Dear Salzburg Friends,The many thoughtful responses to my 14 November posting - asking Salzburg Fellows to offer advice to President-Elect Obama - were most heartening and provided the perfect preparation for our “Members Only” breakfast briefing this morning on Capitol Hill.
Chairman Howard Berman welcomed members of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee and key staff, as well as the speakers who represented the recently concluded Salzburg Global Seminar on “The United States in the World: New Strategies of Engagement.” These included:
Timothy E. Wirth (President, United Nations Foundation), François Heisbourg (Special Advisor, Foundation for Strategic Studies, Paris), Edward Mortimer (Senior Vice President, Salzburg Global Seminar), and Carlos Pascual (Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy, Brookings Institution).
We began by screening a short, 5-minute film that presents the diversity of perspective that was offered last week in Austria. The film can be seen here:
Brief statements were then offered by Mortimer, Heisbourg, and Pascual. They outlined very briefly some of the key considerations they believed should be uppermost in the minds of the new Administration, and the appropriate committees of Congress, as they take office in January 2009. Click on the following links to see the summary report from the Salzburg gathering, as well as an executive summary of a new report, “Managing Global Insecurities” which was a key part of the discussions.
Chairman Berman asked the group to address two major questions that would be on the minds of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the coming months. First, to what degree should Congress and the Administration re-structure the way that foreign assistance is pursued in the coming years?
Second, he asked how the U.S. should try to balance its attention to and use of United Nations versus the pursuit of new mechanisms such as reform of the G-8 to become the G-20 or some such.
I’ve asked Edward Mortimer if he would offer a comment later today on some of the other substantive points raised in Salzburg, in your comments, and at this morning’s meeting. Watch for that later today.
In the meantime, I’d like to ask for your thoughts on Chairman Berman’s questions.
Both from the perspective of the receivers of foreign assistance and from that of those experienced in the supplying of such aid, how might you recommend that the U.S. foreign assistance program be changed by the Obama Administration and the new Congress?
On the second area, who should be at the table when heads of state convene, especially in this time of international economic crisis and when international institutions need reforming to take account of new realities in the world?
I’m hoping we might compile the best of these responses for use in a follow-up communication to the transition team and to members of the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations Committees in Washington.
Thanks in advance for your contributions.
Stephen
Stephen Salyer
President
Salzburg Global Seminar
3 comments:
Let me add briefly to Stephen’s excellent report, as he suggests.
The meeting with the Committee was a great breakthrough for the Seminar. We owe a big “thank you” to Chairman Berman, to the UN Foundation, and particularly to the Committee’s chief of staff, David Killion, who took a gamble on us. Last night he was seeking to “manage expectations” (somewhat ironically since managing expectations on both sides of the Atlantic was the whole purpose of our exercise), warning us not to assume members would attend, or stay more than five minutes if they did. In fact there was a very good attendance, and several members stayed for the full hour. Carlos Pascual presented the “Managing Global Insecurities” report produced jointly by the Brookings Institution, New York University and Stanford University, as he had done at greater length in a masterly opening lecture at our Salzburg session last week. This combined well with our own memo “Roadmap for Re-engagement: The World’s Advice to the New Administration” (click here), pulling together the main recommendations from the Salzburg session, to stimulate a lively discussion.
On Berman’s second question, Bruce Jones of NYU replied that the “G16” proposed in the MGI report was not intended to substitute for the UN but as a political mechanism bringing together the major powers, so that they could work together and assume their responsibilities within the UN – an essential prerequisite if the Organization is to work better. Indeed, he said, both the present UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki Moon, and his predecessor Kofi Annan were among the biggest fans of the idea. Francois Heisbourg added that in his view the G20 which met over the weekend in Washington is “fated to replace the G8”, since its members between them represented nearly 90 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product. He said he did not envy Italy’s task in organizing next July’s G8 summit, since it was likely to be pre-empted and overshadowed by the G20 meeting in April. (This prompted Mr. Berman to ask whether the G20 was “an anti-Berlusconi operation”, but Francois replied that the Italian prime minister would only be “collateral damage” in an exercised that had more serious objectives.)
