Columbia International Affairs Online
CIAO DATE: 3/5/2008
Assessing Secretary of State Rice's Reform of U.S. Foreign Assistance
February 2008
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract
The September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States engendered a variety of responses: some domestic, some foreign; some short-term, some longterm; some direct, others indirect. The assault on the Taliban in Afghanistan was clearly one direct, immediate, foreign response. The establishment of the Department of Homeland Security was direct, relatively swift, and domestic. Among the long-term, indirect, foreign responses was a serious review and consequent reform of U.S. foreign assistance programs, and the role they play in U.S. foreign policy and national security.
In his second inaugural address and perhaps most pointedly in the National Security Strategy of 2002 and of 2006, President George W. Bush linked U.S. security, especially through the Global War on Terror, to the larger world in which we live. Defense, diplomacy, and development were to be the bases of a single, unifi ed, interlocking national security system.
In that context, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was charged with the review, reform, and implementation of a revised vision of U.S. foreign assistance, the role it should play in transforming the world that produced the 2001 attacks, and (in consequence) a new foreign assistance paradigm. “All spigots” of foreign assistance would be coordinated with one another and also with diplomacy and defense. Whatever other purposes development assistance may have addressed in the past, it would now become a direct instrument of national security.
It would do so as a part of what Rice called “transformational diplomacy.” Unlike traditional diplomacy, transformational diplomacy would not merely represent U.S. interests to other countries. Instead, transformational diplomacy would seek to change the world, make it better, more benign and secure, less likely to generate terrorism or be vulnerable to it.
