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Top Ex-Diplomats Slam 'Militarisation' of Foreign Policy
WASHINGTON - While the Pentagon's budget has risen to heights not seen since World War II, U.S. diplomatic and foreign aid assets have largely atrophied and must be quickly rebuilt by any new administration that takes office in January, according to a new report released here this week by former senior foreign service officers.
The report by the American Academy of Diplomacy (AAD) and the Henry L. Stimson Centre is calling for a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of diplomats and aid and development specialists recruited into the foreign service over the next five years. This would cost about three billion dollars -- or approximately what the Pentagon is currently spending every 10 days on military operations in Iraq -- over current budget estimates.
''Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the diplomatic capacity of the United States has been hollowed out,' according to the 26-page report, 'A Foreign Affairs Budget for the Future'. 'The status quo cannot continue without serious damage to our vital interests.'
The vacuum created by the lack of diplomatic resources -- particularly in comparison to the Pentagon's budget and manpower -- has translated into the militarisation of U.S. foreign policy, warns the report.
''Today, significant portions of the nation's foreign affairs business simply are not accomplished,'' it says. 'The work migrates by default to the military that does have the necessary people and funding but neither sufficient experience nor knowledge. The 'militarisation' of diplomacy exists and is accelerating.'
To that end, the report calls for the State Department to take over control from the Defence Department (DOD) of nearly 800 million dollars a year budgeted for several security assistance programmes, including humanitarian aid, created in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to help friendly militaries prosecute the 'global war on terrorism'.
'Our view is that the Secretary of State has and should have responsibility for assuring that all foreign and security assistance is carried out in accord with U.S. foreign policy, including setting overall policy, approving countries to receive assistance, and setting the budget for such assistance,' the report said.
'DOD's expanded policy responsibility for security assistance programs risks the additional atrophy of the civilian agencies' ability to plan and conduct foreign policy and foreign assistance and raises serious concerns that such programs could conflict with broader U.S. strategic and foreign policy interests.'
'Moreover, these expanded missions are not the core competence of the military and thus may detract from the readiness to perform more central military missions,' it added. 'Finally, it is important for the U.S. to ensure that its non-military international presence and engagement be carried out primarily by civilians, not by the military.'
Indeed, the latest report echoes the views -- albeit in more diplomatic language -- of a growing number of non-governmental organisations and foreign policy experts that the Pentagon, simply by virtue of its enormous budget and its worldwide presence with nearly 800 overseas bases, has become far too dominant in policy making.
Even Pentagon chief Robert Gates a former senior intelligence officer, has complained about the imbalance between U.S. military and diplomatic resources. 'Funding for non-military foreign affairs programmes...remains disproportionately small relative to what we spend on the military,' he declared in a much-discussed speech last November. 'What is clear for me is that there is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security.'
'Our diplomatic leaders -- be they in ambassadors' suites or on the State Department's seventh [top] floor -- must have the resources and political support needed to fully exercise their statutory responsibilities in leading American foreign policy,' he said in July.
He has also noted ruefully that there are more people serving in military bands than in the entire State Department.
Despite his support, however, Gates' views have not yet substantially altered the political equation in Congress, which has routinely approved or even increased the Bush administration's budgetary requests for the Pentagon over the last eight years while casting a far more sceptical eye on requests for the State Department, which lacks a comparably broad-based geographic, commercial, or demographic constituency.
The Defence Department is slated to receive well over 527 billion dollars for 2009 -- not including some 15 billion dollars a month for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan -- or roughly 13 times more than the State Department's budget of less than 40 billion dollars.
Moreover, despite his concerns, Gates has asked -- so far without success -- that substantially more money be allocated to the new discretionary accounts that the Pentagon currently may disburse for allies in the war on terror, a request which, to the dismay of most foreign service officers, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice supported in hearings before Congress earlier this year.
Last week, the Pentagon submitted a new estimate for defence spending that is 450 billion dollars more over the next five years than it had previously announced, according to Congressional Quarterly, beginning with a nearly 10-percent increase in its 2010 budget to nearly 600 billion dollars.
Compared to that request, the recommendation by the AAD-Stimson report to increase the State Department's planned budget by roughly 3.3 billion dollars over the next five years seems paltry, indeed.
According to the report, which was put together by a task force of 14 former senior foreign service officers with the help of an advisory group chaired by former U.N. Amb. Thomas Pickering, the State Department currently suffers serious shortages in personnel in virtually all of its operations, from consular activity to development assistance and public diplomacy.
The report noted the decline in the foreign service and State Department spending began at the end of the Cold War when the international affairs budget was reduced by roughly 30 percent in real terms. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell succeeded in creating more than 1,000 new State Department posts between 2001 and 2004, according to the report, but these increases were quickly absorbed by diplomatic surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving other key areas and global issues with significant staff shortfalls.
It called for total State Department staffing to increase from roughly 10,000 today to nearly 15,000 by 2014.
Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy, and particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
5 Comments so far
Show AllWhen has US foreign policy NOT been on par with militarism?
Eisenhower warned US not to tie the economy to the Industrial Military Complex. But the two were already in bed together and as with most prophets, they are ignored in their life times.