Carlos Pascual had stressed the importance of making the UN Security Council more representative of the realities of power in today’s world, but Francois expressed some skepticism about this, given the failure of other recent attempts at reform, and said he did not think President Obama should spend a lot of capital on it. He also warned that, paradoxically, there might now be more serious arguments between Europe and the US on issues such as climate change, relations with Russia and global governance, precisely because the Obama administration would engage seriously on a search for common ground with Europe whereas with the Bush administration differences on these issues had been so wide that they were not seriously discussed at all.
More follows…
-- Edward Mortimer, Chief Program Officer, Salzburg Global Seminar
Several African American members of Congress were among those attending, one of whom, Congresswoman Barbara Lee, warned that African crises such as those in Darfur and Congo should not be “pushed down the list – or it will appear that our policies are very similar to those of the previous administration”.
In concluding remarks, Senator Wirth made the point that “before we get eaten up by crises, we have an opportunity to set the table”. He urged the Committee to help set the “conceptual basis” for coping with crises, and to study such issues as “how we organize ourselves to deliver development” (he argued that the present model in which 16 different US government agencies are involved, and yet non-governmental organizations deliver more aid than all of them together, is dysfunctional); how the US could be engaged in the UN’s human rights machinery; and “the diplomacy of climate change”. Also, echoing one of the themes from our session in Salzburg, he said Committee members should ask why the US had not adhered to international treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
• To what degree should Congress and the Administration re-structure the way that foreign assistance is pursued in the coming years?
• How should the U.S. should try to balance its attention to and use of United Nations versus the pursuit of new mechanisms such as reform of the G-8 to become the G-20 or some such.
In answer to the second question first, the conversation has been fascinating to read here (especially as it relates to the trans-Atlantic relationship), and it has been challenging enough for me to ask 3 questions:
• What is the role of the G-20, and
• How will it be different to the OECD?
• The mix of nations in the G-20 is based neither on democracy nor good governance, nor even prudent economic management, but shouldn't there be a place made for a small nation that is a young democracy and that is trying to establish good governance and economic management? Ghana comes to mind.
Now, to the surprising first question, a thrill to see, as it means that the new Administration has the will to engage positively with the world again:
To what degree should Congress and the Administration re-structure the way that foreign assistance is pursued in the coming years?
No one has invented a time machine, and we can't turn back the clock, but the degree of re-structure in foreign assistance needed is about 180, and can be summed up by this quote.
"I want to write a Farm Bill that's good for (American) agriculture. If somebody wants to sue us (at the WTO), we've got a lot of lawyers in Washington." - House Agriculture Chair Colin Peterson (Democrat).
The Bill, as Huckleberry Finn would have said, got wrote. As it lasts 5 years, it is the elephant stuck in the foreign assistance pipe, throughout this next Administration and beyond. It hurts both American consumers (continuing policies that
• make US consumers pay more,
• are environmentally destructive
• have destroyed local industry such as American confectionery manufacturing, in which "For each one sugar growing and harvesting job saved through high U.S. sugar prices, nearly three confectionery manufacturing jobs are lost.")
• that impact on the poorest around the world in ways that make "foreign assistance" sound like hypocritical, self-righteous charity, as the combination of flooding foreign markets with over
• that undermine any chance of getting anywhere with Doha.
The 2008 Bill introduces more distortions in world food production and prices by subsidising food crops for ethanol production, a policy that should be ended in the US as well as the EU. These subsidies should end, but what can be done about the Bill as a whole?
