Robert Gates told the Council on
Foreign Relations that the U.S. response to HIV/AIDS in Africa and the
turnaround in Colombia stand among this nation’s greatest foreign policy
successes since the end of the Cold War.
The former Defense Secretary and CIA Director
who served Presidents from Reagan to Obama told us yesterday that these successes
came amidst far too many foreign policy failures such as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Somalia.
Gates drew from his new book,
“Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the
Post-Cold War World” to underscore two key factors that contributed to the U.S.
successes in Colombia and with HIV/AIDS in Africa:
- Both initiatives were led by the State Department and not the Pentagon. “With HIV/AIDS, there was one central coordinator at State who had the budget and was backed by the President,” Gates said.
- The work in Africa and Colombia also enjoyed “strong bipartisan support in Congress” across two administrations. In Colombia, “Congress also limited the size of the U.S. military commitment to 800 troops” and understood the essential role played by State and the Justice Department, which trained hundreds of new judges. By comparison, Gates said that Congress today “is completely paralyzed,” “our politics are frozen,” and we’re unable “to deal with any of the big problems.”
The cosmic
challenge in all of this, of course, is that the U.S. has charged forward with
building a staggering defense and national security infrastructure while in
Gates’ words, “weakened all the non-military tools after the Cold War”
including diplomatic, economic, educational, communications, and cultural
assets.
“Every
president since the Cold War ended has over-militarized U.S. foreign policy,” he
said, doing so based on an antiquated 1947 National Security Act that needs to
be revised and a very different world more than 70 years in our rearview mirror.
Gates invoked the old saw that, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every
problem looks like a nail,” later adding that “we need to reinvest in the State
Department,” which has been savaged over the past several years.
Gates told
us that at the height of the Iraq War, “The military was expected to engage in
nation building, but it’s not trained and equipped to do this.” He pointed to
the enormous disparity between the U.S. military with 170,000 troops in Iraq at
the height of our occupation compared to just 360 civilians from State and U.S.
AID assigned to the provincial reconstruction teams.
Robert Gates
is a sober voice that is sorely needed right now. It’s time to wake up and heed
his call. We must move past politicians misusing the wonderful men and women of
our military to try to solve political and diplomatic problems. It’s nothing
more than simple-minded, faux machismo. And, while we’re at it, we better move
well past the ridiculous left-right clichés in our politics that are obscuring
the path to real solutions. If not, we should get used to HIV/AIDs in Africa
and Colombia remaining among our few foreign policy wins. As Gates told us, the
biggest threat to America is not China or Russia. “It lies within the two miles
that includes the White House and the Capitol.”
Image courtesy of The New York Times.