The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2017

28 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL agricultural production and provide essential services from water to energy can reduce the conflicts and ungoverned spaces that threaten U.S. security, in addition to reflecting the humanitarian instincts of the American people. U.S. Smart Power Undermined The fragmentation of U.S. foreign assistance has been the result of congressional actions—particularly the efforts of Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) after the Republicans gained a majority in the U.S. Senate in 1994—as well as actions by recent administrations. Helms failed in his goal of abolishing USAID, but he and others succeeded in weakening its capacity so that by the end of the George W. Bush administra- tion in 2008, USAID had only a little more than 1,000 Foreign Service officers—less than half of the professional diplomatic staff it had 20 years earlier. U.S. assistance was further fragmented during the second Bush administration with the creation of large new assistance programs, such as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (known as PEPFAR) and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, outside of USAID. It was apparently easier to create something new than to try to fix an existing agency. Over the years USAID’s work has been hampered by dozens of amendments to the original Foreign Assistance Act to the point where a casual reader of the law might wonder how anything at all can get done. As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates noted in 2007 (in his Landon Lecture), after the end of the Cold War the United States “gutted” its civilian foreign affairs agencies, especially the State Department and USAID, and thus its smart power. Rebuilding these institutions takes time. When the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq called for massive foreign assistance to stabilize these countries after U.S.-led invasions, the result was limited achievement at a very high cost, due largely to the fact that there was no single, robust assistance agency with the kind of staffing needed to take on urgent and complex reconstruction tasks. A secondary problem was a lack of understanding by senior policy- makers of what foreign assis- tance can accomplish and the timelines involved. At times State and the Department of Defense seemed interested only in maxi- mizing the amount and speed of money going out the door. Things have gotten better since then under the Obama administration, but only marginally. Congress has made more funding available in flexible accounts and USAID staffing has increased, although not to the levels needed. With the American people increasingly wary of large-scale military intervention, there is a desire to use diplomatic tools over military ones. One wing of the Presidential Palace in downtown Port-au- Prince collapsed during the January 2010 earthquake. COURTESYOFTHOMASC.ADAMS