There is another way that the U.S. can do real good in its foreign assistance, and that is to re-examine what free trade means when it comes to markets like Haiti, where U.S. imports undermined the Haitian farmer's rice-growing and spurred an exodus of would-be immigrants to the US, and where now people go hungry because of the high cost of (imported) rice, their staple food. This is a complex issue with many resources to read about it. But Bill Quigley in Counterpunch sums it up well, as he doesn't just finger-point at the U.S. See "The U.S.'s Role in Haiti's Food Riots", April 21, 2008, http://www.counterpunch.org/quigley04212008.html
Finally, at the risk of sounding like an unrealistic radical, I will reiterate my enthusiastic support for democracy and free trade. And therefore, I would hope that a new right become recognised by the incoming US Administration, as it should by every nation and institution such as the IMF. I have written about this right below, as it applies to my hopes for the United States, in a fresh engagement in the world.
The Right of Economic Self-determination
The United States must recognize and begin to respect the right of economic self-determination of every nation.
The United States must implement a policy towards free trade that matches rhetoric with reality, and respects the sovereign will of other nations, recognizing above all, that different democracies have different attitudes to the mix of socialism and capitalism best for the time and people. The United States must recognize that there is a plurality of attitudes towards what the state provides as a basic right and what capitalism offers their consumers. In recognizing and respecting, the United States will end the undermining of democratic will and stability of nations, because not doing so has dangerously eroded the message of the United States as the beacon of democracy and free trade for the supposed good of all. Indeed, these messages of democracy and free trade must be amplified by resisting protectionism at home as vigorously as the US does abroad, and by using treaties, the rule of law and regulations only in a manner that promotes the well-being and will of all peoples above the will of every industry and corporation to expand.
In recognising that other nations have different attitudes to basic rights, the provision of social services, and the distribution of wealth, the USA must cease its agressive promotion of privatisation abroad (example: Bechtel and water provision in Bolivia) and protectionism at home (examples: the US Farm Bill, and the Ranbaxy generic drugs ban by the US FDA). The USA must seriously analyse the results of its trade policies, because when it does, it will be evident that where aggressive US-government-promoted market expansionism has occured, anti-American sentiment results, the stability of other governments are undermined, and a cynicism is created about the US-style rule of law, incorruptability of regulators, and commitment to democracy, free trade, and capitalism itself. In analysing results of policies, the US should look more deeply at the rise of democracy in Latin America, where US-promoted and enforced privatisation has been a significant factor in the rise of democracy, but democracies distrustful of and unfriendly to America.
The temptation to hamper free trade is great, but the US should resist it. Using standards or selective and dubious enforcement of standards as weapons against free trade hurts Americans at home, and the right to prosperity abroad.
For further information, some references:
About the OECD
http://www.oecd.org/pages/0,3417,en_36734052_36734103_1_1_1_1_1,00.html
"More on Trade", by Kevin Drum, The Washington Monthly, April 10, 2008
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_04/013499.php
"US Farm Bill at Home: Preaching Abroad", by Devinder Sharma (chair of the New Delhi-based Forum for Biotechnology & Food Security. Among his recent works are two books--GATT to WTO: Seeds of Despair and In the Famine Trap.)
http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2007/09/us_farm_bill_20.html
"New United States Farm Bill: A lost opportunity" - Media release from the Australian Minister for Trade Simon Crean
http://www.trademinister.gov.au/releases/2008/sc_035.html
"US Farm Bill is a "setback" for Doha negotiations" Third World Network
http://www.twnside.org.sg/title2/wto.info/twninfo080704.htm
History and contents of the 2008 Farm Bill (The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food,_Conservation,_and_Energy_Act_of_2008
"A sweeter Farm Bill for Sugar" Washington Post Investigations 01/18/2008
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/washingtonpostinvestigations/2008/01/a_sweeter_farm_bill.html
"Employment changes in U.S. Food Manufacturing: The Impact of Sugar Prices
www.trade.gov/media/publications/pdf/sugar06.pdf
"Fuel Choices, Fuel Crises, and Finger Pointing" Andrew Martin, The New York Times, April 15, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/business/worldbusiness/15food.html?pagewanted=print
"Gas at $4 and Corn at $7", Robert Rapier, The R-Squared Energy Blog, June 8, 2008
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2008/06/gas-at-4-and-corn-at-7.html
Toshi Knell
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