? Short of an Iranian-style Islamic government overtly hostile to the United States, Mubarak's departure is unlikely to affect military cooperation with the United States. The United States does not actually rely on the Egyptian military for much militarily, and most of that which the United States does is very much in their interests to continue. But it could affect Egyptian-Israeli cooperation, with enormous consequences for the United States.

For military purposes, the United States relies on the Egyptian government in three main ways: 1) acting as a transit for U.S. military forces, 2) preventing Egypt from becoming a base for terrorist activity that would affect the United States, and 3) protecting Israel.

Read on

Foreign aid is once again under fire. Every so often a few politicians -- usually Republicans -- get up in arms about our government's gift of large amounts of money to other countries. Equally often, media stories appear detailing how ineffective aid supposedly is. The picture emerges that foreign aid is unnecessary, ineffective, and wasteful.

For example, the Republican Study Committee (RSC) released a proposal last week to cut the budget for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) by $1.39 billion as part of a broader package of deficit-reduction proposals. (Hat tip to our friends at The Cable for their post on the subject.) There were similar rumblings after the Republican takeover in 1994. Republicans seem to have an inborn suspicion -- usually dormant, but one that fitfully flares up once per decade -- that aid is just a handout from rich countries to poor ones to help the former ease their consciences.

Or take the lengthy Wall Street Journal story last week that declares, "A massive U.S. aid program that has made Pakistan the world's second-largest recipient of American economic and development assistance is facing serious challenges, people involved in the effort say. The ambitious civilian-aid program is intended in part to bolster support for the U.S. in the volatile and strategically vital nation. But a host of problems on the ground are hampering the initiative." Despite billions of aid, the United States remains unpopular in Pakistan; thus, the article implies, aid is ineffective.

These criticisms of foreign aid rest on faulty notions of what aid is and what it is supposed to accomplish. There are two views of aid reflected here, neither of which are helpful.

• National bribery. Some people think that the United States gives money to other countries to be popular. On this view, if the United States lavishes the Pakistanis with enough money, they will respect the United States. The problem is that if someone did this on an individual level, the United States would call it craven, insecure, and insulting -- which is probably how it is perceived by the Pakistanis. Aid as bribery doesn't work. Money can't buy me love -- not individually, and not between states.
• Charity. Others seem to think that the United States gives money out of the pure, unalloyed goodness of our hearts. Foreign aid is an extension of private goodness. Individually, we give money to the Salvation Army or World Vision so they can help our fellow man on the far side of the world. Foreign aid is functionally the same thing: the United States gives our tax dollars to USAID to do the same kind of charity work as NGOs. But why should the U.S. be charitable to someone in Nepal just because they live in an exotic country when there are Americans who need help? Additionally, there is no logical limit to how far the United States's charity could extend. The United States could bankrupt itself trying to save the world.

I propose a third view of foreign aid.

• Strategic investment. Foreign aid helps countries whose interests align with our own increase their capacities. The United States gives money to help select countries -- not the entire world -- improve specific abilities, like their ability to provide public security, defend their borders, or buy and sell goods.

The advantage of this view is that it is realistic. The United States can actually do this. The U.S. is not trying to change people's heart or minds, contrary to the bribery view. It is only trying to change their capacity. Additionally, this view helps the U.S. prioritize which countries should get aid, and what kind, contrary to the charity view. Giving billions to Tuvalu would be a commendable act of charity for the Salvation Army, but it would be folly for USAID because Tuvalu is not a strategic priority for the United States.

(I am not arguing that we should never be charitable. Rather, every possible foreign aid program is an act of charity. Charity by itself cannot help us decide which charitable programs to undertake. The United States either has to flip a coin to allocate our charity randomly, or consult our own interests to allocate it strategically.)

The Marshall Plan is a good model. The United States gave something like $25 billion (in today's dollars) per year to Western Europe after World War II. It was undoubtedly an act of charity. The money helped the Europeans rebuild their economies and saved tens of millions of people from poverty or even starvation. But it was also a strategic investment. Policymakers at the time worried about a return of the Great Depression following demobilization and the Marshall Plan helped Europe become a strong trading partner for the United States. Most importantly, U.S. officials feared the rise of Soviet power and hoped the Plan would bolster European governments' stability and prevent the spread of communism.

