As is the case with any new blog, it’s always exciting the first time another blog links to and responds to a post.  So kudos and thanks to Matt Armstrong over at Mountain Runner for replying to my post on Jesse Helms and, among other things, the demise of USIA.  He gives Undip a nice mention, and I want to thank him for that.  As I noted in that post, Mountain Runner has few peers when it comes to covering public diplomacy.

After the nice words, Matt goes on to disagree with my point that Helms (and Clinton) were responsible for the end of the USIA:

[A]bolishing the USIA was not a one-man show.  There was more to it than a choice by President Clinton.  There was the USAID director who had the guts to fight for his agency and the USIA director who did not.  There was also the co-star in the form of a Secretary of State who may have later acknowledged her complicity was her biggest mistake.

Well, yes.  No kidding.  The President is not a one-man show.  And yes, Brian Atwood of USAID was a much more effective advocate than Joe Duffey at USIA.  But both of them — and Secretary Albright — worked for Clinton, and ultimately it was Clinton who decided that he didn’t want to fight Helms.  Speaking frankly — and as a former Clinton Administration official, albeit not even remotely a senior one — President Clinton rarely met a foreign policy or national security fight he didn’t try to avoid.

There’s nothing to suggest that Helms’ attempt to force Clinton to choose between the two agencies was in any way inevitable. Helms was a powerful Chairman, but there were plenty of other Senators, including some in his own party (say Lugar and Chaffee, for example) who the Administration could have lined up to oppose the move.  Had Clinton told Helms to go to hell — and done so in a thoughtful, strategic manner — he not only might have saved USIA, but he also might have forestalled some of the good Senator’s other stunts — like putting holds on every single person Clinton nominated for U.S. Ambassador to Mexico.

Furthermore, disagreement over the question of who was responsible does not take away from the feeding frenzy that resulted at State.  By gutting the infrastructure, the State Department gutted the mission.  And as I noted in my earlier post, the main reason State did this was that it too was profoundly underresourced, a problem that was at least in part a result of the shennanigans of… Jesse Helms.

And finally, Matt, Secretary Albright may have said that her role in the death of USIA was her biggest mistake, but let’s not kid ourselves.  Her complicity in the Clinton Administration’s utter failure to respond to the genocide in Rwanda was a far, far, greater disaster.

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