Russia’s Debacle: The Military and Energy Crisis

Russia claims it is boosting its strategic rocket forces and revamping the military, but should the United States be worried? With the declining oil and gas revenues and antiquated oil industry, Russia will struggle to afford President Putin’s increased military budget while attempting to revitalize its oil and natural gas production. During the U.S. presidential campaigns, former Governor Mitt Romney believed Russia was America’s number one geo-political foe, and even after the election, people still believe Romney’s statement to be credible. But the U.S. should not overly concern itself with the Russian military improvements because they will likely not happen.

Recent history shows that Russia’s attempts to upgrade its military have fallen short time and again. Former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov was a casuality of this trend and was dismissed in November 2012 when he failed to meet expectations.  Before he surrendered to corruption charges, both he and President Putin vowed to increase Russia’s military strength.  Serdyukov was originally appointed Defense Minister because he vowed to take control of the rampant corruption in the military while engineering a military boost in spending and capability. But he failed to create the modern military demanded by Putin.

Military spending increased under Serdyukov, but real military improvements did not. Most of the spending increase was devoted to pay raises for Russian officers. President Putin wants to increase the production of battle tanks, long-range bombers, and new and improved ballistic missiles such as the new liquid-fueled ballistic missile. He has also tried to develop Russia’s first unmanned remotely-piloted drone program. But Serdyukov failed to meet those demands. He provided little improvement, in part because he could not control the military funding, a reality that Putin acknowledged. Regardless, his resignation was followed by the promotion of Sergei Shoigu, the former Minister of Emergency Situations. Shoigu was thought to be Putin’s puppet, but he has been actively remodeling Russia’s military. Shoigu’s goal is to increase domestic weaponry procurement so the military investment pays dividends for the Russian economy. In July 2011, then Prime Minister Putin unveiled draft budget guidelines for 2012-2014, which called for boosting defense spending to 1.85 trillion rubles ($66.6 billion) in 2012 to 2.75 trillion rubles ($99 billion) in 2014. The projected Russian military spending for 2013 is currently at $90.1 billion, just above its projection. The military spending is increasing on target. However, it is doubtful that such increases in spending will be sustainable.

How will Russia afford its defense budget, when it is clear that its diminishing oil reserves will lead to a declining GDP?

Russia simply cannot afford the expanded defense budget. It remains dependent on revenue from its oil surplus to accommodate its spending, but the declining revenue will severely restrict Russia’s treasury. Unconventional reserves around the world are vastly expanding supply and stabilizing the oil markets. Most think the oil prices will stabilize at around $80-100 per oil barrel, well below the $120-140 metric that the Russian government assumed when it made its promises on federal spending and expansion of social programs. President Putin has relied on the oil industry as the main source of revenue since the beginning of his presidency in 2000. But facing international competition, projected declines in oil reserves by 2020, and political corruption scandals sapping Russia’ bank, Russia cannot afford to fund internal demands, let alone military expansions.

Russia’s oil dilemma is such an imposing problem that, in late December, it sent its naval fleet in a desperate search for new oil fields. This action was sanctioned after two shale oil fields recently dried up. There are problems with this move. First, Russia lacks the advanced technologies to search for oil in the deep Arctic Ocean. Second, even if Russia could find oil in the Arctic Ocean, it would not be able to drill with its antiquated horizontal drilling techniques. For years, Russia has dealt with technology shortcomings.

So how can Russia afford to modernize the military and oil industry as it faces declining revenues? It cannot. Whatever option Russia decides to pursue, it will be limited by its declining fiscal resources.

The Russian oil industry and the Russian government have spent the last several decades refusing to modernize the industry and prepare for future development. The arrogance of Russia’s top leaders in ignoring modernization of its oil industry is no less embarrassing than pathetic.

In the November-December issue of Foreign Affairs, writer Thane Gustafson states that “The state’s fiscal and regulatory system, although it has been successful in extracting revenue, constrains investments and stifles innovation. The result is an industry that lags behind its foreign peers, and this is at the very moment that the global oil industry is experiencing an unprecedented technology revolution.”

