February 28, 2017
Opinion: The State Department Is Already Running on Fumes
When every problem looks like a nail, it’s all too easy to order up more hammers.
So it is with the Trump administration, which announced this week that it plans to ask Congress for a $54 billion increase in military spending. Depending on how you count, that amounts to a 10 percent boost in the Pentagon budget, even as the White House takes a hatchet to the State Department and USAID, cutting the $58.8 billion international affairs budget by as much as 37 percent. Presidential budgets are political documents—and fortunately these extreme cuts are unlikely to make it through the congressional wringer—but they send an unmistakable message about the Trump team’s disdain for diplomacy and foreign aid.
But Trump’s overwhelming emphasis on military tools is not new. If anything, it’s only the latest example of a political culture I saw during my service at the departments of State and Defense and as a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Unfortunately, the end result of years of overreliance on defense is a national security machine in which the military is by far the most capable component—and every other part has to go begging just to do its job.
Read the full article at Politico.
More from CNAS
-
Loren DeJonge Schulman on The Smell of Victory Podcast
Podcast
On The Smell of Victory Podcast, Bob Hein and Phil Walter sat down with Loren DeJonge Schulman of the Center for a New American Security to discuss the draft. Listen to the f...
By Loren DeJonge Schulman
-
Trump Gets NATO Backwards
Commentary
Returning from the World War I armistice commemoration in Paris, President Trump reemphasized his view of America’s European allies. “We pay for large portions of other countr...
By Richard Fontaine
-
Amb. Nuland on N. Korea: The U.S. 'needs to get back into real diplomacy'
Video
Amb. Victoria Nuland, CEO of the Center for a New American Security and former Assistant Secretary of State, joins Ali Velshi to discuss reports that North Korea is moving ahe...
By Victoria Nuland
-
US midterm elections 2018: Democrats abroad in the Indo-Pacific
Commentary
A partial "blue wave" crested over the US House of Representatives this week, ushering in a Democratic majority there for the first time in eight years. With Republicans stren...
By Richard Fontaine
