Firepower cannot replace diplomacy
The Senate Appropriations Committee has issued a report criticizing the Trump administration’s proposed State Department budget for being too damn low.
The unusually harsh language appeared in the report attached to spending legislation for the State Department and foreign operations that totals $51 billion, roughly $11 billion more in funding than the administration had requested. The Trump administration had proposed a budget that slashed State Department spending for fiscal year 2018 by about 30 percent from the previous year.
Because Trump and his buddies are so thick they think we can do everything by shooting and bombing.
“On May 23, 2017, President Donald Trump submitted to the Congress the fiscal year 2018 budget of the United States government entitled, ‘A New Foundation for American Greatness,’ and asserted in ‘The Budget Message of the President’ that ‘[i]n these dangerous times, our increased attention to public safety and national security sends a clear message to the world — a message of American strength and resolve,'” the report said. “This message is not reflected in the International Affairs budget request of $40,521,826,000, a 30 percent cut below the fiscal year 2017 enacted level.”
“The lessons learned since September 11, 2001, include the reality that defense alone does not provide for American strength and resolve abroad,” the report continued. “Battlefield technology and firepower cannot replace diplomacy and development. The administration’s apparent doctrine of retreat, which also includes distancing the United States from collective and multilateral dispute resolution frameworks, serves only to weaken America’s standing in the world.”
Trump thinks standing=the biggest guns.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has defended the proposed cuts to the State Department.
“It is an unmistakable restatement of the needs the country faces and the priorities we must establish,” Tillerson said in a letter to the department’s 75,000 employees in March. “It acknowledges that U.S. engagement must be more efficient, that our aid be more effective, and that advocating the national interests of our country always be our primary mission.”
What would he know about it? He was an oil executive, not a diplomat or foreign policy scholar.
Draining the swamp.
Swamps are valuable ecosystems in their own right, quite apart from the valuable protections they provide against flooding. Of course Trump declared he wanted to drain the swamp – he prefers concrete and glass eyesores which not only fail to provide any environmental benefits whatsoever, they actively damage the environment.
tiggerthewing, just what I’ve been saying all along. I have always hated that drain the swamp metaphor, because it portrays swamps as bad things. I’ve spent many happy hours wandering through swamps, marveling at the exquisite plant life, avoiding any water moccasins that happened to be claiming the swamp as their own (I took their claims of ownership very seriously), and appreciating the beauty that is a swamp. But none of the swamps I ever explored were gold-plated, so maybe that’s why everyone wants to drain them?
Once I had a student (when I was in North Texas) that took a holiday and drove to Colorado. On the drive, she drove through Oklahoma (which is where I was from). On her return, she told me just how much was wrong with Oklahoma, which she summed up in one sentence: Not enough concrete.
This is a standard attitude, which is why Trump’s swamp draining metaphor has been popular. People think swamps are bad, and need to be covered with roads and buildings and parking lots.
American fascists, and I suspect many conservatives in general, have tended to be isolationists. There is a strong desire to be left alone to get on with their own nasty projects, so they don’t like the idea that countries have any business commenting on each others goings-on. Building a fortress, both in defence of the home and as a strong point to exert control and lash out like the robber barons of old is just a perfectly typical combination. Compare current positions to those pre-WW2.
Diplomacy requires patience, knowledge, nuance and expertise, all attributes which Trump lacks and actively disparages.
That’s not quite the case. They don’t believe that anyone else has any business commenting on their goings on. But we have a long history, and yes, conservatives, of feeling we need to comment on others goings on. Conservatives may be isolationist, but the minute they get into a country with their business, and the country doesn’t cooperate, they want the government to come in and flex some muscle to “persuade” the local government and citizens to bend to their will.
YNNB:
Yes, which is why the dismantling of America’s diplomacy infrastructure is so especially terrifying to everyone on the planet. Decades-long relationships between diplomats (or with overlapping successive diplomats) can’t just be turned back on with a switch. When those relationships are burned by short-sighted idiocy, who knows what it will take – and how long it will take – to reestablish them, assuming that’s even possible? Who knows what it will cost in terms of money, time, economic consideration, lives….?
The cliche of cold-war spies from enemy nations meeting by the duck pond is not inaccurate. That’s one of the things spies are *for*. Diplomacy is pretty much the same thing. It’s not something you can always do by memo, it requires mistrustful personal relationships established over time.
I think what they believe in is a sort of one-way border. No-one must come in (except Russian oligarchs, Mafia dons and the like) and if anyone should look in to ask what they are up to that’s really very rude.
Going the other way though is no problem. If they decide to hop over and shoot up Venezuela then that’s fine. I hear they are also eying up Nicaragua again: haven’t toppled or dominated the government there for a while!
Maureen, the real problem is that they think our most important concern should be the American dream (which for some of us is a bit of a nightmare). That’s one thing; but they also assume everyone else in the world should also be the United States and it’s needs, wants, and fetishes. It can’t get through their heads that the other countries have a right to put themselves first, and us last if they so desire. It can’t get through their head that anyone would want to put themselves before us.