In the gas market, Russia is no longer the only supplier to Europe because it must now compete with the new Trans-Anatolian gas pipeline (TANAP) and the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (BTC). The TANAP and BTC runs from the Caspian Sea through the Southern Caucasus region to reach expanding markets in Europe. The demand for gas is growing in Europe and Asia, and some predict over 60% of that demand will occur in these regions’ developing economies. Russia has no transport capacity to supply these emergent markets, particularly in Asia. Russia is only now approving, in theory, construction of pipelines to Vladivostok, the most easterly Russian city, in order to expand its activities into Asia. It stands to lose out on new markets if it fails to build that capacity and sign long term, oil-indexed contracts in those regions. Liquefied natural gas capacity from Australia, Qatar, Africa, Turkmenistan, and potentially the U.S. may all beat Russia to the punch. Turkmenistan is regarded as the biggest threat to Russia’s natural gas dominance. It holds the fourth highest natural gas reserve and plans to develop a pipeline with CNPC, China’s dominant gas company. As a result, Russia will most likely lose credibility in Europe, and possibly Asia, as a source for natural gas.

The United States should take Russian growth and expansion intentions with a grain of salt. For too long, the U.S. has believed Russia’s saber rattling. The declining revenues of the oil and gas companies will eventually strain government spending. Russia is experiencing not only a decline in its energy sector, but also a decline in its geo-political clout, the likes of which have not occurred since the fall of the Berlin Wall more than two decades ago. While the U.S. will need and should seek cooperation of Russia in major conflict areas and in seeking further arms reductions, it need not react to each and every Russia military challenge, as it did during the Cold War. Presently, reinforcing the so-called Asian Pivot and addressing the turmoil in the Middle East should be the top foreign policy priorities for the U.S.

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Detect, Dismantle, and Disarm: IAEA Verification, 1992-2005
By Christine Wing and Fiona Simpson
United States Institute of Peace Press,
2013, 184 pp.

When the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) entered into force in 1970, it included a provision designating the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as its verification arm. When the IAEA was created in 1957, its principal purpose was to promote the use of nuclear energy for civilian purposes. Over the years, however, its role has changed.

Today, its more-visible function is to provide the international community with assurances that countries using nuclear science and nuclear materials are not using them to pursue weapons programs. Because of its expanded role in verification, largely through on-site inspections, the IAEA has joined the NPT as one of the two key anchors of the nuclear nonproliferation regime.

Over time and particularly after 1991, the IAEA has sought to strengthen its safeguards, or verification, function. The agency failed to detect Iraq’s advanced nuclear weapons program until the United Nations gave the agency special powers in Iraq in the wake of Baghdad’s defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The revelation of the Iraqi program prompted the IAEA to ask its member states for a more general enhancement of its verification authority by adopting an additional protocol, based on the 1997 Model Additional Protocol, to the standard comprehensive safeguards agreement that they reach with the IAEA. These protocols are intended to strengthen the IAEA’s authority to inspect nuclear facilities, detect illegal activities, and account for the use of nuclear materials. This was a positive step that, like most quantum leaps in strengthening the international nuclear regime, came in the aftermath of a catalytic event.

Yet, any fair analysis of the effectiveness of the IAEA and the international community in detecting safeguards violations must acknowledge that the IAEA, like all international organizations, operates in an international system that is dominated by states. Furthermore, like most international organizations, the IAEA lacks the authority to compel violators to comply with their international commitments. In other words, the IAEA can be only as effective as its member states allow it to be. Fifteen years after the agency asked its member states to adopt an additional protocol, one-third of them have failed to do so. Effective verification remains a work in progress.

What then is the overall record? How successful have the IAEA and the international community been in sounding the alarm when countries seek to conceal their nuclear programs from the agency and other countries? How effective have the IAEA and the international community been in reversing secret, incipient or advanced nuclear weapons programs once detected? What helps to explain success or failure in detection, dismantlement, and disarmament? These are important questions that have not been meticulously studied and for which observers provide differing answers.

