Comments on: Responsibility and Foreign Policy http://www.undiplomatic.net/2009/01/15/responsibility-and-foreign-policy/ Bringing foreign policy back, girl. Those other countries don't know how to act. Mon, 21 May 2012 18:08:48 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 By: Heather Hamilton http://www.undiplomatic.net/2009/01/15/responsibility-and-foreign-policy/#comment-11083 Heather Hamilton Thu, 15 Jan 2009 18:30:55 +0000 http://www.undiplomatic.net/?p=2387#comment-11083 Thanks for the thoughtful commentary, Charlie. It's important to note that the audience for the letter is not the public but the policymakers who, grappling with the many, many crises that threaten to push the global affairs agenda to the back burner. The point was to engage the community in an exercise to identify those specific policy actions that could not wait beyond the first six months if we were to make progress on the broader policy questions down the road -- and that we, as a community, were prepared to support and help get enacted. Because the audience is wonks in an administration that clearly already agrees with the big picture, we felt that getting into the weeds and identifying which of the many, many proposals out there were most urgent was a useful thing to do. On the question of the national security budget, the question of funding for civilian versus military capacity is consistently raised, both in our discussions and by top civilian and military leaders, as one of the most important aspects of getting our foreign policy back on track. During the consultations and steering committee discussions, many experts consistently raised the concern that this imbalance couldn't be fixed with the old "guns versus butter" debate, but had to instead be contextualized within a larger discussion about our national security structure and budgeting, as recommended in the bullet point. Now, the thing about the budget process is that the 2010 budget has to be transmitted to to the Congress in the first months of the new administration, which means that any substantive changes in budgeting process would have to take place immediately if we wanted to see the impact of those changes in the first *two years* of the Obama administration. The interesting thing about this letter is that it's a good example of how crowdsourcing can sometimes cut through the conventional wisdom -- we asked over 215 experts from across the organizational and issue spectrum to engage in a series of conversations about relative priorities and specific actions necessary to move the larger picture. As a result, each action on this list has gone through a rigorous set of questions about how important it really is, how much of an impact it would have on the bigger picture, and whether it really has to happen in the first 100 days to six months. So, let's call it a thoroughly vetted, prioritized laundry list that happens to have the support of the broad community of think-tank, advocacy and activist organizations that the administration will need to achieve these broader goals. Thanks for the thoughtful commentary, Charlie. It’s important to note that the audience for the letter is not the public but the policymakers who, grappling with the many, many crises that threaten to push the global affairs agenda to the back burner. The point was to engage the community in an exercise to identify those specific policy actions that could not wait beyond the first six months if we were to make progress on the broader policy questions down the road — and that we, as a community, were prepared to support and help get enacted. Because the audience is wonks in an administration that clearly already agrees with the big picture, we felt that getting into the weeds and identifying which of the many, many proposals out there were most urgent was a useful thing to do.

On the question of the national security budget, the question of funding for civilian versus military capacity is consistently raised, both in our discussions and by top civilian and military leaders, as one of the most important aspects of getting our foreign policy back on track. During the consultations and steering committee discussions, many experts consistently raised the concern that this imbalance couldn’t be fixed with the old “guns versus butter” debate, but had to instead be contextualized within a larger discussion about our national security structure and budgeting, as recommended in the bullet point. Now, the thing about the budget process is that the 2010 budget has to be transmitted to to the Congress in the first months of the new administration, which means that any substantive changes in budgeting process would have to take place immediately if we wanted to see the impact of those changes in the first *two years* of the Obama administration.

The interesting thing about this letter is that it’s a good example of how crowdsourcing can sometimes cut through the conventional wisdom — we asked over 215 experts from across the organizational and issue spectrum to engage in a series of conversations about relative priorities and specific actions necessary to move the larger picture. As a result, each action on this list has gone through a rigorous set of questions about how important it really is, how much of an impact it would have on the bigger picture, and whether it really has to happen in the first 100 days to six months. So, let’s call it a thoroughly vetted, prioritized laundry list that happens to have the support of the broad community of think-tank, advocacy and activist organizations that the administration will need to achieve these broader goals.

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