Foreign Affairs for the 21st Century
by William P. Kiehl, Ed. D.,
Editor of American Diplomacy

The Past is Prologue
A little more than 60 years ago foresighted American leaders devised a national security structure for the post-World War II 20th Century. In the 1980s, another group of foresighted American leaders devised a way to create a more efficient and effective defense structure for our national security. Additional changes to create a Department of Homeland Security and to coordinate the intelligence community came after 9-11. Now the time has come for the current generation of foresighted American leaders to match these efforts in the realm of foreign affairs.

With the passage of the National Security Act in 1947, the United States positioned itself for the post-WWII world on a new and innovative structure(1). That structure created many of the institutions that still serve us today: The Department of Defense (DoD) merging the War and Navy Departments, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Council (NSC) and the NSC process of inter-agency consultation and cooperation. By the 1980s it was clear that the service rivalries and bureaucratic infighting in the Defense Department was reducing military effectiveness and wasting enormous sums of money through redundancies and inefficiencies. The solution--the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act--was a masterstroke that over time created "joint-ness", a "purple" or integrated military without destroying the individual services that have served the nation so well over two centuries(2). While no one would deny that there remain huge inefficiencies and waste in this enormous bureaucracy, it is generally considered that DoD is infinitely better positioned for the 21st century than the civilian side of the United States Government.

In the aftermath of the tragedy of 9-11, American leaders searched for the cause of the failure to stop a terrorist attack on American soil and found it in the turf-wars and bureaucratic ossification among our intelligence and law enforcement agencies and many of those entities became today’s Department of Homeland Security (3). The intelligence community too was reorganized and the Director of Central Intelligence function was split from the CIA Directorship(4) with the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It is too soon to tell if these were masterstrokes or merely stages in the evolution of these functions.

A Growing Problem
The only significant part of the national security structure of the U.S. Government that has not changed in any serious way is that of foreign affairs. With the ill-served consolidation of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency into the Department of State and the weakening of the Agency for International Development (USAID) as a viable voice in foreign policy debate, the Department of State emerged from the 20th century a weaker, less relevant and more ambiguous partner of the Department of Defense and other agencies of national security. This led to the gradual but inexorable accumulation of civilian duties to the military—public diplomacy, foreign assistance and nation building in particular.

While the Departments of State and Defense were able to keep within their lanes with a relatively clear demarcation of responsibilities during the period of the Cold War, in the post-Cold War era this delineation has become blurred. Even more problematic has been the large and growing imbalance in funding dedicated to military vs. civilian international responsibilities and national security. In large measure the drift of public diplomacy (strategic communication), foreign assistance (civil-military affairs) from the civilian world of the State Department and USAID to the military world of the uniformed services and various DoD contractors is the result of this funding imbalance.

This situation has become untenable and thus it is time for a reappraisal and reassessment of the whole structure of foreign affairs just as Goldwater-Nichols served for the whole structure of national defense.