Momentum Builds for Putting Smart Power to Work
On October 14, the USGLC launched its new Putting Smart Power to Work initiative by hosting a dialogue on the State Department’s first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR). The event featured a discussion with Deputy Secretary of State Jacob Lew and QDDR co-chairs Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter and Acting USAID Administrator Alonzo Fulgham, moderated by PBS’s Judy Woodruff. The event offered an opportunity to hear more about the QDDR’s aims and process, as well as to raise questions and concerns.
Over 500 people in Washington, DC were joined by hundreds from around the country watching via live web stream for the opening session, which began with remarks by Deputy Secretary of State Lew, in which he said, “We’re going to give civilians the tools to do what they do best, and let the military get back to doing what it does best.”
In the discussion among the QDDR co-chairs, the speakers emphasized their commitment to strengthening U.S. development and diplomacy capabilities and making ‘smart power’ a reality. Topics discussed included the future of USAID, with Slaughter saying, “The vision the secretary has coming out of the QDDR is of a much stronger, much better resourced AID . . . so we look at this in terms of development enhancing our diplomacy but diplomacy also enhancing our development. ” Highlighting efforts to rebalance the relationship with the military, Lew said, “We have been working over the past half a year with the Defense Department going through authority by authority trying to sort it out in a way that makes sense based on a logical construct of what each of us should be doing. It’s going quite well.” Fulgham discussed foreign assistance reform, saying, “I think that for the first time, we have a review process that gives us an opportunity to address the stovepiping and redundancy that we’re currently going through within our agency.”
Following the opening plenary, participants gathered in five working groups corresponding to sub-groups organized by the QDDR to carry out the review:
1. Building Operational and Resource Platforms for Success;
2. Building a Global Architecture of Cooperation;
3. Investing in the Building Block of Stronger Societies;
4. Preventing and Responding to Crises and Conflicts; and
5. Leading and Supporting Whole of Government Solutions.
In each session, QDDR staff, Hill staff, and leaders from the development, business, and faith communities tackled the issues faced by the QDDR staff, discussing past successes, current challenges, and visions of how development and diplomacy should operate in the future. In the concluding session, a summary of findings from each working group was presented with closing remarks from Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Maria Otero.
Speakers and participants emphasized this was the beginning of an ongoing dialogue as the review continues in the coming months. USGLC will continue to seek ways to engage diverse voices to contribute to an effort critical for strengthening and modernizing the development and diplomacy capabilities the U.S. needs to restore its global leadership.
Congratulations to USGLC for hosting this event. Regrettably, by combining diplomacy and development in one QR, the effect is the further diminution of a long-term development perspective within the USG, and the further deterioration of USAID, or a replacement development entity, as a USG center of excellence on long-term human progress. There should be a Diplomacy QDR and a Development QDR, with President Obama and his national security team ultimately balancing the resources allocated to the three national QDRs.
If anyone has any doubt that the development voice will be lost in a combined QDDR, one has only to look at how the long-term change perspective has suffered in the State-led “F” budget process over the past three years. Or, one has only to look at who is sitting with President Obama, as we “speak,” to discuss Afghanistan policy. Despite the fact that the conflict issues in Afghanistan are profoundly — one might argue essentially — developmental in nature (joblessness, extraordinary isolation and poverty, illiteracy, feudalism, absence of governance), neither the NSC nor the QDDR team at State has accorded the nation’s development agency even a back row seat at the White House Situation Room
As much as I would like to think otherwise, we can expect more of this diminution of long-term development thinking in any combined QDDR process.