Fortunately, Christine Wing (a board member of the Arms Control Association) and Fiona Simpson have written a deeply researched, highly readable study of the IAEA’s role in detecting and dismantling the nuclear weapons programs of four countries—Iraq, North Korea, South Africa (each in the 1990s), and Libya (largely 2003-2004)—all in the post-Cold War period. As indicated above, the international community and the IAEA had not discovered a secret nuclear program prior to 1991 or developed the means and tools for verifying that a suspect program had been effectively terminated or dismantled. Starting with Iraq in 1991, the IAEA and members of the international community broke new ground in a hurry, created new precedents, devised new verification tools, and accumulated valuable experience in international verification.

Using comparative case studies, the authors of this important book provide a detailed autopsy of all four nuclear programs and describe how lessons learned from one country might be applied to another. With that dissection of the four case studies, they identify a set of verification lessons that may have relevance to two contemporary cases, Iran and Syria, that are not part of this short volume and continue to defy international resolution.

Not surprisingly, the authors conclude that successful verification depends heavily on several factors. Among these factors are the clarity and extent of each country’s commitment to cooperating with international inspectors to reach an agreement on verification. More specifically, cooperation and success in detecting violations of safeguards agreements correlate with the extent to which a country perceives it is in its interest to cooperate with the IAEA, other interested parties, or both.

Thus, South Africa invited the IAEA to verify that it had dismantled its nuclear weapons program and eliminated its nuclear weapons just as the postapartheid government believed nuclear transparency was a price to pay for re-establishing normal relations with the rest of the world. Regime change in Pretoria led to a change in national priorities that did not include nuclear weapons.

Secret talks between Libyan authorities and their counterparts in the United States and the United Kingdom helped set the stage for Libya’s public renunciation of weapons of mass destruction. Despite some turf battles between the IAEA and both the United States and United Kingdom, the key determinant underlying the successful dismantlement of Libya’s nuclear program was Libya’s willingness to terminate its program.

In contrast, Iraq and North Korea sought to hide their nuclear weapon programs from the outside world; resisted international sanctions, including those imposed by the UN Security Council; and made international inspections and inspectors unwelcome. Over time, draconian international sanctions were imposed on both countries.

IAEA inspections in Iraq began in May 1991 with an explicit mandate to verify the accuracy of the declarations of its nuclear materials that Iraq had made to the IAEA under its safeguards agreement with the agency. The IAEA, which the Security Council empowered with special authorities to determine the accuracy of Iraq’s declaration of its use of nuclear materials, demonstrated flexibility and innovation in carrying out its mandate. The IAEA inspections in postwar Iraq marked the first time the agency undertook the task of accounting for all nuclear materials in a member state suspected of a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

The IAEA conducted 14 inspections, used swipe and area-wide environmental sampling for the first time, employed intelligence information from member states for site selection, realized more fully the benefits of unannounced inspections, and made use of global positioning satellite imagery to assist its work. The IAEA and its member states realized that verifying the accuracy of a state’s nuclear materials declaration was insufficient and that determining the accuracy and the completeness of a country’s declaration was necessary to assure the international community that the country was complying with its safeguards obligations.

When the IAEA was unable to verify the correctness of North Korea’s initial declaration in 1992, the stage was set for long-term hostility to international scrutiny that has lasted until today. Because North Korea now has conducted three nuclear weapons tests, any future verification agreement would have to include dismantlement of its nuclear weapons program and disarmament. Because the nuclear weapons program is one of North Korea’s few levers it has to extract concessions from the international community, it seems unlikely that Pyongyang would allow international inspectors to return at all or with a broad mandate.

Wing and Simpson argue that when multiple key actors get involved, there is a greater likelihood that the complexity of goals and voices will hamper effective verification and dismantlement. Here, the authors make a less convincing case. The South African and Libyan examples involved far fewer actors than did the Iraqi and North Korean cases, thereby making the verification process less cumbersome. Yet, it seems that the number of actors in each of the four cases was largely a result of the particular country’s willingness to cooperate and its calculations of the potential benefits from international inspections. At the very least, there appears to be mutual causation at work: the more a country resists external verification, the more other actors are motivated to intervene; the more outside actors get involved, the more complicated the process of verification becomes.

