The Foreign Service Journal, October 2015

64 OCTOBER 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The Barnacles of Foreign Assistance Memoirs of an Agent for Change in International Development: My Flight Path into the 21st Century Ludwig Rudel, Arlington Hall Press, 2014, $17.95, softcover, 340 pages. Reviewed By Maria C. Livingston In a year when the United Nations and its member states are trying to come to agree- ment on a post-2015 development agenda (as a sequel to the U.N. MillenniumDevel- opment Goals, which are due to sunset at the end of this year), Ludwig Rudel’s historical narrative, Memoirs of an Agent for Change in International Development , provides much food for thought. Rudel, whose family fled the Holocaust during WorldWar II, spent nearly 25 years as a Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Agency for International Development, joining in 1954 when the aid organization was known as the International Coopera- tion Agency. His career took him to such far-flung posts as Iran, Turkey, India, Pakistan and Egypt. Writing for his heirs and development professionals alike, Rudel goes back and forth between describing the political and economic events that determined his career path and sharing the intimate and sometimes messy details of his life choices. A son and brother first, Rudel became a husband and father along the way, all while donning his faithful public servant’s hat as he evaluated technical assistance projects, designed export promotion schemes and helpedmanage PL480 grain import programs. Fromdeveloping a lifelong friendship with a contact in the TurkishMinistry of Commerce to dealing with an ailing parent from 8,000 miles away, and frombeing mistaken for a spy to seeking one’s place in expat communities through amateur theater and flight school, Rudel’s memoirs are the substance of real life. Any Foreign Service reader will no doubt relate to and appreciate his commentary on the quirks and perks of the Foreign Service experience. The former economic-assis- tance hand does not pull any punches, either. With the security of more than 30 years between his active-duty days and today, Rudel is particularly vocal in his view that the CIA and BritishMI6 were not behind the 1953 ouster of Iranian Prime Minister MohammadMosaddegh: “The shah had absolute control and power in Iran. He appointedMosaddegh to the position of prime minister in 1951. He then dismissed him in 1953 and remained in power. How can that be described as a coup?” The assertion will certainly ring hollow for many readers—not tomention that it flies in the face of volumes of now-declas- sified government documents andmem- oirs of individuals involved in the coup. But it is not in this type of second-guessing that the book’s merit lies. It is instead Rudel’s account of one especially painful episode—the crush of betrayal when cuts to USAID budgets led to his firing shortly before he was set to retire—that brings the book’s most useful contribution to the dialogue on foreign assistance into focus. Prompted by the euphoria that per- vaded the post–WorldWar II approach to reconstruction in war-scarred Europe, the author jumped on the economic assis- tance bandwagon at a time when the ICA’s mandate was viewed as temporary and when there was a genuine expectation that the agency would work itself out of a job within 10 short years. Rudel waxes nostalgic for the days when U.S. benevolence was broadly supported at home and welcomed by foreign countries and their citizenry. Yet, as his time in the Service wore on, this excitement and expectation would succumb to two unanticipated trends. First, developing coun- tries would come to view foreign aid as an entitlement, rather than a fleeting act of goodwill to facilitate transi- tion to political and economic indepen- dence. Second, untethered public support among Americans and ipso facto congres- sional funding for foreign assistance would plummet as discontent over the Vietnam War increased. Rudel likens the politicization of foreign aid to affixing “barnacles” to USAID’s once-glistening ship. By the 1970s, a more seasoned Rudel finds himself working the United Nations “conference circuit.” In a decidedly cyni- cal turn, the author accuses Group of 77 countries of manipulating the multilateral “development game” to guilt wealthy countries into ever-increasing “resource transfers.” According to Rudel, the Millennium Development Goals—though worthy—are the manifestation of this trend in the new millennium. The reader may be disap- pointed with his completely unviable solution to the problem. The book includes a chapter on Rudel’s moonlighting as a housing developer in rural Pennsylvania. He draws lessons from his time with USAID to navigate the oft-bewildering red tape all through the course of this 30-year business venture. Barely earning enough to break even, Rudel weighs in favor of effective regulation, which he believes is necessary to offset the rise of megabanks and oligopolies that prey on consumers BOOKS