Photo Illustration: Dwynn Ronald V. Trazo/©Gulf News
At its best, for America, being a great nation has always meant a commitment to building a better, safer world — not just for Americans themselves, but for their children and grandchildren. This has meant leading the world in advancing the cause of peace, responding when disease and disaster strike, lifting millions out of poverty and inspiring those yearning for freedom.
This calling is under threat.
The United States administration’s proposal, announced on Tuesday, to slash approximately 30 per cent from the US State Department and foreign assistance budget signals an American retreat, leaving a vacuum that would make America far less safe and prosperous. While it may sound penny-wise, it is pound-foolish.
This proposal will bring resources for American civilian forces to a third of what they spent at the height of Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” years, as a percentage of the gross domestic product. It would be internationally irresponsible, distressing America’s friends, encouraging our enemies and undermining our own economic and national security interests.
The idea that putting Americans “first” requires a withdrawal from the world is simply wrongheaded, because a retreat would achieve exactly the opposite for American citizens. I learned that lesson the hard way when I became US secretary of state after a decade of budget cuts that hollowed out our civilian foreign policy tools.
Many had assumed the Cold War’s end would allow America to retreat from the world, but cuts that may have looked logical at the time came back to haunt the US as tensions rose in the Middle East, Africa, the Korean Peninsula and elsewhere. Confronting such challenges requires not just a military that is second to none, but also well-resourced, effective and empowered diplomats and aid workers.
Indeed, we’re strongest when the face of America isn’t only a soldier carrying a gun, but also a diplomat negotiating peace, a Peace Corps volunteer bringing clean water to a village or a relief worker stepping off a cargo plane as floodwaters rise. While I am all for reviewing, reforming and strengthening the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), proposals to zero out economic and development assistance in more than 35 countries would effectively lower the American flag at American outposts around the world and make us far less safe.
Today, the world is witnessing some of the most significant humanitarian crises in living memory. With more than 65 million people displaced, there have never been more people fleeing war and instability since the Second World War. The famines engulfing families in South Sudan, Yemen, Nigeria and Somalia put more than 20 million people at risk of starvation — further destabilising regions already under threat from Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levnat), Al Qaida, Boko Haram and Al Shabab.
Do we really want to slash the US State Department and the USAID at such a perilous moment? The American answer has always been no. Yet, this budget proposal has forced us to ask what America’s role in the world is and what kind of nation do Americans seek it to be. The US president’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, has described these cuts as “not a reflection of the president’s policies regarding an attitude towards state”. But how is a 32 per cent cut to America’s civilian programmes overseas anything but a clear expression of policy?
True, many in the US Congress have effectively declared the administration’s budget proposal “dead on arrival”, but they also acknowledge that it will set the tone for the coming budget debate. That’s the wrong conversation. American diplomacy and development budget is not just about reducing spending and finding efficiencies. America needs a frank conversation about what the country stands for as that “shining city on a hill”. And that conversation begins by acknowledging that we can’t do it on the cheap.
Diplomacy and aid aren’t the only self-defeating cuts in the administration’s proposal. A call to all but eliminate two key export-promotion agencies — the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Trade and Development Agency — would harm thousands of American workers and actually add to the deficit. And any cut to US economic development investments in Africa and elsewhere will undermine America’s ability to build new customer bases in the world’s fastest-growing markets.
With 95 per cent of the world’s consumers outside America’s borders, it’s not “America first” to surrender the field to an ambitious China rapidly expanding its influence, building highways and railroads across Africa and Asia. China is far from slashing its development budget. Instead, it’s growing — by more than 780 per cent in Africa alone since 2003.
Since the release of its initial budget request in March, the US administration has started to demonstrate a more strategic foreign policy approach. This is welcome, but it will take far more than a strike against Syria, a harder line on Russia, increased pressure on North Korea and deeper engagement with China to steer American foreign policy. It also takes the resources to underwrite it.
America is great when it is the country that the world admires — a beacon of hope and a principled people who are generous, fair and caring. That’s the American way. If America is still that nation, then it must continue to devote this small but strategic 1 per cent of its federal budget to this mission.
Throughout my career, I learned plenty about war on the battlefield, but I learned even more about the importance of finding peace. And that is what the State Department and USAID do: Prevent the wars that America can avoid, so that it fights only the ones it must. For all American service members and citizens, it’s an investment we must make.
— New York Times News Service