Finally, the authors examine the role of the IAEA in the four countries, and their analysis is interesting and instructive. They suggest a typology that portrays the IAEA in one of four different roles in the process of detection, dismantlement, and disarmament: as a sole actor (South Africa), as the most influential actor among a set of actors (North Korea at the outset but not later), as a partner with other international organizations (Iraq), and as a marginal actor in a process driven mostly by interested states (Libya). This typology seems sensible, but four countries and four different IAEA roles do not make for useful generalizations about the IAEA other than that each suspected case of noncompliance spawns its own requirements and places a premium on flexibility and learning. Collectively, the cases make the point that, in spite of the long-standing need to combat nuclear proliferation, the international tools and mechanics for doing so still are being tested and still are in their early stages of development.

The authors rightly ask, “Are the existing institutional bases and the treaties that underlie them adequate to the task of verifying nonproliferation when a state wants to hide its nuclear activities?” Although they have steadily improved over the years, international nuclear governance and the tools to detect violations of legally binding or voluntary nuclear commitments have not kept pace with international requirements. As more countries develop new civilian nuclear programs and as existing programs expand, the verification demands on the IAEA will continue to grow.

A country that is fully determined to develop a nuclear weapons program, whether inside or outside the NPT and the IAEA, can do so, although at considerable political and economic costs under the prevailing system of safeguards and international pressures. Today, Iran, North Korea, and even Syria exploit weaknesses in the nuclear nonproliferation regime and are willing to suffer international opprobrium and the negative effects of coercive diplomacy that may include a range of economic and political sanctions.

The IAEA, which is the sole international organization vested with responsibility to monitor and report on member states’ compliance with their safeguards obligations, faces a number of obstacles to carrying out that responsibility. Implicit in Wing and Simpson’s study is the acknowledgement that the IAEA not only is short on funding and authority, but also must operate with an increasingly politicized Board of Governors.

In addition, the IAEA lacks enforcement authority to make meaningful any international response to its technical judgment that a country is in noncompliance. It must rely on enforcement decisions by the UN Security Council. In the process of making a decision on what to do about a country’s noncompliance, the locus of decision-making moves from the technical reports of IAEA inspectors to the IAEA Secretariat to the Board Governors to the UN Security Council. The process grows increasingly political at each stage, and ensuring a country’s compliance with its international obligations becomes less predictable.

One important virtue of Wing and Simpson’s book is that it describes and analyzes the four tough proliferation cases in ways that are readily understandable to the lay public as well as to seasoned scholars and policy practitioners. It also shows how the IAEA must play its role as a technical international actor while being responsive to the politics and goals of the national actors on which it must rely for financial and political support.

The authors could have strengthened their book with some additional analysis of the international inspection system and its weaknesses, which are so evident with the current impasses on Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Nonetheless, Detect, Dismantle, and Disarm is a valuable contribution to the international community’s knowledge of how the IAEA safeguards system works, making clear its strengths and weaknesses.

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2. The Timing Just Isn’t Right
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U.S. must adapt, prepare for future terrorist attacks

It’s hard to believe that more than 11 years have passed since the devastating terrorist strike to our homeland on 9/11. Overnight, homeland security became a top priority. Yet, until last month’s Boston Marathon bombings, the issue of terrorism had faded from the front pages. The terrorist threat barely surfaced in the debates leading up to last November’s presidential election. While we have long been warning of it, the tragic events in Boston have jolted others, including those running in today’s Cleveland Marathon, to realize that the threats to our homeland have not disappeared — rather, they have evolved. Our public debate needs to evolve along with them.

The killing of Osama bin Laden and many other terrorist leaders seriously damaged al-Qaida, but did not destroy it. Today, smaller al-Qaida offshoots flourish in South Asia, Yemen and North Africa, and are dreaming up diabolical new ways to hurt us. The Christmas 2009 “underwear bomber,” who nearly killed 290 people on a Northwest Airlines flight into Detroit, and the 2010 plot to use explosive printer cartridges to blow up cargo planes over American cities are just two examples. Serious concerns remain about terrorists acquiring nuclear or biological materials and directing them against one of our cities. While the likelihood of such an attack might be remote, it would inflict catastrophic damage. Continued chaos in countries like Syria and Pakistan increases the risk that these weapons could fall into the wrong hands. 

