[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

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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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