What we the people need to comprehend is that the USA Government and Israel Military are the 21st Century Empire and "Any nation that year after year continues to raise the Defense budget while cutting social programs to the neediest is a nation approaching spiritual death."- Rev. MLK
"Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing the amounts provided to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct U.S. economic and military assistance since 1976 and the largest total recipient since World War ll. Total direct U.S. aid to Israel amounts to well over $140 billion in 2003 dollars. Israel receives about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year, which is roughly one-fifth of America's entire foreign aid budget. In per capita terms, the United States gives each Israeli a direct subsidy worth about $500 per year. This largesse is especially striking when one realizes that Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to South Korea or Spain.”- John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"
Daily, U.S.A. Tax payers provide more than $6.8 million to help maintain the Israeli Occupation of Palestine.
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/
In 2007, Naomi Klein, in her book "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" argued that at the height of the 2003-07 economic boom, the military industrial complex was driving Israel's tremendous economic growth, and Israel had the largest GDP growth of any Western country.
Klein theorized that the source of Israel's tremendous economic growth in the past five years cannot be attributed simply to its encouragement of high tech entrepreneurship and basic science. Its success must be understood, rather, as a product of its ability to use the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as a laboratory for defense industry innovation -- and to showcase their wares.
"Young Israeli computer scientists and engineers gain their training in the military, and then go on to start the kind of technology companies that have proliferated wildly in Israel and whose products are much sought after abroad. The entire Israeli hi-tech sector and not just military technology per se, is thus an outgrowth of Israel's hyper militarization. The Israeli economy's tech sector grew by 20% in 2006 alone, and Israel is now the foreign country with the second most US stock exchange-listed companies. Klein's point that Israel's military-derived technologies are an economic growth-driver because they can be tested in situ is correct, but it is insufficient for describing the magnitude of the military's tremendous penetration of the country's economy. Palestinians under occupation can indeed be seen as human "guinea pigs" and not just merely military targets, as Klein claims, but the society's militarization is far more profound than even she suggests." [1]
After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel's economy was devastated, but then came 9/11, and "suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners…Many of the country's most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel's status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom--a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war…Israel now sends $1.2 billion in "defense" products to the United States—up dramatically from $270 million in 1999…That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world…Much of this growth has been in the so-called "homeland security" sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry.
"By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion--an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are …precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the "global war on terror…
"Israel's policy of erecting walls and checkpoints to seal off the occupied territories are also "laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security states are being field-tested Palestinians--whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling "Hamasistan"--are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs…" [2]
-Excerpted from: Orwell meets Vanunu and The Industrial Military Media Security/Surveillance Complex:
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=860&Itemid=198
Eileen Fleming, Citizen Journalist, Author,
Producer "30 Minutes With Vanunu" and
"13 Minutes with Vanunu" FREELY STREAMING
http://www.wearewideawake.org/
The above article makes reference to Thomas Pickering, a career U.S. "diplomat" and his advocacy of a stronger role for U.S. "diplomacy".
It is very important to know what you are wishing for. Diplomacy is one thing. However, diplomacy as cover for U.S. destabilization, covert action, and support for right wing governments and death squads is another.
This is an excerpt from a published article but represents exactly my view on both Pickering and U.S. diplomacy.
(Excerpt from "What is U.S. envoy Thomas Pickering doing in Sri Lanka" by Barry Grey, May 27, 2000)
(quote)
No analysis of the US intervention in Sri Lanka would be complete without an examination of Thomas Pickering's democratic and pacifist credentials. Boasting the rank of career ambassador, the highest rank in the US Foreign Service, this veteran of American diplomacy has been involved in some of the most sordid foreign policy episodes of the past three decades.
As a rising star in the US foreign policy establishment, Pickering served as special assistant to Henry Kissinger in 1973-74, when the US was attempting to stave off defeat in Vietnam. He was Kissinger's special assistant when the latter helped mastermind the US-backed coup that brought the fascist general and mass murderer Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile.
He served as US ambassador to El Salvador under the Reagan administration, when Washington was supporting that country's death squad regime. His last ambassadorial post was in Moscow (1993-96), where he helped coordinate the Yeltsin regime's bombing of the Russian parliament in October of 1993.
Such is the résumé of Washington's point man in Sri Lanka. It underscores the reactionary substance behind the humanitarian rhetoric of US policy on the Indian subcontinent.
(end quote)
Thomas Pickering is not what the world needs in terms of U.S. diplomacy. The U.S. State Department is a key element in U.S. global imperialism.
David Brookbank -- "Hasta donde debemos practicar las verdades?"
The key is to reduce the military to what is required for defense, rather than aggressive wars. This means a reduction in aircraft carriers, foreign bases and strike forces.
Then diplomacy is required.
For diplomacy to work we need to spy like crazy, but not interfere. This means a reduction in strike forces, assassins, mercenaries and recognize human rights.
In other words, voluntarily abandon the empire.
Then monkeys will fly out of my butt -
Long term we will lose the empire and be forced to act more reasonably.
We wouldn't need any diplomats if our foreign policy was more humane and less antagonistic.
Hoa binh