The 9/11 attacks were carried out by terrorists who came from abroad. But today’s attacks are not just being hatched overseas. Disaffected young people in different pockets of the country are “self-radicalizing,” seduced by extremists who cater to their grievances, increasingly over the Internet, and peddle violence as a solution to their problems, real or perceived. The Fort Hood shooter who killed 13 soldiers in Texas in November 2009 had extensive Internet contact with a radical preacher in Yemen before he attacked. We have gotten better at stopping terrorists from crossing our borders, but those precautions can only be part of a solution. As the Boston bombings demonstrate, we also need to be wary of homegrown terrorists.

Another change is the emergence of a new and potentially devastating threat: cyber attacks. American companies, including those here in the Midwest, are on the front lines of this virtual battlefield. Our critical infrastructure — electrical grids, banking, telecommunications — is under daily attack from nonstate actors and adversary nations, including Iran and China. Some countries appear to be using cyber attacks to steal our companies’ trade secrets. American companies should be taking steps now to protect their electronic systems.

Since 9/11, Congress has made major changes in our national security system to help protect us: It created the Department of Homeland Security (a massive reorganization of 22 agencies); established the office of the director of National Intelligence; and refocused the FBI on counterterrorism. It also passed into law most of the 9/11 Commission recommendations. But government can only do so much. There is an important role for citizens across the nation. Some threats, like young people being radicalized, are best spotted and prevented by concerned people who know their local communities — parents, teachers, counselors, religious leaders. As hurricanes Katrina and Sandy showed, when a crisis strikes, community preparedness can be the difference between resilience and catastrophe.

Citizen engagement in national security is also important because it moves policy. These issues are too important to leave solely to the so-called experts. We need to persistently ask local and national leaders, in politics and business: Are we ready for the next crisis? We need to know if our local police, fire and emergency-response officials have the communications they require if a terrorist attack or natural disaster hits. We need to insist that our banks, health care providers and other entities that handle sensitive data are taking appropriate steps to secure it. We need to ensure that companies are protecting from cyber attacks the trade secrets that give them an edge in the global economy. Failing to plan is planning to fail.

We are safer than we were 11 years ago, but new threats are emerging. The consequences of lapsing into a pre-9/11 mindset —-could be dire. It is our duty as informed and engaged citizens to ensure that our government and our communities are better prepared for the next crisis than we were for the last.

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Congress’s budget process  broken because it’s ignored

After trying private negotiations, bipartisan commissions, informal “gangs” and a supercommittee, the search for a long-term federal fiscal plan has come  full circle back to where it started — regular order under the budget process in  Congress.

Or has it?

We hope it has, because regular order ensures that every member of Congress gets  to participate in the final form of any fiscal agreement, grand or otherwise.

Regular order simply means that the House and Senate pass budget resolutions,  as they have done, go to conference on those budget plans — including any  reconciliation instructions to committees — and negotiate a path forward that  then sets the direction for committees to begin filling in the details of the  agreement.

If reconciliation instructions to the various tax and direct spending  committees emerge from conference, then the instructed committees of the House  and Senate shape legislation within their jurisdictions in order to achieve the  revenue increases or spending reductions required by those instructions. The  reconciled committees pass on their actual changes in law to the Budget  committees, which bundle them up into a reconciliation bill. The reconciliation  bill then heads to the House and Senate floor for up-or-down votes, then to  conference and back to the House and Senate floors for final passage of a  reconciliation bill conference report.

The president then signs the bill, and at least in theory, deficits begin to  drop.

This all started in 1981 and had become old hat to some members of Congress.  That is, until recent years, in which Congress has failed to use regular order  and to enact the basic budget document for the upcoming fiscal year.

Those failures have led to debt-ceiling crises, “fiscal cliffs,” threats of  government shutdowns, complex appropriations negotiations and other sorts of  chaotic melodrama — all of which has confused and angered the general public and  left Congress widely demeaned.

Now, both the House and Senate have passed budget resolutions with  reconciliation instructions. Regular order has started, but will it  continue?

The critical question is very simple: will the House and Senate appoint  conferees so that negotiations on a fiscal 2014 budget can start?

Media reports and informal discussions with congressional staff indicate  hesitancy in both the House and Senate. Will a conference be held to get a  budget agreement? Will reconciliation even get a chance to begin? Many analysts  believe reaching any conference agreements will be impossible.

