The Foreign Service Journal, January 2010

J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 53 The Business of Governing One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy Allison Stanger, Yale University Press, 2009, $29, hardcover, 242 pages. R EVIEWED BY P ETER F. S PALDING Thomas Friedman recently sug- gested in his New York Times column that as Americans debate new troop levels in Afghanistan, they would be wise to consider the extent to which we already outsource jobs that the State Department and other agencies once did on their own. He went on to rec- ommend this book. Allison Stanger, director of the Ro- hatyn Center for International Affairs at Middlebury College, has given us a timely, thought-provoking examination of the transformative effect outsourc- ing has had on the conduct of Ameri- can foreign policy. She writes, “Knock on the door of the federal government in 2009, and chances are that you will find nobody home. The U.S. govern- ment’s impulse to exploit the compar- ative advantage of the private sector, and the private sector’s responsiveness to the demand for its services, have combined to replace big government with a staggeringly large shadow gov- ernment. In this new world, the pri- vate sector increasingly handles the everyday business of governing.” The book devotes chapters to the impact of outsourcing on the so-called “three Ds” of government: diplomacy, defense and development. The titles aptly reflect the tenor of her argu- ments: The discussion of State is titled “The End of Statesmanship.” For the Pentagon, the headline is “The Priva- tization of Defense.” And the chap- ter about the U.S. Agency for Inter- national Development mourns “The Slow Death of USAID.” (Another chapter, “Laissez-Faire Homeland Se- curity,” is a fierce indictment of DHS’s record to date.) As Stanger documents, 83 percent of State’s budget in Fiscal Year 2008, and 82 percent of the Pentagon bud- get, were outsourced as contracts and grants. The hands that open the flood gates to contractors are often found in Congress, because so many private- sector entities have their headquarters in various congressional districts. To take just one example: LockheedMar- tin gets more federal money each year than the Department of Justice or En- ergy. Some of her fixes for the pitfalls caused by the privatization of foreign policy are simplistic, such as a unified national security budget that would in- clude defense, diplomacy and home- land security. Her overriding recom- mendation, however, is well worth pur- suing: complete transparency in all government financial transactions, es- pecially those involving the private sec- tor. Toward that end, Stanger recom- mends the Web site USAspending.gov (the result of legislation sponsored by Senators Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla.), which tracks all government spending, including contracts, though it remains very much a work in progress. Stanger sums up: “What we need is capitalism with a human face, [which] is about fairness and choice, not privi- lege and coercion. But we will never have capitalism with a human face while laissez-faire government outsourc- ing drives our foreign policy. Unless government provides the appropriate incentives, business will always choose short-term profitability over the com- mon good. And so long as their re- election demands perpetual fund- raising, our elected officials will always Stanger calls for retrieving “the conduct of international affairs from the grasp of the private sector.” B OOKS