The State Department is involved in a massive project — the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review — that is designed to address a serious “funding imbalance” between the civilian and military institutions involved in American national security.
Says Anne-Marie Slaughter, Director of Policy and Planning at the State Department and in charge of the review:
“This is not an abstract planning exercise that goes into a report and sits on a shelf,” she said. “It’s a planning exercise that does connect to the budget, that’s very important, but the implications go far beyond the budget. The budget is the tool to implement what we’re going to come up with. This is really what I think secretaries of state should be doing, which is a kind of farsighted look into how the United States is going to implement its foreign policy agenda in the 21st century.”
It is designed to roughly model the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, which similarly connects threats to strategies to resources to budgets.
What’s more, it’s exactly what the State Department needs — with a budget hovering around $40 billion, or well less than 10 percent of the Pentagon’s, it’s quite fair to say that in 2009, Foggy Bottom is responsible for well more than 10 percent of the national security of the United States. Now it just needs the bureaucratic proof to justify that need to Congress. Et voila — the QDDR!
