CSIS: U.S. Needs Shift To ‘Smart Power’

Okay, the US gets rid of Condi, and THEN starts funding the State Department properly ..? Yeah, right. Right when the US goes totally, unequivocably broke? Give me a BREAK.

By JOHN T. BENNETT

The U.S., which too often turns to its military and economic strength to solve global conundrums, must increase its use of “smart power” foreign-policy tools by pouring money into the alliances and institutions that will improve America’s influence and legitimacy worldwide, a new think tank report says.

U.S. officials have too often used the military, which “tends to fill every void, even those that civilian instruments should fill,” according to the Nov. 7 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report, compiled by a panel of current and former lawmakers and former national security officials. “There are limits to what hard power can achieve.”

Instead, the U.S. should cultivate “smart power”, an “integrated strategy, resource base and tool kit to achieve American objectives, drawing on both hard and soft power.” Washington must continue to have a strong military, but federal officials must spend “heavily in alliances, partnerships and institutions at all levels to expand American influence and establish the legitimacy of American action,” the report says.

“We don’t do that well right now,” CSIS President and CEO John Hamre, a former deputy defense secretary, said during a Nov. 6 briefing.

Since al-Qaida struck U.S. targets in 2001, Washington “has been exporting fear and anger,” said panel co-chair Richard Armitage, deputy undersecretary of State during President George W. Bush’s first term. Smart power would allow the country to “get back to exporting hope,” Armitage said.

Armitage’s fellow co-chair was Joseph Nye, a former senior Pentagon and State Department official. The panel also featured a number of longtime Washington officials, including Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., a House Appropriations Committee member; Anthony Zinni, a retired Marine Corps general and former U.S. Central Command chief; Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, a House Armed Services Committee member; and former Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker, R-Kan.

Several of them called on officials and lawmakers to inflate the State Department’s annual budget, echoing the CSIS study’s conclusion that federal agencies that specialize in diplomacy and promoting overseas development often get too little federal funding.

They also stressed the need for America to promote “the global good,” a sentiment sprinkled throughout the report.

“The United States must become a smarter power by once again investing in the global good — providing things people and governments in all quarters of the world want but cannot attain in the absence of American leadership,” the study said.

“By complementing U.S. military and economic might with greater investments in soft power, America can build the framework it needs to tackle tough global challenges.”

To move away from the group’s perceived over-reliance on hard-power tools, the report said the next president would be wise to take a number of steps, including:

• Creating a Cabinet-level voice to work with federal agency secretaries to improve U.S. development work in other countries.

• “Double-hat” a senior deputy to the national security adviser and the Office of Management and Budget chief as a “smart power deputy” tasked with “developing and managing a strategic framework for planning policies and allocating resources.”

• Begin conducting “quadrennial smart power reviews” that would “parallel” the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review.

• Create “new venues to align strategy and resources on global health.”

• Swell the State Department’s Foreign Service ranks by more than 1,000 personnel.