GLENN BAKER: How does preventive diplomacy differ from traditional diplomacy?
BRIAN ATWOOD: Well, I think preventive diplomacy requires one to have
early
warning systems in place. It requires one to see the beginnings of a crisis.
It requires one to
understand the kinds of pressures that bring about crisis. And it requires
action before some of
these stories get on the front page of the newspaper. So, there's an
entirely different orientation
that one has.
It isn't brinksmanship. It isn't sort of pulling forces as we did
during the Cold War and
using deterrent strategies and the like of a military nature, it is more
attempting to try to reconcile
within societies. There's an awful lot of internal as opposed to
cross-border activity that is
involved.
It's obvious that in the old days and today that if you have a
cross-border war,
you're going to get international arbitration and involvement in diplomacy.
A lot of the crises that
we see and the dealings that we have in the preventive diplomacy rubric
are internal to - inside the sovereign borders of countries.
BAKER: What factors are now seen as the most telltale early warning signs of conflict?
ATWOOD: Well, I think you see a number of factors. Obviously, weak governance and individuals who take an extreme view of politics in countries are the single most threatening factor. The question really is what other factors increase their influence within a society. Extreme poverty does. The urbanization problem, where millions of people are coming to cities, leaving rural areas. Rapid population growth, where countries double and triple their populations within a decade. All of these pressures, it seems to me, arm the extremists with what they need to influence the situation inside a country. And so, you have to deal with all of these matters if you're going to have a successful preventive diplomacy strategy.
BAKER: There are critics of such early warning systems that claim that they're overly broad and vague about the time in which a conflict might occur, you know, five years, ten years, next month. And they claim that, thereby, it paralyzes policymakers by presenting them with two large a list of potential crisis states, that perhaps you could count two-thirds of the states in Africa as fitting the criteria of on the brink of some conflict. How do you respond to that critique?
ATWOOD: I think it's valid. I think that we still have not developed
early warning
systems within our government that will call to the attention of policymakers
serious problems in a
timely manner and that we tend to either have too many that we're putting
forth before people or
we're not putting enough before people and getting to these issues so enough.
So, I think that we've got to look at early warning systems in a variety
of ways, not
simply what our intelligence community, for example, advises the policymakers
within our
government, but also what people in the region are being told. Regional
mobilizations are
extremely important. Communications among leaders in a region is important
and they ought to have the means to communicate. In many of these poor
countries, they don't have that means.
We've tried to introduce Internet into the foreign affairs agencies of
various countries in
East Africa, as well as the development ministries, in order to cause them
to communicate. I think
the biggest conflicts occur, the most conflicts, I should say, occur in
countries where they're
terribly poor and they've got famine problems and all sorts of other things.
So, I think if they can
communicate, that is the best kind of early warning system to put in place.
BAKER: We see that graphic media images of war or manmade disasters are often what it takes to spur action in the West to respond. How do you generate support for preventive action designed to prevent such disasters in the absence of those images?
ATWOOD: It is a problem and I think that intelligent governments and
leadership at an
international scale is what is needed here. You have a very hard time
getting peoples' attention if
something isn't on the front pages of the newspaper or on television. I
think it's extremely important that we have a much more intelligent approach
to the world because we can't
wait and react when these situations blow up. They become very intractable
at that point. It becomes extremely difficult when you have two irrational
forces that are on both sides of a civil
war, as, for example, you do in the case of Burundi. So, you've got to get
out, way out ahead of
these kinds of situations.
I'll give you one example of an area of the world where we have had a
great deal of
success in dealing with a kind of nascent and then real conflict, but it
wasn't the
kind of conflict that boiled over, it was the kind of conflict that simmered
along for many years,
and that is in the southern Philippines region of Mindanao.
There, because we were concerned about the threat of the Muslim
extremists, in that case,
to the government of the Philippines and because we had strategic interests
during the Cold War in
the Philippines, we invested a great deal of foreign aid money into the
Mindanao region. We built
airports, we built fishing ports, we built 180 kilometers of roads, we
helped set up new businesses
all over the region, and economic growth is now really booming and there are
towns they call
boom towns, like General Santos City in Mindanao that I visited last week.
The best possible way to deal with conflict is to to get out ahead of it,
as we did in the
case of Mindanao and invest money. Now we've brought in the other donors.
