An Anniversary to Remember and Learn From

AMERICAN MEDIA LOVE ANNIVERSARIES, especially if they come in nice, clean multiples of five. But most media missed marking a major milestone a little more than a week ago: the 60 anniversary of the signing of the Foreign Assistance Act, the legislation that set the Marshall Plan into motion.

Maybe that’s because the Act itself, signed by President Harry S Truman on April 3, 1948, followed by nearly a year the famous June 1947 speech — given by none other than Secretary of State George C. Marshall at Harvard commencement ceremonies — that was arguably the galvanizing impetus to the creation of the Marshall Plan.

But the Foreign Assistance Act was the culmination of an intense discourse that led to a national consensus around the idea of using American material resources (backed by military assets) to strengthen allies and, as it would turn out, shape them in the image of American capitalism and democracy.

As Diane Kunz wrote in a June 1997 edition of Foreign Affairs Magazine on the 50th anniversary of Marshall’s speech (okay, so I guess that’s the milestone most point to first): “The Marshall Plan was a limited investment that paid incalculable dividends. A situation favorable to American interests was established in Europe. The aid program raised Western Europe from its knees, launched the American challenge to the Soviet Union, and bolstered the American economy.... When the vital interests of the United States seem to be at stake, the expenditure of American dollars for foreign aid can be amply justified. That was true at the time of the Marshall Plan, and it is still true today.”

Unfortunately, not enough Americans seem to recognize the wisdom of Kunz’s last words, “it is still true today.” Nor has our current administration, which has been all too willing to settle disputes and assert American interests using mostly military power, embraced these words. Unlike America in 1947 and ’48, our current national discourse seems to miss the lesson of the Marshall Plan: that such assistance to others around the world can be an effective way to strengthen ties — cultural, economic and political –- with current and future allies. 

Luckily, there are some smart and influential people who understand how that lesson applies to America’s currently sorry standing in the world. Notably, the Center for Strategic and International Studies over the last year convened a Commission on Smart Power, a collection of major policy makers and statespeople. They looked at ways in which the U.S. might strengthen its image among and ties with the other nations of the world by, as the Commission put it, “providing things that people and governments in all quarters of the world want but cannot attain in the absence of American leadership.”

The “smart power” approach is not a carbon copy of the Marshall Plan, which gave out a total of $12.5 billion to several war-battered Western European countries between April 3, 1948, and June 30, 1951. As the Commission’s November 2007 final report describes, “smart power” tools include:

• “Alliances, partnerships, and institutions: Rebuilding the foundation to deal with global challenges;
• “Global development: Developing a unified approach, starting with public health;
• “Public diplomacy: Improving access to international knowledge and learning;
• “Economic integration: Increasing the benefits of trade for all people;
• “Technology and innovation: Addressing climate change and energy insecurity.”

Some of these approaches involve cash outlays, not necessarily only from the U.S. Treasury but also from private American sources. Some call for a different way of facing the rest of the world (such as engagement through alliances, as well as public diplomacy) and even changing how most Americans carry on our lives (e.g. climate change).

The “smart power” approach (the new-and-improved iteration of the term “soft power,” coined by Joseph S. Nye, Jr., the Harvard government professor who co-chairs the Commission) does not argue that it can or should replace “hard power” — U.S. military might — in world affairs.

Rather, it aims to complement hard power and to “attract people to our side without coercion,” as the Commission’s report puts it. “Legitimacy is central to soft power. If a people or nation believes American objectives to be legitimate, we are more likely to persuade them to follow our lead without using threats and bribes. Legitimacy can also reduce opposition to — and the costs of — using hard power when the situation demands. Appealing to others’ values, interests, and preferences can, in certain circumstances, replace the dependence on carrots and sticks….

“….Militaries are well suited to defeating states,” the report adds, “but they are often poor instruments to fight ideas. Today, victory depends on attracting foreign populations to our side and helping them to build capable, democratic states. Soft power is essential to winning the peace.”

The trouble is that it’s difficult to spread this gospel within the current landscape. Many Members of Congress can speak of the fervor with which many of their constituents castigate them for voting for foreign aid, arguing that all those dollars we send abroad (which usually represent a fraction of a percent of the federal budget) instead of being applied to domestic priorities.

“[I]n general,” the U.S. Agency for International Development states on its Web site, "Americans have never strongly supported economic aid to other countries. For example, three surveys conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations since the end of the Cold War have found that the U.S. public is divided on whether to give economic aid to other countries. In the most recent survey, in line with the previous two, only 13 percent of Americans favored increasing federal spending on foreign economic aid-while 48 percent favored reducing it.”

If anything, the U.S. military has resources that vastly outweigh those that USAID gets. For that reason, in many places around the world our military has in recent years increasingly been the entity that’s put in charge of delivering the kind of assistance that USAID is supposed to. It has to send a bit of a mixed message for even the most compassionate soldier, with an M-16 slung over his shoulder, to represent America as a giving and benevolent country.

Many who espouse the policy of “smart power” will admit that it’s too late and highly unlikely for our current administration to put the approach in place in any effective way. Their hope is that our next president will get a fresh opportunity to use this set of tools in a way that could begin to undo the mess our current administration has made of America’s standing in the world.

But they need a strong public consensus – like the one that emerged around the Marshall Plan 60 years ago — to give them the political cover to deploy what can be a powerful weapon in our foreign policy arsenal.

We shall see.

Jeff

Pictured with President Truman in the photo above (which you can click to enlarge and which comes from the Averell Harriman Papers in the Library of Congress's Manuscript Division) of the signing of the Foreign Assistance Act, are (l to r): Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R—Mich.), Treasury Secretary John Snyder, Representative Charles Eaton (R—N.J.), Senator Tom Connally (D—Tex.), Secretary of the Interior Julius A. Krug, Representative Joseph Martin (R—Mass.), Representative Sol Bloom (D—N.Y.),and Attorney General Tom Clark.

Comments

[rinky]

Hi Jeff