OPINION:
When describing war, Army Gen. Omar Bradley famously declared: “Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.”
The same applies to foreign affairs. Many pontificate about high-minded principles of democracy and human rights or the hard-knuckled compromises of realpolitik. But few understand how to move the levers of power to turn pontification into practice.
Daniel Runde sets out to solve this problem in his new book, “The American Imperative,” an unembellished “user’s manual” to those levers for anyone interested in the American foreign policy apparatus.
In an era of alarmingly intensifying great power competition between the U.S. and China, Mr. Runde serves up a digestible tour of the otherwise dizzying array of acronyms and agencies undergirding the international order that America and its allies built after World War II. For dessert, Mr. Runde, a seasoned veteran of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank, illustrates how dangerously close the People’s Republic of China has recently come to hijacking those institutions.
“The American Imperative” strikes a good balance between articulating a view of America’s place in the world while providing a blueprint for how to reform the machinery of state, thus living up to Bradley’s dictum to focus on logistics — or what Mr. Runde calls “the plumbing.”
The book provides a renewed and refreshingly sober vision for American foreign aid. “The U.S. has to be clear in its belief in and support for democratic governance,” writes Mr. Runde, who unapologetically advocates the intersection of American values and realpolitik, especially as great power competition heats up with China and Russia.
While acknowledging that tough choices must at times be made, Mr. Runde presents a vision in which the U.S. best advances its own interests when advancing the ability of people in developing countries to live lives in well-governed, free societies while enabling their prosperity in well-functioning market economies.
He also provides a history lesson on how, after World War II, the U.S. and its allies constructed a multilateral system — built around the United Nations and the World Bank — then promptly set about ignoring and underinvesting in it. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. government has significantly cut back its maintenance of the machinery of the world order it created, and the PRC has stepped into the vacuum to now quietly dominate key parts of the multilateral system. Mr. Runde correctly asserts that great power competition will play out not in flowery speeches on the floor of the U.N. General Assembly or its Security Council but in the obscure committees and working groups that turn the gears of international governance.
Mr. Runde identifies the contours of Chinese control over several of these institutions, including the International Telecommunication Union (setting standards on international communications, including the internet), the International Civil Aviation Organization (which sets standards for air transportation), the World Health Organization (which sets standards for global public health), and the World Intellectual Property Organization (which governs patents and trademarks). Beijing, he explains, has picked up the “manual” that America and its allies wrote for running the international world order and has proceeded to beat us with it.
To counter this growing influence, Mr. Runde calls for greater, “sustained effort over a long time,” and provides a step-by-step approach for improving what he calls “the often unglamorous work” of advancing both American foreign policy and improving the lives of people around the world.
The frontline personnel in this great power competition will include government employees from across the U.S. government’s “three D’s” of defense, diplomacy and development. Therefore, Mr. Runde focuses on reforms at the intersection of all three D’s and especially diplomacy and development with a particular emphasis on USAID and the U.S. Development Finance Corp. These agencies, and the companies and nongovermental organizations that support them, will face off against the PRC and Russia, while also working in “coopetition” with rising middle powers like Brazil and India — not in New York, Paris or Tokyo, but in Kinshasa, Kyiv and San Salvador.
To better equip America’s frontline diplomats and development professionals, Mr. Runde proposes some wise reforms, such as stepping up the focus on combating corruption, improving access to higher education to transfer American values to future developing country leaders, and a renewed focus on trade (not just aid) to improve job creation and economic growth both in emerging markets and in the U.S.
He also recommends some important reforms to the “plumbing” of foreign assistance. In fact, Mr. Runde and I have collaborated on numerous papers and projects through the Center for Strategic and International Studies, including those that advocated creating the organizational bureaucracy necessary to run more “whole of government” approaches integrating diplomacy and development.
Mr. Runde specifically recommends having the USAID administrator simultaneously serve as deputy secretary of state for development, treating the companies and NGOs that make up the “development industrial base” as an asset to American foreign policy, re-skilling the development workforce, and creating processes for realigning planning, budgeting and oversight to improve efficiency and better serve America’s national interests.
For better or worse, all of these reforms rest on one overarching transformation: a bipartisan consensus on the challenges posed by renewed great power competition. Throughout much of the Cold War, this kind of long-view consensus existed among Democrats and Republicans. Mr. Runde points out that it does not today, and until it does, many of the very good reforms he proposes will make only marginal improvements.
There is still hope that successive Congresses and presidential administrations can agree on the nature of the threat. If and when they do, they should embrace the logistical improvements Mr. Runde recommends to win the new great power competition.
• Richard J. Crespin is the CEO of CollaborateUp.
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The American Imperative: Reclaiming Global Leadership Through Soft Power
By Daniel Runde
Bombardier Books, Feb. 7, 2023
$28, 280 pages
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