We have encouraged other donors to come into that region. Now the
government of the Philippines is on
the verge of negotiating an arrangement with the Muslim extremists. It's
somewhat
controversial and there's debate over in the Philippines, but the fact of
the matter is that
development has brought peace and they're on the verge of a peace
settlement. I think that's the
kind of crisis prevention that ought to be exercised.
BAKER: There are those that argue that even when policymakers are presented with overwhelming early warning signs of conflict that governments are slow to take effective preventive action. Rwanda is the case and point. How do you go about mobilizing government resolve to act decisively before conflict erupts when all signs indicate that it's coming?
ATWOOD: Well, In the case of Rwanda, the international community was
engaged.
We had a UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda. We had the Urusha Accords, which
put
certain requirements on the government. What we apparently didn't recognize
was the volatility of
the situation. It was a tinder box. And when the president's plane was
shot down, the presidents
of Burundi and Rwanda, it caused a genocide.
I don't know that we had sufficient assets in the country, either the
United Nations or the
United States, to know that a very intricate plan was underway
to commit
genocide. It certainly was a very extensive genocide. It had to be planned
to some extent,
although it sort of took off after it began. Then obviously, the UN force
was overwhelmed
by the situation. There were only about 1500 troops there.
I think the international community had, in the outlines of what it was
doing in
Rwanda, approached it appropriately, but without sufficient resources.
And the volatility of the
situation I think was attributable not only to the nefarious characters
that brought that plane down
and plotted the genocide, but also because of the many other pressures
that existed within that
society that made it easy for them to prey upon the society as a whole.
In other words, the extremists were able to take advantage of the
extreme poverty, the
over-population. It was the densest population in all of Africa.
The environmental problems, the
land tenure problems, all of the development problems became then an excuse
for genocide. So,
the question really is whether the international community, in the ten years
, you know, preceding
the genocide had made the investments necessary to prevent a failed state.
BAKER: Today, we see right next door, Burundi, as you mentioned, having similar ethnic make-up and there has been some concerns expressed that it could go the way of Rwanda. Considering the relatively small amount and getting smaller of money that the US can give to foreign aid and the massive amount of resources that are needed to bolster imploding societies like Burundi, is it likely that AID will choose to invest heavily in countries that are already deeply at risk of war?
ATWOOD: Well, we do have reduced resources, but what's important to note here is that the United States as the remaining superpower has more influence in situations like this than any other country. So, even with fewer resources, we can still influence other donors in other countries to get involved. But if we have none, no resources, and we simply refuse to put any money on the table, we're going to find that we've lost our leadership capacity. We're not suggesting to the American people that they should bear the entire burden of conflict, of prevention, what we're suggesting is that we need adequate resources to be involved and to be at the table and to discuss the possible solutions to a problem like the Burundi problem.
BAKER: Is it sometimes seen as necessary to not waste resources on countries that may be perceived as basket cases and instead of invest in regions where progress seems more likely?
ATWOOD: We have invested some resources in the Horn, the Greater Horn
area of East Africa. It is probably the poorest area in the world, but we
are
pouring resources into that
area for humanitarian causes, for relief of humanitarian problems because
that area is a
chronic drought area and there's a famine every ten years. People may
remember, in 1985, we
poured millions of government money and voluntary contributions into
Ethiopia when there was a
tremendous famine there.
What we've tried to do is to get the international community, in the
case of the Greater
Horn area, which is about ten countries in that region of East Africa, to
think differently about
what they do. Because we'll keep pouring more and more money into that for humanitarian relief
if we don't get the, for example, to improve their own agricultural
production, if we don't get the
countries of the region to trade with one another, so that some of the areas
that can grow crops will
sell to the areas that can't because of drought, if we don't get them to
communicate with one
another, to come together to talk about the development of the region.
Now you still may have one country in that region, in the case of
region, obviously,
Rwanda and Burundi are the worst, but that will fall out, but the chances
are better of
dealing with crisis prevention if you can get the regional leaders to deal
with it on a regional basis.
So, that's what we've tried. That's President Clinton's Greater Horn
Initiative. The rest of the
world has followed suit. We are now looking at a continuum.
We're looking at relief, recovery and development, long-term development
and looking at
the relationship of what we do in each of those areas to the other areas.
That hasn't been done
before, it's all been compartmentalized. We pour food in. We don't know
what the Europeans do,
they don't know what we do. We're spending more money than we have to spend.
We're not
putting enough development money into the recovery side to get, for example,
soldiers
decommissioned and working again.
