Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.news From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Task force looks beyond Cold War Date: Thu, 29 Oct 92 14:38:17 EST Message-ID: \SE A \HD Task force looks beyond Cold War \SH Trade issues overshadow defense \BY Warren Strobel \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES Whoever is sworn in as president in January will face the daunting challenge of reshaping a national security apparatus erected to fight the Cold War. Some of that structure is now no more relevant than the U.S. nuclear missiles once pointed at Poland. At the State Department and in academia, special study teams are completing proposals for major changes in the way the United States makes foreign, defense and trade policy. Perhaps the biggest challenge is to ensure that U.S. economic interests, once of secondary concern compared with Soviet military power, will be at center stage when decisions are made. The change is already clear in the presidential campaign. When foreign policy has come up at all, it usually has been in debates over relations with major trading partners such as Japan and China, on free-trade agreements and on the migration of jobs overseas. A State Department task force, known as State 2000, is due to complete a preliminary report by Nov. 1 that recommends major changes to steer the department into the new era. It would give greater prominence to 1990s concerns such as trade, U.N. peacekeeping, regional instability and refugees. Some bureaus would be eliminated or merged, others upgraded. It also calls for changes in the role of U.S. embassies in an era when CNN and commercial computer data bases often provide information more quickly than traditional diplomatic channels. While such studies may seem like exercises in rearranging flow charts, organization is important, said Richard Holbrooke, an assistant secretary of state in the Carter administration. Mr. Holbrooke, who co-chairs a bipartisan blue-ribbon panel on the subject, said: "We're not just moving boxes around on an organization chart. This is not a group of organization wonks." Many recent foreign policy failures - such as not seeing Saddam Hussein's real intentions toward Kuwait or acting before the disintegration of Yugoslavia - happened because senior officials were preoccupied with other matters and did not get information they should have. Others, like the Iran-Contra scandal, occurred because formal government channels were ignored. "Any secretary of state is going to focus on five, six, 10 issues," said William Bacchus, executive director of the State 2000 task force. "But you need to have a system to ensure the hundreds of subordinate issues get handled properly." Mr. Holbrooke added: "Bad organization creates stalemates, which then lead to bypass mechanisms, which means you're operating [government] on two levels." The reformers' challenge is to simultaneously figure out how to better coordinate foreign and domestic policy, handle problems no one envisioned three or four years ago, and properly channel the oceans of information now becoming available for analysis. A July study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded: "We are a country ill-equipped for new priorities. Our institutions creak with anachronisms. Many leaders proclaim change but act as if nothing has changed." That study gave birth to the blue-ribbon panel, a joint effort of the Carnegie Endowment and the Institute for International Economics. It focuses on the White House rather than the State Department. It will propose giving greater weight to economic and environmental concerns in White House deliberations. One idea is to create a National Economic Security Council alongside the current National Security Council; another would combine the Commerce Department and U.S. Trade Representative's Office into an entity with more bureaucratic clout. Mr. Holbrooke has been mentioned for a senior post if Bill Clinton is elected, but the panel includes many former officials from Republican administrations. It hopes the next president will heed its advice. So do members of the State 2000 task force, whose Nov. 1 deadline was deliberately chosen to fall before Election Day. Both groups want to help forge a new consensus on foreign policy to replace the largely vanished ideological divisions of the Cold War. Attempts to overhaul the foreign policy establishment are rare, and success is rarer still. The last such effort failed in the mid-1970s. But officials argue that the end of the Cold War, the presidential election and a major turnover in Congress - especially on its foreign affairs committees - provide a rare chance for real reform. "What I've been surprised by, really, is the lack of cynicism, the number of people willing to take one more look at it," Mr. Bacchus said. Still, as a senior administration official said, "There are major impediments to change." Congress often forces the executive branch to create a new office when it thinks a problem isn't getting enough attention, or stops it from closing others. Bureaucrats resist change, even when agencies become obsolete. And it has yet to be demonstrated that foreign policy and domestic policy, which play to different constituencies, can be blended better. "We haven't ever done the domestic side right," one task force official said. Now, he said, "the issues cannot be isolated into domestic and foreign policy. They never could, probably." That belief - that the divide between foreign and domestic policy crumbled along with the Berlin Wall - runs through much of the planning for the future. Someone coined the word "intermestic" to describe the merging of the international and domestic agendas. The crises of the future - AIDS, mass migration of peoples, international crime - cannot be neatly separated into one compartment or another. Coordinating the two could overburden an already top-heavy bureaucracy. This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM