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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2005-01-07

Foreign Policy Thoughts

Two interesting essays in the January/February issue of Foreign Policy Magazine caught my eye today.

The first is a well-written and thorough defense of the Bush Administration's long-term view of the world and our role in shaping it by none other than . . . outgoing SecState Colin Powell. For a man who frequently draws the ire of conservatives, Powell has, on a number of occassions, really spoken forcefully in defense of the President.

This essay is not an apologetics exercise--it is a statement of reality. Early on, Powell makes it clear that he and the administration are on completely the same page with the wide-angle lens:

As the first George W. Bush administration moved toward its conclusion, many people asked me to sum up the president’s foreign-policy record of the last four years. Almost invariably, their questions focused on September 11 and the war on terrorism, developments in Iraq and Afghanistan, the state of trans-Atlantic relations, or the difficulties of the intelligence craft. Almost invariably, my answers have keyed on distinguishing between issues such as these that tend to dominate the headlines, and issues of equal or greater long-term strategic significance that rarely generate as much interest.

Among these latter issues, none is more important than economic development in the world’s poorest societies. As the president wrote in the National Security Strategy in September 2002, “A world where some live in comfort and plenty, while half of the human race lives on less than $2 a day, is neither just nor stable.” No issue has consumed more of the administration’s concern and energy. And now that George W. Bush has a mandate for a second term, he intends to pursue his goals for economic development with the same determination that made possible the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan. . .

We have come to understand that development assistance does not work well when it is conceived and pursued as a narrow economic exercise. . .

The first George W. Bush administration took these lessons to heart. We see development, democracy, and security as inextricably linked. We recognize that poverty alleviation cannot succeed without sustained economic growth, which requires that policymakers take seriously the challenge of good governance.

This is a remarkable statement from the man who has been the face of American foreign policy for the last four years. And it is no wonder that the U.N. and the State Department in general--two organizations that crave above all else stability--would not appreciate this administration. This statement by Powell is a gauntlet to despots and the bureaucrats who support them, challenging them to recognize that their own failures of leadership are the root cause of the suffering of their people, NOT U.S. supremacy in the world.

Development is not a “soft” policy issue, but a core national security issue. Although we see a link between terrorism and poverty, we do not believe that poverty directly causes terrorism. Few terrorists are poor. The leaders of the September 11 group were all well-educated men, far from the bottom rungs of their societies.

This is not a new point, but it is one that I have not heard any foreign policy "experts" make so forcefully. And it tees up the next phrase exceedingly well:

The connection between poverty and the absence of freedom is not an incidental one. Although resource endowments shape development, poverty is not inevitable in countries that possess few natural resources. After all, Holland and Venice in days gone by, and Singapore and Israel today, are small territories without significant natural resources—but they have not suffered from poverty and powerlessness.

The root cause of poverty is social injustice and the bad government that abets it. Poverty arises and persists where corruption is endemic and enterprise is stifled, where basic fairness provided by the rule of law is absent.

This is an especially important statement in light of our efforts at transforming the Middle East. It's easy to take the humanitarian view that regime change often leads to fewer state-sanctioned murders; it's far more important to see regime changes as essential to the expansion of human rights, human dignity and improvements in basic living conditions.

This is where I think the left is, perhaps, most wrong (though there's a lot of areas that compete for that title). Seeing the world as a divide between the haves and the have-nots, and pressing the noblesse oblige in the form of foreign aid, expecting that that alone will solve our image problem, is a naive--and dangerously so--way of looking at the world. It is not enough to contain and prop up horrible governments, as the US has done before all around the world. That approach has earned us only contempt, and our charity is greeted with only scorn. What the peoples of the world really need for us to do is exert our power to move the cause of Freedom into neighborhoods near them. Poweel even makes that point, though more eloquently:

If economic aid to developing countries is to succeed, it must be part of an incentive system for good governance. Foreign aid that succeeds is foreign aid that makes itself obsolete. If a country needs aid year after year, decade after decade, it will develop a dependency on outside assistance.

Indeed, foreign aid to undemocratic regimes can be counterproductive in that it increases the longevity of the ruling autocracy by making it easier for despots to keep their small clique of supporters happy. Foreign aid will not make a real difference if markets are manipulated by autocrats who control access to credit, licenses, and jobs. Foreign aid will not generate growth if sound banking institutions cannot arise, because transparency exposes nepotism and other forms of corruption.

This is only a small sample of the essay. I encourage you to read it and give it some thought--especially people who are critical of either Powell as too soft, or of the Bush Administration as too hawkish. Neither are quite true, and it is quite clear that the team has a unified vision:

The United States cannot win the war on terrorism unless we confront the social and political roots of poverty. We want to bring people to justice if they commit acts of terrorism, but we also want to bring justice to people. We want to help others achieve representative government that provides opportunity and fairness. We want to unshackle the human spirit so that entrepreneurship, investment, and trade can flourish. This goal is the indispensable social and political precondition for sustainable development; it is the means by which we will uproot the social support structures of terrorism.
Posted by: Michael / 1/07/2005 01:25:00 AM

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