[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 74 (Tuesday, June 3, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1096-E1097]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      OVERHAULING THE FOREIGN AID ESTABLISHMENT SUPPORT: H.R. 1486

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. DAVID DREIER

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, June 3, 1997

  Mr. DREIER. Mr. Speaker, later this week the House is likely to 
consider H.R. 1486, the Foreign Policy Reform Act of 1997. I believe 
that this important legislation, crafted in a responsible and 
bipartisan manner by the esteemed chairman of the House International 
Relations Committee, Ben Gilman of Middletown, NY, offers a historic 
opportunity to move our Nation's foreign policy in the right direction.
  The legislation reported by the International Relations Committee 
represents a return to proper congressional authorization procedures. 
It authorizes spending for the State Department and related agencies, 
as well as for security, humanitarian, and development assistance at 
levels agreed to by the House and Senate last week in their votes on 
the budget resolution, and at levels agreed to by the administration.
  David Warsh, a business and economics columnist for the Boston Globe, 
recently wrote a cogent article putting the bill, and Chairman Gilman's 
leadership, in the proper historical perspective. Namely, it is a plan 
for development aid in the post-cold war era that rivals the shrewdness 
of the Marshall Plan itself.

                          Marshall's Inheritor

       He was a kid sergeant when General George Marshall was 
     Chief of Staff of the Army--an Army Air Corps navigator with 
     35 missions over Japan. And when Secretary of State Marshall 
     in 1947 announced the ambitious plan for the reconstruction 
     of Europe that has borne his name ever since, Ben Gilman was 
     a GI Bill student at New York University Law School.
       Now Gilman, the little-known chairman of the House 
     Committee on International Relations, is acting as Marshall's 
     inheritor--in ways that are as yet little understood.
       Next week Congress takes up his Foreign Policy Reform Act. 
     It is billed as the first major overhaul of the foreign aid 
     establishment since 1961.
       More to the point, the bill provides a set of tools for the 
     conduct of development aid in the post-Cold War era that are 
     in many ways analogous--opposite in approach but perhaps 
     equal in shrewdness--to the Marshall Plan itself.
       Chief among its features is a streamlining of the baroque 
     foreign policy establishment that grew up during the half-
     century contest with the former Soviet Union.
       Merged into the State Department altogether would be the US 
     Information Agency and the Arms Control and Disarmament 
     Agency. The Agency for International Development, which now 
     reports directly to the president, also would go to work for 
     the secretary of state instead. The expansion of NATO to the 
     countries of Eastern Europe and Russia itself is authorized 
     as well.
       Thus the dueling strategies that have given the US 
     government's foreign policy some of its worst moments since 
     the Berlin Wall came down would at last be expected to speak 
     with a single voice.
       It was one of these smoldering rivalries that burst into 
     flames last month when the Agency for International 
     Development suspended a $14 million contract with a unit of 
     Harvard University that has been consulting to the Russian 
     government on various privatization programs.
       The reason: The significant others of the two lead 
     advisers--the wife of one, the girlfriend of the other--had 
     been investing heavily in Russian ventures for personal gain.
       Harvard economics professor Andrei Shleifer and Moscow 
     program director Jonathan Hay were fired from its programs 
     last week by the Harvard Institute for International 
     Development. But the suspended contract is expected to be 
     canceled soon, with permanent damage to the Russian faction 
     that has been Washington's brightest hope for reform.
       But there were deeper currents. HIID might never have had 
     the contract in the first place but for the rump State 
     Department that was the AID mission to Moscow--something like 
     300 hard-to-control employees. In fast-moving events after 
     the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991--and 
     especially after Bill Clinton moved into the White House--the 
     Harvard Institute came to be used as the principal, if 
     unofficial, instrument of US macroeconomic policy in Moscow, 
     responsive to instructions from the White House in ways that 
     the well-entrenched AID mission in Russia never was.
       It was amid such back-channel maneuvering that the 
     burgeoning conflicts of interest on the part of the 
     administration's preferred advisers, Shleifer and Hays, went 
     unnoticed--or at least unchallenged.
       With everybody in the foreign policy apparatus working for 
     the president--as they would be under Ben Gilman's Foreign 
     Policy Reform Act--such mischief would be far less likely to 
     occur.
       Harry Truman called Marshall ``one of the most astute and 
     profound men I have ever known.'' At a distance of 50 years, 
     it is clear that Marshall understood that with a devastating 
     war just ended but an even more threatening possibility in 
     prospect, a concerted effort by the Americans to rebuild 
     Europe would be required to keep Soviet tanks out of Paris.
       Conditioned by the sacrifices of the war, a bipartisan 
     Congress dug deep and came up with money--$13:5 billion, 
     paltry even at 10 times that sum in current dollars--
     necessary to jump-start the European miracle. Peace and 
     prosperity--and a strong line of defense against an 
     expansionist Soviet empire--was the result.
       Today, the situation is nearly opposite. Instead of a world 
     hobbled by war, the United States looks outward to a world 
     pretty much at peace with itself. Instead of relatively 
     easily repaired physical damage, the harm done to many of the 
     world's great nations--Russia, China, India--has been self-
     inflicted. It is institutional regeneration that is needed, 
     not spare parts and heating oil.
       And, of course, instead of facing a powerful and 
     unpredictable foe, America finds itself alone as a global 
     superpower. It is, however,

[[Page E1097]]

     one among many nations seeking to compete in global markets, 
     and without the comfort of an eneny to galvanize its will.
       In these circumstances, Ben Gilman's approach to foreign 
     policy deserves to be understood for what it is: the best 
     possible approach under the circumstances. It amounts to a 
     return to the stripped-down apparatus with which America 
     entered the post-World War II era: a president who makes 
     foreign policy through his secretary of state, with the 
     advice and consent of Congress, but without the bureaucratic 
     barnacles that have grown up over 50 years.
       Like the foreign policy of the Marshall Plan, the support 
     for the Foreign Policy Reform Act is selfconciously 
     bipartisan. Freshmen hotheads made a bold attempt to derail 
     Gilman's ascension to the international relations committee's 
     chair (he replaced Representative Lee Hamilton) following the 
     surprise Republican conquest of the House in 1994; he was too 
     much a Rockefeller Republican for some. (A moderate, Gilman 
     was elected to Congress on Richard Nixon's coattails in 
     1972.)
       Yet Gil;man works well with his Republican counterpart in 
     the Senate, Jesse Helms. Gilman retains the respect of the 
     Democrats. And he keeps a light checkrein on the Clinton 
     administration, causing few embarrassments, but regularly 
     extracting compromises in cases where he believes US policy 
     is overly soft or harsh--in China, in Bosnia, in Somalia, in 
     Haiti, in the Ukraine.
       It is picturesque that debate should be scheduled to begin 
     on Gilman's bill on Tuesday--in time to offer the possibility 
     that it could come to a vote in the House on the 50th 
     anniversary of Marshall's famous speech at Harvard, June 5.
       So never mind the nostalgia. Great deeds are still being 
     undertaken. The shaping economic development around the world 
     has replaced defense as the cutting edge of foreign policy. 
     It is possible that the next 50 years will be even better 
     than the last.

     

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