No Bandwagon for Diplomacy
A good article in the January/February edition of Foreign Affairs by former President of the American Foreign Service Association J. Anthony Holmes advocates dramatically increasing the number of Foreign Service Officers (FSOs). Holmes offers some powerful statistics: The number of lawyers at the Defense Department is larger than the entire U.S. diplomatic corps, there are more musicians in the military bands than there are U.S. diplomats, and the Defense Department’s 2008 budget was over 24 times as large as the combined budgets of the State Department and USAID ($750 billion compared with $31 billion). Enough made similar calls for reform ...
A “Peace Surge” by Any Other Name
During a recent Symposium on Preventive Priorities at the Council on Foreign Relations, Adjunct Fellow for Africa Michelle Gavin rightly argued that, “Robust, intensive diplomacy,” and “A real understanding of…incentives and disincentives,” must be the hallmarks of American foreign policy. The fact that Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) is now in trouble underscores Gavin’s point. As John Prendergast and John Norris note: The CPA itself—the agreement to end the 22-year war in southern Sudan and establish a framework for democratic transformation of the country—was reached in 2005 after a sustained investment in diplomacy, led in part by the United States ...