We don't look at the agricultural sector in a way that would help them
increase their pro --
productivity and feeding themselves, as opposed to being on the dole, on the
international dole.
So, these are the kinds of things we're doing in a very new way of looking
at the Greater Horn
area. That's the poorest area in the world and there are going to be
conflicts. There will be
famines.
But I think when we use the devices that are available to us nowadays
-- satellites.
We're looking at the terrain to see exactly where the drought areas are
coming. We can look at the
effect of the El Nino currents in South America, off the coast of South
America to see what the
effect of weather will be in regions like that and we can predict better.
We're using the Internet, so that the regional leaders can communicate
with one
another and they can have access to information that will be vital to them
in terms of development.
So, technological advances are also going to, I think, to help us with
crisis prevention and
preventive diplomacy in the future.
BAKER: There are those that claim that preventive action is simply a popular buzz word that will soon pass the way of Pet Rocks and hula hoops and that others claim that it's an alternative strategy that's gaining acceptance. What do you see is the future of preventive diplomacy?
ATWOOD: I mean, we can stand back and criticize preventive diplomacy and
we can
point out its weaknesses or whatever, but we really have no choice. In a
world that is growing as
fast as this world is growing, where forces have been unleashed as a result
of the end of the Cold
War, ethnic tensions, and the like. We're going to be seeing two billion
more people in the next
20 years on the face of the earth. We have no choice but to try to find
mechanisms to deal
with the impending chaos in any given country or globally.
If we don't do it, it's going to disrupt the global economy. It's going
to mean that we won't
see the growth that we want for our own economy. It's going to mean that
diseases that we
thought had been beaten or new diseases that we never really understood,
like AIDS and ebola
virus and the like are going to be affecting our people. We can no longer
close our doors to
the developing world. So, we have to have a program. It seems to me we
can't do it alone.
No one is asking the American people to bear that burden alone, but
we're asking
for an effective United Nations, an effective international financial system.
We're looking for
effective leadership in development, something the United States has always
had. And that goes
hand in glove with effective diplomacy.
Diplomacy, no matter how effective, can't handle the problem after
the top has
blown off a country because you're dealing, as we have seen in places like
Somalia, where there
still is not a sitting government, and places like Bosnia, where it was
extremely difficult because of
the intractability of the forces on all sides to finally bring a settlement.
I think that was an
ingenious settlement led by the United States, but nonetheless, we have to
make it stick now.
These situations become extraordinarily difficult if we let them get to
the point of boiling
over. If we don't deal with them up front, then we're not going to have a
viable foreign policy, and
I think that idea is catching on. I think that it's logical, it's common
sense. I don't see any other
way to approach the world. And since the United States has vast interests
in this world. We must
have a policy that works. We must use the new technology. We must use the
new diplomacy and
we must use international organizations to try to bring some structure, some
form to this world, so
that everyone is practicing preventive diplomacy in the same essentially
manner, not just the
United States. But if we don't lead, it won't happen.
BAKER: Let's look at foreign aid specifically. Today, we see foreign aid under seige on Capitol Hill and at the same time, we see the US military, which receives approximately $265 billion a year, increasing involved in costly post-conflict relief or interventionary roles. In the long run, does cutting foreign aid make financial or political sense?
ATWOOD: No, and, ironically, Secretary Perry and General Shalikashvili
of the staff of the Joint Chiefs said the same thing. We can no longer use
the military...We should not be using the military as a first resort, we
should be using them as a last
resort. But increasingly, because internationally that's the only resources
we have, we're finding
the military in places where they don't want to be. They didn't want to be
in Rwanda helping
refugees after. They did a very good job of it, but we could have prevented
that from happening if
we had more resources. So, I think it's very shortsighted to cut our
foreign aid budget.
It relates also to our interest in competing more effectively in the
global economy, both
from the perspective of failed states and refugee flows and environmental
disasters disrupting the
global economy and inhibiting its growth, but it's also an opportunity for
us to create
economic growth, which will obviously be of advantage to our business and
to our economy.
Now 26 percent of our economy is tied into the global economy. That's
very low compared
to other industrial nations, but it's doubled in the last decade. And
consequently, it seems to me,
that we're realizing as each year goes by the stake we have in trying to
make sure that economic
growth continues. We've taken great advantage through our foreign aid
program in encouraging
economic growth to go from, in 1946, $2.3 trillion to $23.4 trillion today.