This view of foreign aid would help protect it from the kind of cuts the congressional Republicans are proposing. Aid is hard power. It is a weapon the United States uses to strengthen allies and, thus, ourselves. But this view would also help save it from the kind of limitless, grandiose visions Democrats sometimes seem to have for it. This is the sort of view that I hoped Secretary of State Clinton would incorporate in the recent Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. But despite the document's many strengths it did not seem to offer a framework for prioritizing among the Unites States' many foreign aid opportunities.

Two apparently unrelated snapshots have got me thinking about the hoary topic of the gap between academic political science and the nitty-gritty world of foreign policymaking.

Snapshot 1: The story about the haggling between Chinese and U.S. aides over protocol niceties for the state visit of Chinese leader Hu. The report vividly conveys the back-and-forth that is the daily grind of diplomacy in the trenches. I could well recall how doggedly the Chinese aides pursued a diplomatic nicety here or a protocol advantage there, all the while blocking the efforts of U.S. aides to add elements that would highlight U.S. priorities. And I cringed once again at the account of the gaffes that accompanied the welcome ceremony of Hu's visit back in 2006.

Snapshot 2: My program here just hosted Farah Pandith, who is special representative to Muslim communities in the State Department, a relatively new post that was set up to help implement the vision President Obama outlined in his June 2009 Cairo speech. Ms. Pandith is a rarity -- she has served as a political appointee in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations -- and she delighted the students with a vivid account of her engagement with Muslims around the world on behalf of Obama and Secretary Clinton. She focuses on the under-30 generation and, naturally, this led my students to ask about recent dramatic events in Tunisia and Lebanon in which the younger generation seems to be playing a particularly influential role. However, Ms. Pandith deftly shifted from expansive to circumspect to avoid saying anything that might roil the diplomatic waters at this delicate time; "I would refer you to the remarks made by Assistant Secretary Feltman," was about all she would say. And rightly so, because in her position a stray remark might wreck carefully calibrated (at least, I hope they are carefully calibrated) strategies being pursued at the top level.

Both these snapshots are good teaching moments, precisely because they are at such variance with the daily fare of a typical political science course, including my courses. Very few theories of U.S. foreign policy cover adequately the nuances of summit protocol staff negotiations, and it is hard to capture such detail in class discussion anyway. Yet, I indulge the conceit that I am training the next generation of staffers who will do it. Likewise, my students hear me speculate widely and wildly about every current event, precisely because in my current position and in my classroom there is very little harm done -- nothing protects the country from my errors quite so much as towering irrelevance. Yet, if I were in Ms. Pandith's shoes, I would have to adopt as circumspect a posture. The challenge is for trained-in-the-general and free-to-be-irresponsible academics to cultivate an appreciation for nuance and an attention to circumspection in one's students.

The best way to do that, I guess, is to keep introducing my students to practitioners and to remind them that, as good as political science can be, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in [my] philosophy."

On Dec. 15, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rolled out the State Department's first ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) at an internal town hall meeting -- a year behind schedule. No surprise, it turns out to be more of a public relations document than a disciplined strategic review. Yet if it doesn't score a bull-eye, the QDDR at least hits an outer ring by describing an ambitious and needed reform agenda.

Quadrennial reviews -- used by the Department of Defense since 1993 and also adopted by the Intelligence Community and Department of Homeland Security -- are supposed to evaluate an institution's fitness for accomplishing expected missions and responding to crises. As guides for decision-makers, they should assess the continuing applicability of the agency's charter, the global operating environment, institutional strengths and weaknesses, and options prioritized by resources available.

I may have missed something in my speed read through the QDDR's 242 pages. But it seemed less an analytical assessment than a justification for steps the secretary had already taken. State's desire to coordinate a growing menagerie of interagency actors in its embassies got coverage, but its evolving relationship with them was brief. The operating environment lacked details on forecast challenges and regional goals. Moreover, the authors pulled punches on institutional strengths and weaknesses, shed little light on budgetary realities, and established no discernible priorities among a long list of to-do's.

