Last week, Secretary of State John Kerry appeared before the Senate Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee and House Foreign Affairs Committee to discuss the FY2016 Foreign Affairs Budget. That budget, while comprising only one percent of overall federal spending, reflects the regional and topical complexity of U.S. policy abroad. Relatively brief (by Congressional standards), the hearings are less focused on budget minutiae and instead become barometers of Congressional foreign affairs concerns. At a time of extreme partisanship many of these concerns are surprisingly bipartisan – or at a minimum, issue stances of individual members do not break down neatly along partisan lines.
Members of both parties compliment Secretary Kerry’s tireless engagement in the full spectrum of global crises. Kerry pushed back against sentiments expressed in prior Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on U.S. foreign policy strategy that the U.S.-led global system is “unraveling.” The world is now far more complex and dangerous than during the Cold War, Kerry said, and the U.S. needs to develop new, non-military ways to engage its persistent trouble spots. America’s leaders also need to adjust their expectations of how safe the world can be at any given time.
Kerry was peppered with questions from across the foreign policy spectrum, but three main themes stuck out.
Russia Is a Problem; Europe is a Non-Issue. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), the Democratic Whip, prodded Kerry on what “plan B” existed beyond sanctions to respond to Russian aggression in Ukraine. Likewise, Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, worried that a tepid response to Russia’s land grabs would amount to the “end of NATO.” In addition to NATO obligations, several members recalled that the U.S. needs to live up to the guarantee of Ukrainian sovereignty and security it made under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum with Russia and Britain to remove Ukraine’s nuclear weapons. While defending the Administration’s response in Ukraine, Kerry described Russia’s recent behavior as “a dangerous and unnecessary effort to re-open a sort of East/West game” for the first time since the Cold War. American leaders, he believed, should view Russia’s shift as a long-term issue not confined to specific territory.
Given the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, the absence of any discussion of U.S. relations with Europe from either Kerry or Committee members was striking. The Euro crisis could be seen as the jurisdiction of other committees. Overall, however, Europe continues to register faintly with Congress. No longer a source of military crises, it is not seen as stable enough to be seen a source of solutions to them. This view undercuts the partner role the EU could play with the U.S. on its often shared foreign policy agenda.
The War on Terror is Alive and Well… President Obama has worked hard to extricate America from its post-9/11 “war footing”. Outside of political rhetoric, however, the “War on Terror” has not gone anywhere. Many of the questions Secretary Kerry fielded dealt with the scope of the Obama Administration’s request for a new Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to combat ISIS. Kerry made clear that battling ISIS will be a multi-year task. He appeared confident that ISIS’s frightening initial momentum has been curbed. The shaky governance within the region and its reliance on U.S. military superiority mean that degrading ISIS’s ability to take and hold territory amounts to a larger-scale U.S. military posture than was needed to degrade al-Qaeda.
…but there is a limit to what U.S. force alone can do.
Rhetorically, Kerry replaced the “War on Terror” with a multi-faceted doctrine that adds several layers of non-military engagement to the U.S. strategic response to ISIS. Pointing to February’s White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, he argued strongly that a solely military approach to extremist groups like ISIS will fail. The key, Kerry said, is for the one percent of federal spending represented in the foreign affairs budget to include non-military strategies that drain ISIS’s future recruiting base and starve any “future ISIS” in its early stages. Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), Senate Foreign Ops Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman – and no opponent of military intervention – agreed on the need to prioritize ways of engaging the world short of military force. When specific ways are discussed, however, bipartisanship fades. There is collective agreement on the need for a stronger U.S. response on social media to combat ISIS recruiting tactics. Anti-corruption efforts to build workable institutions of governance abroad likewise are broadly supported. Predictably, however, some conservative members of both committees balked at any suggestion of development-led “jobs programs” abroad. Kerry and others face an uphill battle to develop much-needed efforts to address directly the international issue of youth unemployment. The secretary preferred the politically palatable rhetoric of helping youth “build a stake” in their countries. Throughout his testimony, however, he seemed convinced that youth unemployment was the engine of any future ISIS, and resolved to address it.
At the first Senate Armed Services Committee hearings of the term, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) name-checked Dean Acheson’s memoir Present at the Creation by wondering if we were now “present at the unraveling.” Seemingly in response, Kerry came to the budget hearings armed with his own Acheson quote. Addressing the world’s foreign policy problems is not like “popping an aspirin”; there are no one-time cures. The task of foreign policy leaders was to manage risk where it is not possible to eliminate it. Add Kerry’s message of expanded non-military engagement to combat Islamic extremism, and his strategy relies equally on new foreign policy tools and adjusted American expectations.