Ultimately, we must enact changes to preserve, adjust and strengthen the  major entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. We must also  enact fundamental tax reform that raises revenues by cutting back on the  trillion dollars of annual tax breaks that are essentially government subsides  run through the tax code.

The regular budget process is designed to resolve such conflicting  priorities. It is broken because it is ignored. That can change this year, if  congressional leaders have the nerve to see it through.

Without reconciliation, we doubt that a significant deficit-reduction bill  can emerge from Congress.

Without the protections of time limitations and privileged parliamentary  status that reconciliation provides, how will real tax reform or re-structuring  of entitlements ever pass?

So, while the House and Senate have passed separate budget resolutions, and  done so before April 15, as required by law, not a single dime has been cut from  future deficits by those resolutions.

This is a critical time for the House and Senate, as well as the  president.

The president has submitted his own budget plan for next year. He should urge  Congress to continue its work under its own budget process in order to get an  agreement that reduces the increasing debt placed on the American public.

House and Senate leadership should appoint conferees as soon as possible to  negotiate a compromise budget plan and demand that reconciliation instructions  emerge from that conference.

If leadership fails again, if the can gets booted down the road once more,  then the nation’s fiscal crisis deepens. It will mean one more year that  policymakers in Washington have failed to do the basics — produce a budget,  enforce that budget and put America on a sound long-term fiscal path.

Related posts:

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2. The future of Congress should lie in the past
3. For Political Closure, We Need Disclosure

Weep for the Senate

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How Politics Has Changed

When two senators recently got into a spat over whether the Boston Marathon bombings were being politicized, the news was everywhere within minutes. Reams of commentary quickly followed. In the maneuvering over gun-control legislation, every twist and turn was instantly reported and then endlessly debated. As the effects of the federal sequester start to make themselves felt, outlets in every medium — print, television, online — are carrying both the news and the inevitable partisan sniping over its meaning.

This is political reality today, and when people ask me how politics has changed since I first ran for Congress in 1964, it’s the first thing that comes to mind. Back then, when you spoke to the Rotary in a small town, you were speaking to a few members of the Rotary. Today, you might well be speaking to the world. A debate on Capitol Hill back then might or might not have made the news, but even if it did, days could go by before the rest of the country reacted. Today, the response is instantaneous, often hot-blooded, and almost inconceivably far-reaching.

It’s not just the sheer proliferation and aggressiveness of the media that have ratcheted up the intensity of political life. Almost every facet of politics is more complicated and hard-edged. Voters want instant results. Consultants are everywhere. Lobbyists have multiplied and become immeasurably sophisticated at finding ways to get what they want. Well-funded, highly organized interest groups enrich the DC region’s economy, while in the rest of the country grassroots organizations try to influence policy on every cause under the sun. All of this, in turn, has created an unending flood of money. Politics is now big business.

Perhaps because of the scrutiny that political decisions now get — and the speed with which organizations turn those decisions into fundraising opportunities — it is much harder to do the basic work of politics: finding common ground. I don’t think I’m being overly rosy in saying that a generation ago, when politicians of differing views met to hammer out their differences, they actually hammered out their differences. It was not easy, but they believed that as elected officials they had a responsibility to find their way out of difficult problems together. They understood that this usually meant accepting a solution that was less than perfect.

Today, the first words out of a politician’s mouth when presented with a new proposal are, “It doesn’t measure up.” Incremental achievements have come to be seen as shameful concessions, to be avoided if at all possible. In a Washington that is more ideological, more partisan, and less pragmatic than it used to be, the bedrock notion that politicians would come together to make the country work seems quaint. It hasn’t disappeared entirely, but it’s certainly endangered.

Which may be one reason there’s been another change I’ve seen in politics over the years. I first went to Congress at a time when Americans had faith in the institutions of government. The year I ran for office, Lyndon Johnson was campaigning for President on a platform that the country could successfully wage a war against poverty. Today, it seems inconceivable that a politician would be so bold or so naïve — it’s not just that Americans have been chastened in their ambitions in the nearly 50 years since, but that they would have very little confidence that government could deliver. Congress can’t even get a normal budget done on time. A “war” on anything seems beyond its grasp.

