Above is my quick and dirty comparison of the coming fight over foreign assistance. In green is the amount already spent in 2010 on each of the discreet line items (I’ve chosen these four areas because they were directly comparable between the various proposed appropriations).
Here’s how to read the graph: The actual amount spent in 2010 by the USG on each line item is in green. In red is the amount Republicans want to cut back to for the remainder of FY2011, expiring on 30 September. And in blue is what the White House would like to spend in FY2012’s budget proposal.
Now, I understand that there’s a conversation to be had about fixing how we spend foreign assistance and what we should receive back from it. But this is a more basic philosophical disagreement about whether or not America should be a world leader, or whether we should disengage from the rest of the world. After all, at its best, foreign assistance buys soft power, something that has been in relatively short supply of late.
In light of that, it’s worth keeping in mind this quote from Joe Nye’s new book, The Future Power:
In general, the United States has not worked out an integrated plan for combining hard and soft power….Many official instruments of soft power – public diplomacy, broadcasting, exchange programs, development assistance, disaster relief, military-to-military contracts – are scattered around the government, and there is no overarching strategy or budget that even tries to integrate them with hard power into an overarching smart power strategy. The United States spends about five hundred times more on the military than it does on broadcasting and exchanges.
Photo Credit: Marines Haiti Relief