Read on

By Thomas Mahnken

John Barry, one of the nation's most insightful defense reporters, has posted a piece for Newsweek arguing that the Pentagon should be put in charge of the Haiti relief effort. As he notes, the only institution capable of meeting the demands of the Haiti crisis is not the United Nations, but the U.S. military.

As in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. armed forces have once again become the responder of first resort. In this case, the U.S. Navy is front and center: the USS Carl Vinson's heavy-lift helicopter and the USS Bataan and USS Ft McHenry's air cushioned landing craft are bringing needed supplies to the people of Haiti. 

There are three lessons here. First, for all the talk of whole-of-government solutions, the U.S. military remains the most competent national security institution we have. In recent years, the men and women of the U.S. armed forces have time and time again responded admirably when called upon to conduct missions far beyond those for which they were trained.

Second, the very competence of the military has become a sort of trap. Time and time again, the military has taken up the slack when other national security institutions do not perform as well as they can or should. Tasks better performed by the State Department or U.S. Agency for International Development, state or local governments, or non-governmental organizations too often wind up being performed by soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines.

Third, when the American taxpayer bought today's Navy, he got a lot more than he thought he was getting. He not only got a force capable of defending American interests on the high seas, but also one possessing the flexibility to respond rapidly to contingencies across the spectrum of conflict. Let's hope that the Obama administration's Quadrennial Defense Review, to be released next month, reflects this reality.

The Obama administration has two choices. First, it can continue to hope that, with more funding and some presidential leadership, the other parts of the national security community will finally rise to the occasion. Both Secretary of Defense Gates and Secretary of State Clinton (both at Foggy Bottom and before that in the Senate) have been articulate advocates for whole-of-government approaches. I very much hope they succeed.

If not, the logical alternative is to do what John Barry says and give missions like Haiti to the Pentagon. Such an approach would, however, be undesirable; it would further dilute U.S. military capabilities while also delegitimizing those institutions that should be bringing their unique talents to bear on crisis situations.

By Dov Zakheim

Kabul is a city at war. There are green zones and red zones, and roadblocks everywhere. The city is awash with a host of uniforms -- those of NATO states, as well as others, from Australia to Mongolia. Americans in uniform walk the streets fully equipped and armed. American government civilians wear body armor, as I did when making the short twenty minute walk from Camp Eggars to the U.S. Embassy.

In much of our government, however, the war is nowhere to be seen. Civil servants go about their business as if it were peacetime. There is still a serious shortage of U.S. government civilians here in Afghanistan, although their numbers are increasing. Many of those who do indeed serve here do not venture out of Kabul. This is so not because they are less dedicated to their mission. The sorry fact is that all too often they have little to offer in the field. Their expertise tends to be bureaucratic -- they are only equipped to manage and document projects and activities -- rather than technical.

The contrast with life back home could not be more striking. It is not just that most U.S. citizens go about their daily business unaffected by war, (unless they have a loved one serving in the military). Our executive branch does the same, with the notable exceptions of pockets in State, Treasury, and even smaller elements of other agencies.

And Congress is not much better. To be sure, it votes big supplemental budgets. But it has not done enough to lift restrictions on government activities that apply more to peacetime than to war zones.

As an example, while here I was told of the tragic story of a U.S. military couple deployed to Afghanistan and based at Bagram Air Base that had been bunking in a plywood structure with a tin roof called a B hut. The hut took a direct hit from a 107mm rocket; the wife was taking a shower outside the hut. When she returned she found her husband a victim of the hit.

Why were they in such a flimsy structure? Because of arcane Congressional spending limitations on what is called "minor military construction." There was no money to build the brick structures that might have saved the soldier's, and those of others like him.