I don’t mean to be entirely negative. Politics’ greater intensity also has its bright spots. There are more and often better sources of information. Ordinary Americans are highly engaged, with more avenues of entry into the system. If you want to understand even the most complex issues facing Congress, it’s possible to learn about them far more easily than just a few decades ago.

Perhaps that’s something to build on. With greater public sophistication about a complex system, Americans might also show more patience with politicians trying in good faith to resolve our challenges. And if that happens, who knows? Maybe we’ll even discover that government can, in fact, successfully tackle the big problems.

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We should protect freedom of expression in all media

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Commentary: Tired of budget shenanigans? Here’s an answer

With the formal release of President Obama’s budget, the pieces are finally in place for a reprise of the Washington drama we’ve all come to know. There will be high-stakes negotiations, lines in the sand, and enough intrigue to keep Beltway insiders riveted by every piece of breaking news.

The rest of us, though, are already worn out. In repeated conversations with ordinary people, I’ve been struck by the immense frustration I’ve encountered. They’re tired of brinksmanship and constant fiscal crisis. They’re fed up with accusations, spin, fear mongering, and intransigence. They’ve had it with a complex, opaque process when the outline of a solution — controlling spending and entitlements, raising revenues to meet the country’s obligations, and investing in economic growth — seems evident. Above all, they’re weary of a government that appears addicted to crisis. Why, they wonder, can we not pass a budget in an orderly, rational way?

It’s a good question, though the answer is hardly reassuring: I believe Congress no longer knows how. Talking to a group of younger members recently, I realized they’d had no experience of following regular procedures to craft a budget. They’ve spent their congressional careers watching the leadership put it together in an ad-hoc, crisis-fueled manner. True budget-making skills on Capitol Hill are eroding. It’s in danger of becoming a lost art.

Yet it need not be. There is a time-honored process that we can rejuvenate at any time for constructing a budget. On Capitol Hill, it’s known as “the regular order.”

This is the insider’s way of referring to procedures that Congress developed over our history as a nation. Their guiding principle is to provide a coherent and well-structured way of deciding in detail where our national priorities ought to lie, and then funding them. They were designed to give members of Congress a clear, fair way to scrutinize, consider, debate, and reach consensus on the divisive issues that go along with taxing and spending.

The last time Congress passed a regular-order budget, not an omnibus spending bill, was 1997. Though it was far from a tidy process, its abandonment, I believe, is what has produced our current mess.

So what is the regular order? The President submits a budget on time (not two months late, as President Obama has just done). Then congressional committees and subcommittees take it up, dividing their work according to the departments of government — agriculture, defense, transportation and the like. They hold hearings, call witnesses, explore what the executive branch has done with its money in the past, and consider its plans for the future. They debate and draft their own proposals, and allow amendments from both parties. Once the full committee acts, its measure goes to the floor for further debate, amendments, and a vote. Eventually, the bills arrived at separately by the House and the Senate get reconciled and go to the President to be signed.

The advantage of the regular order, in addition to its transparency and accountability, is that it spreads the workload and makes room for the expertise and considered judgment of a wide array of legislators. In the past, the leadership deferred to experienced committee chairmen who knew the issues they were confronting inside and out, and who had a talent for drafting legislation. Rank-and-file members had a chance to influence the outcome through amendments and debate. The process played to Congress’s core strength of deliberation.

Not any longer. Now, huge omnibus bills and continuing resolutions — not to mention the mindless cudgel of the sequester — are put together by a handful of leaders and their staffs. They don’t have specific, detailed expertise, and they’re more interested in seeking partisan advantage than in fair process or effective legislating.

Too often in the past, members of Congress have sought some automatic budget mechanism — a balanced-budget amendment, say, or budget caps — to solve their problems. Mostly, these have been a way to avoid the hard choices required by the regular order. In the end, there’s no substitute for experience, knowledge, hard work, compromise, and a resolve to seek solutions. That’s what the regular order would encourage. It’s time for Congress to stop paying it lip service and actually revive it.

Editor’s note: The following commentary was written by Lee Hamilton, a PSA Advisory Board member and director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.