That growth is attributable, in part, in large part, to development
exercises that have gone
on. And when four out of five people live in the developing world, clearly
that's where the
consumers are, and poor people can't buy American products. So, we have a
real interest, it seems
to me, in having a foreign aid program that works.
BAKER: So, foreign aid is related to jobs?
ATWOOD: It's related to jobs here, it's related to health here, it's related to environment here. It's related to global stability and our foreign policy. It's related to preventive diplomacy. It's related, yes, to all of those things. It's related to our effort to stabilize world population growth, but we hope to do that by the year 2050. But when you see a billion more people every decade added to the face of the year, about 90 to 100 million people, that's the size of the country of Mexico, every year, you've got to deal with that. It will be unmanageable if we do not have a foreign aid program in our arsenal.
BAKER: During the Cold War, foreign aid usually played a political role in the superpower competition for influence in what we then called the Third World. How is foreign aid being retooled today to make it more effective in promoting American national interests?
ATWOOD: Well, the Cold War placed a great burden on the development
mission
because we were forced for political considerations to work with governments
that were not good
development partners. We're no longer forced to do that. We don't have to
work with Zaire, for
example, where Mobutu has acknowledged putting a lot of that money back into
Swiss bank accounts. We don't have to do that any longer. We can work with
non-governmental
organizations, which the network of which is extensive around the world
today, and we can
work with governments that are good development partners that allow us
access to their people.
Because development doesn't work if people can't participate in it.
So, now that the Cold War is over, we can do effective development work
as never before.
And we're, as a consequence, not working in a lot of countries that are not
good development
partners. That's the biggest change.
BAKER: Can you give an example of what you would consider an effective program today that might not have taken place 15 years ago?
ATWOOD: An effective program today. I mean, we have a lot of effective
programs
today because what we're trying to do today is to hold our people
accountable for results. But -- I'll
give you an example.
I've just come from Indonesia. We have an extensive family planning
program in
Indonesia and the Indonesian government is constantly going on television
and explaining to
people why this is important to them and to their lives. This program
works probably better than any family planning program in the world.
We don't have to worry that the Indonesian people will see us in
Indonesia as having an
ulterior motive. They know that our motive is to help the Indonesian
people achieve economic
growth and control the size of their population. The per capita income
of Indonesia soars as a
result of their ability to control population growth, as well as to
achieve economic growth.
In the old days of the Cold War, I'm sure a lot of Indonesians would
have been somewhat
concerned that the American foreign aid agency was there to try to make
sure they stayed on
the right side of the column in the East-West struggle.
BAKER: One thing we haven't gone into in great detail is the increasing budget cuts. Very simply, how are budget cuts impacting USAID programs today?
ATWOOD: Well, I'm deeply worried that we're losing our institutional
capacity to
continue our leadership role in development. We've just had a
reduction-in-force of 200 direct-hire Americans. We have reduced more
people in this agency than any other agency save one in
government. These are development professionals. They're scientists,
they're environmentalists,
they're economists, they're agricultural specialists, and I'm worry that
we're going to be
losing our institutional capacity.
We had a close to one billion dollar cut in our budget last year, most
of that affecting the
developing world. It didn't affect our Middle East programs or our former
Soviet Union programs
as much as it did Africa, Latin America and Asia. So, we're losing our
edge. We're having to
close some 27 missions around the world. I think in many cases, we
wouldn't want to be there
because the government isn't a good partner, but in other cases we would
probably be there for at
least another decade, but we're being forced to leave early.
What that means is that other governments -- the Japanese, the French,
the Germans, all of
whom now give more aid than we do in absolute terms, as a percentage of our
GNP, we are absolutely last among the industrial countries.
It's .10 percent now of our GNP.
Among the industrial nations, we are absolutely last as a percentage of
our gross national
product. Countries like Denmark provide $900 per taxpaying family to
foreign aid. The United
States is now under $30 per taxpaying family. In other words, about the
size of a -- of a -- a nice
healthy lunch at McDonald's. This is what we give each year for foreign
aid. Now that, it seems
to me, is not advancing our interests.
It is not understanding the role that our economy plays in the global
economy. It's not understanding the need to be competitive. It's not
understanding our need to
deal with threats to our interests, health, and environmental, and
population and the like. It's a
very narrow view of the world. Now I understand there's a need to balance
our budget, but you
also have to make investments in the future if you're going to see that
budget being balanced.