The restrictions, and, more generally, the behaviors that make good sense in peace time are not appropriate in wartime. We cannot pretend to be a nation at peace even as we have the better part of 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, and a virtually like amount in Iraq, still very much at war. If we continue to do so, we will undermine the effectiveness of any troop increases, and make success -- already a challenging proposition -- even more difficult to achieve.

SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images

By David J. Kramer

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came away from her visit to Moscow this week with mixed results. The two big ticket items involved Iran and the human rights situation inside Russia.

By all appearances, Clinton struck out on moving Russia closer to supporting sanctions against Iran should current negotiation efforts fail. "We did not ask for anything today," she said, in a rather stunning admission. "We reviewed the situation and where it stood, which I think was the appropriate timing for what this process entails."

That she would not try to push Russia toward supporting sanctions is hard to believe -- and, if true, frankly irresponsible. More likely, she tried and failed but was putting the best spin on it. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's comments after his meeting with Clinton clearly indicated continued Russian resistance to any sanctions push. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, never a supporter of getting tougher toward Iran, reinforced this position in comments from Beijing on Wednesday when he argued that discussing sanctions now against Iran would be "premature."

This contrasts with comments Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made in New York last month and that he reportedly reiterated in his private meeting with Clinton on Tuesday. The Kremlin, however, has not publicly challenged either the foreign minister's or prime minister's contradictory comments, even though the president is ultimately in charge of Russian foreign policy (the idea that Medvedev would slap down Putin is rather laughable). Yet these conflicting messages cause confusion about who calls the shots in Moscow. Then again, perhaps the situation is very clear: it is Putin and not Medvedev (more on this in a future blog entry). What a shame, then, that Putin was in Beijing, not Moscow, during Clinton's visit. All this is not a surprise to those of us who have been saying that Russia is unlikely at the end of the day to support tough sanctions against Iran -- even in exchange for the Obama administration's regrettable decision September 17 on missile defense (which, by the way, was handled abysmally).

In contrast to the bad news on Iran, Clinton's comments on the human rights situation inside Russia were a pleasant surprise. In spite of her short shrift of human rights concerns in the past (recall her comments on the way to Beijing in February when she said she didn't want those issues to "interfere" with other pressing matters), Clinton made clear the concerns of the Obama administration about the deteriorating situation inside Russia.  Her meeting with human rights and civil society activists was a very good follow-up to President Obama's similar meeting in July. Her interview with independent radio station Ekho Moskvy and her remarks to students at Moscow State University (MGU) also touched on these issues in a strong way.

"I think all of these issues -- imprisonments, detentions, beatings, killings - it is something that is hurtful to see from the outside," Clinton said at MGU. "Every country has criminal elements, every country has people who try to abuse power, but in the last 18 months ... there have been too many of the incidents," adding that not enough was being done to "ensure no one had impunity from prosecution ... I said that this is a matter of grave concern not just for the United States but for the Russian people, and not just for activists but people who worry that unsolved killings are a very serious challenge to order and the fair functioning of society," Clinton said. In an innovative society, she observed, "people must be free to take unpopular decisions, disagree with conventional wisdom, know they are safe to peacefully challenge accepted practice and authority."

In her interview with Ekho Mskvy, she highlighted the attacks on journalists and human rights defenders, noting they are "of such great concern. ... in the last 18 months ... there have been many of these incidents. ... I think we want the government to stand up and say this is wrong."

Her strong statements on these issues were especially important given an unnecessary and unfortunate situation caused by an article in the Russian newspaper Kommersant earlier in the week based on comments made by NSC Senior Director Michael McFaul suggesting that human rights concerns would receive less attention from the Obama administration. The thrust of the Kommersant article seemed out of synch with Obama's handling of the issue in July, with Clinton's comments this week, and with McFaul's own passion for human rights over his career (and I've known him for some 16 years). Clinton stepped into the fray and allayed the concerns, at least for the time being, of those who were worry that human rights issues will fall down the list of priorities in the interest of the Obama Administration's overall "reset" policy with Moscow. 

ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP/Getty Images

By Michael J. Green

While conducting research for a book I am currently writing on the history of American strategic thought on Asia, I came across a memorandum prepared by the State Department in the early 1840s to guide the United States' first treaty negotiations with China. The memo stressed that the paramount goal of the U.S. commissioner to China was to secure trade access, and that under no conditions was the U.S. delegation to let on that the United States was a republic, since this might frighten the Qing. Instead, the delegation was instructed to highlight that unlike Britain, the United States would maintain a strict policy of noninterference in the affairs of other states and to express respect for the benign rule of the Celestial Emperor toward his people.

In its day, this was probably considered "smart power" and its advocates have made something of a comeback in recent months.

There has been a great deal of speculation about why the Obama administration has changed the tone and substance of U.S. policy on democracy and human rights. It is partly related to the tension between anti-imperialism and human rights in the liberal foreign-policy playbook. Iraq has also contributed to a backlash against values-based foreign policy strategies in a repeat of what happened to democracy-promotion after the Philippines intervention, World War I, and Vietnam. Politics are at play too, since Democrats now seem to believe that they can seize the political high ground on national security by embracing realism as their own (and perhaps peeling off some moderate Republicans in the process).

However, it would be far too simplistic too argue that the administration has "abandoned" human rights and democracy -- at least in Asia. In fact, the administration has actually made the case for real pressure on regimes like Burma, North Korea, and even China. The problem is that these statements of policy have been overshadowed by conflicting signals sent in speeches by the president or decisions like not inviting the Dalai Lama to the White House during his visit to Washington this week. Ironically, by being both tough and soft at the same time, the administration risks losing both American prestige and progress on the democratic causes America has always championed.

The consequences of this confused message were obvious in a meeting I had earlier this week with a senior delegation from Vietnam. The delegation raised a trip I had taken to Hanoi in early 2005 to hammer out a religious freedom agreement in advance of the Vietnamese prime minister's first visit to the White House (I was then NSC senior director for Asia). In that agreement, Vietnam agreed to open hundreds of house churches in the Central Highlands, paving the way for a successful summit and a strategic advance in U.S. relations with Vietnam. My interlocutors this week raised the trip because they wanted to confirm that U.S. strategy had now changed. They noted that President Obama's U.N. speech identified four pillars, none of which touched on human rights and democracy. Authoritarian states take what leaders say far more seriously than what bureaucrats say. So they asked my advice on how to approach intransigent U.S. bureaucrats now that the president had "moved beyond" the difficult issues of human rights and democracy.

The administration's confused signals have also hurt on Burma. After weeks of speculation that U.S. sanctions would be lifted -- speculation fueled by self-proclaimed advisors to candidate Obama now seeking to ingratiate themselves with the SPDC and by the administration's own proengagement rhetoric -- the administration's policy review on Burma turned out to be fairly modest in terms of course correction. In fact -- and this was largely missed by the press -- Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell testified that if there was not progress on securing the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and integrating the NLD and the ethnic minorities into the new constitution, the U.S. would actually seek to increase sanctions on the regime. But by then the regime had already internalized the wrong message and thought that reducing Aung San Suu Kyi's sentence from three years to 18 months would be enough to get sanctions lifted (even as the regime launched violent new military offensives against ethnic minorities along the Chinese and Thai border). Just as bad, states in ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, are moving away from their own very healthy debate about how to implement the human rights standards in the association's new charter and focusing on getting the United States to change its policy instead (Singaporeans could not be more gleeful at the opportunity to escape an internal ASEAN debate on values by shifting the burden back on Washington to change its approach). Now the prospects for progress in this new engagement of the regime are diminished because U.S. signals have softened everyone else's resolve.

Ditto for North Korea. Secretary of State Clinton's July 23 statement on North Korea, emphasized that the United States will "continue to work closely with other governments, international organizations, and NGOs to address human rights violations and abuses perpetuated by the regime, and would soon announce an envoy for North Korean human rights." But the senior envoy dispatched to the region has made barely a mention of the situation in the North.

