Palm Beach
The Council on Foreign Relations’ J. Anthony Holmes writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (January/February 2009) what we already know to be painfully true. The Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development have been thoroughly gutted over the last decade. In essence, the greatest country on the planet has very little capacity to carry out sustained diplomacy everywhere it is needed. Far too many national security, intelligence, diplomatic, peacekeeping and nation-building requirements have been deposited in a Defense Department that is both operationally inappropriate and philosophically ill-suited to handle some of them. Just ask the best colonels when their armchair-warrior politician bosses are not in the room, and they’ll validate this contention.
Holmes writes that the number of lawyers at Defense exceeds the entire U.S. diplomatic corps and that there are more musicians in military bands than there are U.S. diplomats. I have worked with many of those military bands, so this is no knock on them. It is simply a matter of proportion. Holmes also notes that the 2008 DOD budget was over 24 times as large as the combined State and USAID budgets. No serious analyst would argue for anything less than a robust defense budget in these treacherous times, but the imbalance here borders on insanity.
If the United States stands any shot at rebuilding its position in the world, we will need to reinvest mightily in the Foreign Service and place it on a somewhat more equitable status with the military. The only major weakness in Holmes’ argument is predictably placing 100 percent of the blame for this situation on the train wreck otherwise known as the Bush Administration. To be fair, the disinvestment in diplomacy long preceded George Bush and Condi Rice. They complicated and magnified the dilemma exponentially, as they did most things. But they didn’t start it.
p.s. You know, The Breakers never gets old. We enjoyed a delightful dinner just yards in front of a frothy Atlantic and an even frothier young coupled embraced in a lip lock for, oh, 20 minutes. And they say halon removes oxygen from the room.
The Council on Foreign Relations’ J. Anthony Holmes writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (January/February 2009) what we already know to be painfully true. The Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development have been thoroughly gutted over the last decade. In essence, the greatest country on the planet has very little capacity to carry out sustained diplomacy everywhere it is needed. Far too many national security, intelligence, diplomatic, peacekeeping and nation-building requirements have been deposited in a Defense Department that is both operationally inappropriate and philosophically ill-suited to handle some of them. Just ask the best colonels when their armchair-warrior politician bosses are not in the room, and they’ll validate this contention.
Holmes writes that the number of lawyers at Defense exceeds the entire U.S. diplomatic corps and that there are more musicians in military bands than there are U.S. diplomats. I have worked with many of those military bands, so this is no knock on them. It is simply a matter of proportion. Holmes also notes that the 2008 DOD budget was over 24 times as large as the combined State and USAID budgets. No serious analyst would argue for anything less than a robust defense budget in these treacherous times, but the imbalance here borders on insanity.
If the United States stands any shot at rebuilding its position in the world, we will need to reinvest mightily in the Foreign Service and place it on a somewhat more equitable status with the military. The only major weakness in Holmes’ argument is predictably placing 100 percent of the blame for this situation on the train wreck otherwise known as the Bush Administration. To be fair, the disinvestment in diplomacy long preceded George Bush and Condi Rice. They complicated and magnified the dilemma exponentially, as they did most things. But they didn’t start it.
p.s. You know, The Breakers never gets old. We enjoyed a delightful dinner just yards in front of a frothy Atlantic and an even frothier young coupled embraced in a lip lock for, oh, 20 minutes. And they say halon removes oxygen from the room.