Imbalance Injures U.S. Diplomacy

This is about the shortchanging of U.S. diplomacy. The timeworn procedure followed by Congress and the executive branch in financing our foreign relations and national security goals is badly out of kilter and permits serious disproportions in the allocation of funds.

The imbalances are the result of Congress’s fencing off the foreign affairs agencies in the budgetary process from their natural partners in the nation’s global strategies - the Department of Defense and the foreign intelligence community. Our diplomatic arm is not recognized as a national security system as defense and intelligence are when it comes to appropriating money.

American national security is supported and defended by our diplomatic corps, intelligence assets and armed forces. Their interlocking functions make up a system analogous to the meshing of land, sea and air components within the military services. The men and women in diplomatic service are our true front line of defense: They bear the preventive role.

Witness the recent achievement of a cease-fire on the Israel/Lebanon border, which served to steady the fragile peace process, the Dayton agreements among the warring factions of former Yugoslavia, where three American negotiators lost their lives, the agreement whereby North Korea was induced to abandon development of nuclear weapons, and earlier attainment of an indefinite extension of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. All are examples of U.S. global leadership and response to the wishes of the majority of our citizens and many in other lands.

Yet the diplomatic budget is treated as a domestic appropriation, a part of discretionary funding that will remain the essential target for cuts as long as entitlement programs are not touchable and defense/intelligence are protected. The State Department must compete with domestic programs and their single-minded political constituencies. Its budget is linked in the authorization/appropriation process with the departments of Commerce and Justice and the judiciary, and along with small business, law enforcement, prisons, the court system, the war on drugs and other areas separate from national security. The result is to reduce the State Department to competing in a budgetary free-fire zone.

And just this month the House Appropriations Committee piled on an additional $11.1 billion, which the administration had not requested, for defense.

The consequence of the process is not surprising. The international relations budget today is at 49 percent of its Cold War high, while combined defense and intelligence expenditures are at 80 percent. Unlike the Pentagon and our myriad intelligence agencies, the State Department’s operating budget appropriation fell a further 8.5 percent in the last year, and the Congressional Budget Resolution projects still steeper cuts ahead. Among other enforced penalties, the State Department has been forced to close some 35 overseas posts, including embassies.

No one questions the importance of reducing federal expenditures and balancing the federal budget. But there is also the need to maintain and strengthen the instruments that ensure the nation’s security: the military, intelligence and diplomatic capabilities on which that security depends. That reasonable and balanced national investment is required for each of these functions should be self-evident. We support placing our military and foreign intelligence needs behind the wall of a special national security category for budgetary protection. Reason and logic dictate that our diplomatic needs should enjoy the same protection.

Our new international agenda includes access to overseas markets, protection of intellectual property rights, the environment, refugee migrations, drug traffic, terrorism, ethnic warfare, and promotion of democracy and market economies. These are issues that require discussion and negotiation, the building of coalitions among governments. Most of these post-Cold War concerns do not lend themselves to resolution by force of arms or covert action.

Less than one percent of the federal budget goes to the operating costs of our foreign affairs agencies. Diplomacy on the cheap will resolve no budgetary problems. What it will surely do is to weaken our capacity to advance the international interests vital to the country’s security and well-being. Of course, only Congress can amend its own procedures. That objective can be advanced with backing from the president, as was the case in attainment of the line-item veto. Congress and the president should rectify this less sweeping but still irrational budgetary process, which poorly serves the best interest of the nation.

Harrop and McCloskey, former ambassadors, are members of the American Academy of Diplomacy.

The following fields overflowed: BYLINE = William C. Harrop and Robert J. McCloskey For the Washington Post