On China, Secretary Clinton fumbled early with statements that she would not let issues like human rights and Tibet interfere with more important strategic issues. But senior administration officials have steadily adjusted since. President Obama raised human rights in welcoming remarks for the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue and in a Sept. 24 speech to the Center for a New American Security, Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg said that he "could not disagree more" with Chinese officials who say that there is no place for human rights in the U.S.-China dialogue.

The problem is that nobody seems to believe any of this anymore. Than Shwe and the thugs running Burma guessed wrong on the administration's expectations. The Vietnamese clearly think the heat is off on religious freedom in their country. Japan's new foreign minister, Katsuya Okada, gloated in a joint press conference with the Cambodian foreign minister this week that the U.S. was "moving closer to Japan and Cambodia's position" -- even though Campbell had clearly testified on the content of the policy the week before.

Now with the administration's decision not to invite the Dalai Lama to the Oval Office during his visit to Washington this week (the first noninvite by a president during the visit of the Dalai Lama since 1991), the White House is compounding the mistakes in its messaging on human rights and democracy in the region.

The elements of a strong policy on human rights and democracy are a matter of record in the statements of senior Obama administration officials (for which they deserve full credit), but those points have been muddled or drowned out by conflicting narratives about engagement, access, "smart power" and the president's own apparent ambivalence about championing universal values. I suspect this will change as feigned neorealism comes up short in terms of results. Indeed, one can already see some evolution in the administration's approach to these issues. However, until the president clearly reaffirms America's commitment to human rights, democracy, and governance, there will be five consequences in Asia that even hard-core realists will lament (not to mention the idealists who would normally be comfortably at the core of a Democratic foreign policy):

1. Change agents within repressive states who matter most will be demoralized, disempowered and possibly endangered;
2. Repressive regimes will continue to think that they can get away with much lower standards than the administration could sell to the Congress or the American people if they want to lift sanctions or advance engagement (as happened in Burma with respect to Aung San Suu Kyi's sentence);
3. Repressive regimes will continue citing evidence of a higher U.S. tolerance for human rights abuses (something that now worries the Tibetans in the wake of the postponement of the Dalai Lama's visit to Washington);
4. The emerging debate in ASEAN, Japan, and Korea on the importance of addressing human rights and democracy will subside;
5. America's greatest source of soft power -- our values -- will suffer.

By Will Inboden

There are few policy subjects more boring than the so-called “interagency process.” The quickest way to find yourself standing suddenly and awkwardly alone at a Washington cocktail party is to say something like “well, what I am really interested in is the reform of the interagency process within the national security infrastructure.” Even devoted policy professionals will quickly change the subject, if not flee your presence entirely (unless you happen to be at a party with any folks from this outfit, who will rush over to buy you a drink). Simply put, it is hard to muster much excitement or interest even within the Beltway, let alone outside the Beltway, for thinking about how the organizational processes of the various departments and agencies of the U.S. government function together to advance national security objectives. 

But just how, and how well, the U.S. government and its various agencies organize, plan for, and allocate resources to national security policy matters profoundly to the conduct of foreign and defense policy. And for anyone who doubts this, exhibit A on what can happen when the process doesn’t work is Iraq up through 2006, exhibit B is Afghanistan today, and exhibit C is any number of possible future interventions (cf. Pakistan, or Iran, or North Korea, or Sudan, or...).

So Secretary Clinton’s announcement on Friday that the State Department and USAID will conduct a “Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review” (QDDR) is significant. Modelled on the Pentagon’s “Quadrennial Defense Review” (QDR), the QDDR will, in Secretary Clinton’s words, be

a tool to provide us with both short-term and long-term blueprints for how to advance our foreign policy objectives and our values and interests. This will provide us with a comprehensive assessment for organizational reform and improvements to our policy, strategy, and planning processes.

Overall, this is a noteworthy and laudable initiative, and has the real potential to strengthen how American foreign policy is made. But there are also a few looming pitfalls. Herewith some thoughts on the good, the bad, and the ugly of the QDDR.

