On October 14, the Obama Administration's first Quadrennial
Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) began with an event
organized by the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, a new
non-governmental organization established by former Secretaries of
State Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, and others.
If the discussions at the kick-off event are an indicator, the
final QDDR product will repeat past mistakes by maintaining a focus
on the traditional official government instruments of foreign aid
and will fail to achieve the true integration of all the tools of
U.S. foreign and security policy.
Conspicuously Absent
The QDDR is intentionally patterned after the Department of
Defense (DoD) Quadrennial Defense Reviews that are undertaken at
the beginning of each new presidential term. The goal of the QDDR
is to provide robust justification to back up President Barack
Obama's pledge "to double" the U.S. development assistance budget
by bringing a new level of "granularity" to USAID's budgets,
beginning with the presentation of the fiscal year (FY) 2011 budget
to Congress. The DoD budget presentations have become the gold
standard among congressional Appropriations Committee Members and
staffers. However, if the idea is to improve clarity of thought and
budget presentation, the QDDR exercise is not likely to achieve its
purpose.[1]
The list of participants and the agenda for the QDDR kick-off by
the Obama Administration sent a number of signals: On the one hand,
there was a standing-room-only crowd of USAID's traditional
non-governmental organizations and contractors. On the other, there
was a notable absence of any officials from the Pentagon, the
Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), or the President's
Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief--the later two of which were
launched by the Bush Administration and have received high marks
for their innovative and measurable results-oriented
approaches.
Perhaps because QDDR organizers boasted of a "New Campaign
Launched to Elevate Non-Military Tools of Development and
Diplomacy"[2] no DoD officials were invited. Their
participation would have been highly relevant nonetheless. DoD
efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan incorporate development assistance
into the larger order of battle for hearts and minds and have been
gaining momentum since they were significant factors in General
David Petraeus's successful Iraq surge strategy. Civilian official
development assistance (ODA) agencies see that tilt toward the
Pentagon as a threat. Yet if "smart power" is meant to represent
the integration of all the policy instruments in the government's
toolbox--as the second goal of the QDDR itself states--then the
U.S. military must be part of the equation.
The Military's Approach
At the QDDR event, Jacob Lew (a Deputy Secretary of State and
the chair of the QDDR) stated that the Obama Administration intends
"to give civilians the tools to do what they do best and let the
military get back to doing what it does best."
And yet the military's approach has been working better than the
old USAID model. Its success is due in part to the fact that DoD
sets more achievable short-term goals and can provide its own
security for its development contractors, which is necessary
because of the frequent violence in today's failed states. These
short-term goals have helped the U.S. to achieve larger foreign
policy objectives. Too often, USAID's development professionals
want to set broader and more generalized goals that can be achieved
only over a five-to-10-year timeframe (or longer) and have little
direct connection to current foreign policy challenges.
Equally striking was the absence of awareness of the need to
reform the public diplomacy and strategic communication tools of
the U.S. government. Yet both President Obama and Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton have spoken about the key role that these
aspects of U.S. foreign policy would have in the current
Administration. Despite the President's own visibility and his
Nobel Peace Prize, he has failed to indicate which direction this
reform and change will take, if any. Meanwhile, Undersecretary of
State for Public Diplomacy Judith McHale is to chair a subcommittee
under the QDDR--an assignment that effectively denies her a
strategy-setting role and assigning her a bit-player part.
Others Who Should Have Been
Invited
Notably absent from this first step in the QDDR review process
were dissenting voices that could call into question the prevailing
conventional ODA wisdom. Astute observers in the developing world
are waking up to the destructiveness of ODA. Someone like Zambian
author and former World Bank official Dambisa Moyo ought to have
been invited to participate in the discussion. In her recent book
Dead Aid,[3] Moyo concludes that foreign aid from
developed countries to Africa has encouraged a culture of
corruption, discouraged private foreign and domestic investment,
and caused poverty rates to rise. That is precisely why the MCC
targets corruption as a top priority.
Also missing at the QDDR launch were any U.S. government trade
officials who could have made the case that private trade with, and
investment in, developing countries has far greater impact than
ODA. This goes both for economic growth within developing countries
and creation of sustainable U.S. private-sector jobs through
expanded export opportunities. U.S. development policy should focus
primarily on expanding U.S. private trade and investment in
developing countries.
Finally, the most striking absence of all was a new USAID
administrator. Given the importance attached by the Administration
to the QDDR, this is a major omission. The failure to date of the
Obama Administration to name a new head of USAID has given rise to
fears among USAID supporters that Secretary Clinton has set her
sights on completing efforts to integrate USAID into the State
Department that began in the mid-1990s and gained momentum under
Secretary Condoleezza Rice. If these efforts are completed, it
would be by far the best development to come out of the QDDR.
What Should the QDDR Do?
The QDDR should focus on the strategic relationship between U.S.
development assistance, public diplomacy/strategic communication
and traditional diplomacy, and the U.S. national security apparatus
to achieve real-time foreign policy objectives. Indeed, even today
the heaviest ODA expenditures by the U.S. government are in
countries where the U.S. is fighting against radical Islam.
It should also acknowledge the importance of performance- and
good-governance-based assistance programs, such as the MCC, whose
funding has been cut by the Obama Administration, as well as the
critical importance of free trade agreements.
The Administration should use the results of the QDDR to
convince Congress to restore the MCC's FY 2009 funding and increase
the FY 2010 request--even if that means subtracting the difference
from other USAID programs. Funding for traditional ODA programs
administered by USAID should gradually be reduced and redirected to
MCC programs. Remaining USAID programs should be redesigned
according to more focused U.S. foreign policy and national security
priorities.
The Administration should also finish the work begun in the
previous Administration to consolidate USAID into the State
Department and make it, once again, an instrument of U.S. national
security policy.
Who Is on the Invite List?
Much can be interpreted of the Administration's intentions for
USAID from who was and was not invited to the kick-off event for
the QDDR. Hopefully, the QDDR can be saved from past mistakes and
set U.S. foreign aid on the right path.
Helle C. Dale is Senior Fellow for Public
Diplomacy in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign
Policy Studies, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis
Institute for International Studies, and James M.
Roberts is Research Fellow for Economic Freedom and Growth in
the Center for International
Trade
and
Economics
at The Heritage
Foundation.