First Kaplan, now Boot wants a Department of Everything Else

OP-ED: "Diplomacy for the real world: Without changes, the State Department isn't ready to meet today's challenges," by Max Boot, Los Angeles Times, 22 February 2006.

Hmm, maybe my little column in the Knoxville News Sentinel has more pull than I realized!

Okay, okay, I put away the delusions of grandeur for a moment ...

Neither Kaplan nor Boot actually call for a Department of Everything Else, my amazingly bold term. Instead, both reference the British Colonial Office, bringing up my always fierce aversion to anything Niall Ferguson!

Okay, okay, I regress ...

Both Kaplan and Boot are historians by nature, so they reach for that paradigm, just like Ferguson, and there's a lot of validity in the comparison--except everything has totally changed in the meantime!

Seriously, the fact that all these big brains come to the same conclusion says something about the inevitability of a Department that does the . . . you know . . . everything else connected with nation-building.

Here's how Boot puts it:

And why not set up a new nation-building department built, perhaps, on the foundation of the Agency for International Development? The new Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization is doing good work, but it is unlikely to get sufficient support from Congress or its own department as long as it's subsumed in a larger bureaucracy.

In any case, the skills needed for nation-building are more akin to those of the old British Colonial Office than to those inculcated by the State Department. We should open up our own version of the Colonial Office at USAID. Instead, the trend seems to be toward more closely integrating USAID into the State Department, repeating the mistake that was made with the USIA.

Don't nod off. Diplomacy may not be sexy stuff, but it is vitally important if we are to deal with looming problems before they turn into a crisis requiring tens of thousands of U.S. troops to fix. We actually need to spend more and hire more people to tackle these issues. The entire international affairs budget — which includes funding not only for the State Department and other agencies but also for foreign aid — is just $35 billion, compared with about $500 billion in defense spending. And the State Department has just 13,000 employees, not enough to fill one Army division.

But before making a bigger commitment to diplomacy and related disciplines, we need to make sure we have the right structure in place to address the challenges of the 21st century.

Hmmm. I'm still feeling pretty shitty, but not so beyond the mainstream as many of my critics would have it.

Grand strategists deal in inevitabilities. You can quote me on that.

Comments

[Brice Timmons]

I've agreed with the inevitability of a DOEE since I first read PNM, however, I'm doubtful that such a thing will happen in the time frame that it should given three factors.

1) Waning domestic support for large-scale foreign policy goals.
2)Empty piggy-bank and a significant likelihood that China will develop a functional banking system within the next few years, reducing their tendency to buy U.S. debt.
3)The percieved ineptitude of DHS, the domestic DOEE, in the wake of Katrina.

I'm concerned that a new department is legislatively infeasable at present, though inevitable in the long run. Perhaps a more workable option is an offshoot of DoD or State with a great deal of autonomy.