Because it's investments in the global economy that are going to bring the
revenues that will help
us balance the budget. So, I think we've been fairly shortsighted in that
regard and I regret very
much the congressional budget cuts that have been made.
BAKER: Simply, is foreign aid pouring money down a rat hole?
ATWOOD: No. And I think that the successes that we've had in the
foreign aid program
with other countries over the last 50 years is rather phenomenal. I mean,
we've seen infant
mortality reduced by half in the world. We've seen the average age of the
world's citizens go from
42 to 62. We've seen clean water now available to 75 percent more people. We've seen economic
growth soar from, as I mentioned before, about 2.3 trillion to 23.4 trillion.
All of this is the result of educating people, making sure that they're
healthy, making sure
that they get their macro-economic and micro-economic policies correct,
making sure that they
understand the principles of market economics and democracy and democratic
institutions. All of these things have made for a more stable world.
Foreign aid has succeeded.
We have had instances in the past, during the
Cold War, where we have not
focussed on the development aspect of the mission, but rather on the
political aspect, and we've
put money into countries where we couldn't have expected to succeed:
The Zaires of
the world, where the per capita income has gone down from something like
$1800 down to less
than $200 today. It's been frittered away by bad policies within the
government of Zaire.
And we don't work with Zaire any longer and most donors don't because you
can't work with
partners that don't care about the development of their own country. So,
that is over. But
when there are references to fraud, mismanagement, abuse or whatever, it's
usually because of the
political motivation behind the foreign aid program. Obviously, there were
problems of
management, too, and I think we're corrected most of those problems in
recent years. So, I don't
believe that foreign aid has been a bad investment at all, it's been a
tremendous investment for the
American people.
BAKER: What about in terms of its economic impact here at home? When people say how does it affect me? When a foreign aid, a foreign aid dollar is spent, where does it go?
ATWOOD: Well, it goes into the part of the world which has now four
out of five people
living there, the developing world. You're talking about emerging markets.
To give you an
example, I mean we spent $16 billion in the 50s and 60s in Korea. We helped
Korea get its
economy on its feet. We helped them with health care and education and the
like. Now we trade,
we export $32 billion worth of goods every year to Korea. That's a
tremendous return on our
investment.
In the case of Latin America, where we invested billions of dollars in
foreign aid over the
years, we now trade with Latin America, we send exports, $108 billion last
year of exports went to
Latin America alone. So, we're getting a tremendous return. Now for every
dollar we invest, for
example, in agricultural research, we get a return of four dollars in terms
of increased yield for
American farmers. The same is true of investing in agricultural production
overseas.
As we improve the lives of people, they look to the United States for a
higher level of import, agricultural imports for the most part. Every
one out of every four acres of American agricultural land is in the export
sector. So, it helps our
farmers, it helps our people, it helps our economy. There is no question
that as we engage in the
global economy more and more every year, now 26 percent of our GNP is in
the -- in the export-import sector, we really are more dependent than ever
before on making sure that economic
growth continues in the developing world, where most of the people live.
So, it's an investment in
the future and it brings a tremendous return.
BAKER: It seems that foreign aid has a PR problem with the American people, that it has certain stigmas attached to it. How does one go about addressing that and changing the public's attitudes about foreign aid in their sort of concretized, old notions of it?
ATWOOD: The American people seem to feel that we spend a lot more money
on
foreign aid that we actually do. Polls indicated that they believe that
it's something like 15 to 20 percent of our national budget goes to foreign
aid. Now my belief is the American
people are never wrong, so why is it that they're confused about this matter,
because it's only one-half of one percent of our budget goes to foreign aid.
Well, they're mixing all international spending together. And when you
consider the $270
billion military budget and the other budgets within the international
affairs field, you do get up to
close to 15 percent or 20 percent of our national budget. That's why I
think they feel that way.
But as we look at a different world with fewer threats from communism and
the like and as we
begin to downsize our military, we're downsizing our foreign aid and our
diplomacy budgets even
more. And that's very dangerous because we're going to end up being the
world's policeman, we're going to end up providing a security umbrella to
our economic
competitors: the Japanese, the French, the Germans, and they're spending
more and
more money on foreign aid, getting out there, making the contacts, helping
to encourage economic
growth that will come back mainly to their businesses as opposed to ours.
Now there's nothing wrong with that kind of competition, but we're
losing right now. As
the country that's rated last among all of the industrial nations in terms
of percentage of our gross
national product, we're simply not putting our best foot forward in the
global economy.
[End of interview.]
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