Related posts:

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2. Congress’s budget process broken because it’s ignored
3. Simpson-Bowles provides fiscal fix

Presidents are breaking the U.S. Foreign Service

American diplomacy is facing a crisis. The professional career service that is intended to be the backbone of that diplomacy no longer claims a lead role at the State Department or in the formulation or implementation of foreign policy. The U.S. Foreign Service is being marginalized — just as military efforts to resolve major diplomatic challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan have failed, and as diplomacy has become both more complex and more important to our national security and prosperity.

The Foreign Service is being relegated to a secondary status: staff support to political elites who set and manage policy. Long-held concepts about the disciplined, competitive, promotion-based personnel system are being called into question.

The Rogers Act established the Foreign Service as a merit-based, professional diplomatic service in 1924. This concept was reemphasized in 1946, after the U.S. experience in World War II ratified the need to model the Foreign Service’s personnel system after that of the military rather than the domestic civil service. The 1980 Foreign Service Act reiterated that “a professional career Foreign Service based on merit principles was necessary to meet the challenges of a more complex and competitive world.” The importance of a professional diplomatic service has been underscored by our national experience in the simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the broad array of current and foreseeable challenges.

What is wrong at State, the U.S. Agency for International Development, our embassies and other agencies that together are the vehicles for American diplomacy? What accounts for the Foreign Service being marginalized?

The most visible factor is the overwhelming — and growing — presence of political appointees in mid-level and top leadership positions at the State Department. For all their merit, political appointees are short-term officials, subject to partisan, ­personality-specific pressures. They do not notably contribute to the institution’s longer-term vitality, and their ascension creates a system inherently incapable of providing expert, nonpartisan foreign policy advice.

When the bulk of its leadership positions are held by transient appointees, the Foreign Service is undermined. This situation spawns opportunism and political correctness, weakens esprit de corps within the service and emaciates institutional memory.

Diplomatic capacity needs professional, institutional leadership. A career service must nurture a deep bench of high-quality professional diplomats. But the trend has been in the opposite direction. Since 1975, the number of top leadership positions at the State Department, defined as deputy secretaries, undersecretaries and assistant secretaries, has increased from 18 to 33. The share filled by career Foreign Service officers has fallen from 61 percent in 1975 to 24 percent in 2012. Only five of the 35 special envoys, representatives, advisers and coordinators appointed during President Obama’s first term were Foreign Service officers.

In exceptional cases, political ambassadorial appointments are understandable. But when a large number of these positions go to people with little exposure to the environment and practice of international diplomacy, it deprives the American people of the full value of their investment in some embassies, and it denies career officers the opportunity to advance. Treating these positions as rewards for political support or contributions devalues diplomacy.

The State Department has two personnel systems: the General Service, its civil service system, and the Foreign Service. The structure of the Foreign Service makes it more suitable for global diplomacy: Its officers are mobile and available for worldwide service. Unlike in the civil service, they can be reassigned or promoted between jobs at home and abroad without having to compete for a vacancy in the system. The department has struggled to manage these distinctly different systems, and the result has been an increasingly fractious and dysfunctional corporate environment, draining energy and focus.

The civil service has grown significantly the past few decades, at the expense of the Foreign Service, especially in the policy bureaus that deal with issues such as refugees, law enforcement, environment and disarmament. If this trend is not reversed, the United States will lose the invaluable contribution of people with overseas experience. The State Department’s civil service personnel system must be adapted to conform more closely to the requirements of professional diplomacy.

Needed are a fresh approach and a strategic vision to build a strong, professional diplomatic service and State Department as the central institution for U.S. diplomacy. The basic requirements include a rigorous, exam-based entry; worldwide availability and mobility; programs to strengthen capacity through professional education and training, integrated with competitive, merit-based advancement; and efforts to foster the knowledge, cross-functional thinking and broad perspectives a premier diplomatic service brings, especially at the senior levels.

Every major country ensures that the competence of its career diplomats is constantly improved to meet 21st-century challenges. We can do no less. The United States can no longer rely on economic and military preeminence to compensate for a less-prepared, less well-resourced, less professional diplomatic service. With a new secretary of state, the time to begin is now.

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