The good:

•    The QDDR might elevate strategic planning at the State Department and USAID. In other words, the QDDR might actually work. It has become a truism that the State Department almost ignores long-term planning about emerging threats, challenges, and opportunities, and instead remains myopically stuck in day-to-day relationship management with other nations. Likewise USAID spends too much time as a contracting agency shackled by Congressional earmarks and merely administering development dollars around the world. The QDDR could force new and creative thinking about global trends and State and USAID’s roles in shaping them.

•     The QDDR might better integrate policies with resources, and State with USAID. Though the Secretary of State ostensibly has authority over USAID, in practice State and USAID have too little integration, so that State’s diplomatic priorities are often not reflected in USAID’s resource allocation. 

•    The QDDR might link State and USAID more closely with the Pentagon. One problem revealed most acutely by the early post-conflict reconstruction failures in Iraq and Afghanistan is the severe disparities between the State Department and the Pentagon in culture, capabilities, and resources. Having State and USAID go through a similar review process, simultaneously with the Pentagon, could begin to bridge this gap. Otherwise, in former Policy Planning Director Steve Krasner’s vivid formulation, “to meet 21st century foreign policy challenges, we might just need to create a new cabinet agency that sits in the middle of the Potomac River” (er, in other words, combining the functions of State, USAID, and the Pentagon).

•     The QDDR makes academic research relevant to policy. The QDDR concept seems to have its roots at least in part in the Princeton Project on National Security, co-chaired by then-Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, and now State’s Director of Policy Planning, Anne-Marie Slaughter. More avenues are needed to bring such scholarly research from universities into the policy world; the QDDR could be a good start.

The bad:

•    The QDDR risks disregarding other vital elements of national power and security policy. There is much more to foreign policy than just diplomacy and development. Trade policy, fiscal policy, energy policy, and intelligence, for starters, all play major roles in the exercise of national power. As I have written previously, the “3 D’s” may have alliterative appeal but it is a less accurate and less comprehensive acronym than, say, “DIME” used at the Pentagon for the different elements of national power: diplomacy, intelligence, military, and economic. More practically, what role will the Treasury Department, the U.S. Trade Representative, the Intelligence Community, the Energy Department, and the Commerce Department have in the QDDR process? And if they have little or no role, how can the QDDR be a credible assessment of resources and strategy?

•    Where’s the National Security Council? The NSC is supposed to coordinate and lead all departments and agencies behind a common policy. But other than an obligatory nod towards “coordinating with the interagency process,” Clinton’s announcement of the QDDR asserts that State will control it, and leaves unclear what if any role the NSC would play in the QDDR process.  Given the endemic differences between State and DoD, it is plausible that the new QDDR could construct even taller stovepipes separating defense from diplomacy and development. To take just one plausible example, what if in the next QDR, the Pentagon identifies China as America’s most likely peer-competitor threat, whereas in the QDDR State identifies China as a strategic partner for the United States? Only leadership, coordination, and yes, control of the process by the NSC can prevent such bureaucratic contradictions and strategic incoherence.  

The ugly:

•    The QDDR risks being, as Mark Twain would put it, “chloroform in print.”  Secretary Clinton described the QDDR as a “bottom-up review.” On a good day this means that input will be solicited far and wide from every embassy and bureau, the people in the field and in the trenches who best understand their patch of turf. On a bad day (which happen more often in government) it means that the QDDR will be a stale, written-by-committee laundry list of bureaucratese that avoids difficult trade-offs and lacks strategic coherence. Even if it is a “bottom-up review,” it will need a firm hand from the top to succeed, and ideally one principal official who controls the writing process.

•    What about the National Security Strategy? The Goldwater-Nichols Act, the law which mandated the QDR, also directed each Administration to produce a National Security Strategy (NSS).  The NSS is the only strategy document which brings all elements of national power into a coherent and integrated framework of policy priorities.  The besetting weakness of the NSS is that it is not linked to budget authority and resource allocation.  Because the QDR and QDDR both ostensibly tie policies with resources, they have more immediate relevance.  So here’s an idea for the White House, which others have suggested but bears repeating: why not fold the QDR and the QDDR into the National Security Strategy, and produce a genuinely integrated, whole-of-government National Security Strategic Review?