The Biden administration needs a proactive foreign policy. Congress wrote the playbook.
During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this month, Antony Blinken was questioned on the international challenges facing the Biden administration. Unsurprisingly, China and Iran loomed large in the conversation, but peppered throughout the testimony was also a slew of crises and potential inflection points that will undoubtedly keep now Secretary Blinken and his team up at night. Turkey, Russia, and Iran are feuding over the fate of Syria while U.S. troops and partner forces quash ISIS remnants. The conflict in Yemen rages on while 24.3 million people — 80% of the country’s population — require humanitarian aid. An estimated 58,000 Ethiopians have been displaced in the country’s Tigray region due to conflict that has sparked serious allegations of extrajudicial killings and sexual violence committed by government forces. There was not enough time for the committee to ask Sec. Blinken about his thoughts on places like Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, where jihadist insurgents have proved resilient in rural areas, or Libya, where a rocky ceasefire holds between rival government factions backed by a host of foreign fighters. And now a military coup in the fragile state of Myanmar looks to be one of the Biden administration’s first foreign policy challenges.
All of these crises are exacerbated by COVID-19, with the revenues of already crippled state institutions falling at the same time that governments are balancing increased debt burdens while managing unprecedented public health campaigns. The World Bank estimates that between 88 and 150 million people will be pushed below the poverty line of living on less than $1.90 per day because of the crisis, the first time the global poverty rate has risen since 1990. Worryingly, an estimated 82 percent of those people will be from middle-income countries, which risks adding even more fragile states to a list that already consists of 39 countries. The sheer breadth of these challenges makes it crucial that the Biden administration adopts a proactive foreign policy that anticipates future crises and prevents any more so-called “forever wars.” However, President Biden’s team need not reinvent the wheel, as a framework for this kind of strategy already exists: The U.S. Global Fragility Act.
The U.S. Global Fragility Act (GFA), which passed Congress with bipartisan support in December 2019, is a significant reimagining of the traditional reactionary foreign policy doctrine. The GFA mandates the government develop and utilize an inter-agency Global Fragility Strategy to prevent and tackle violence in fragile states — countries with high levels of institutional or social fragility, those affected by violent conflict, or both— using best practices gleaned from pilot programs in five countries over the next ten years. Importantly, the strategy seeks to buck the trend of one-off aid dispersals and outside nation-building, instead calling for a unified government strategy across the defense, development, and diplomacy sectors to build local institutional capacity to address the root causes of conflict, such as endemic corruption and weak and exclusionary governance. As Sec. Blinken iterated during the same confirmation hearing, the GFA is a tool to “prevent fragile states from becoming failed states.” To get the most out of the GFA, the Biden administration will need to empower the oft competing worlds of Congress and foreign aid.
Emergency assistance is synonymous with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), with the bags and boxes of its supplies stamped with the slogan “From the American people” found in warzones and disaster areas around the world. Its budget reflects this humanitarian priority — only $4.8 billion of its nearly $25 billion FY20 budget went to the more long-term sector of “governance.” The Biden administration should instruct USAID to act much bolder in its mandate of “recipient self-reliance and resilience” by investing more in initiatives and programs that improve good governance, especially in fragile states. Humanitarian assistance will and should continue to be a priority for the agency — especially during the COVID-19 pandemic— but relief should not be a substitute, nor incentivize, the wholesale duplication of national government systems. The GFA provides both a framework for the new administration’s review of USAID’s work, where officials should guide more traditional aid programs to expand their activities into institution and capacity building, and also acts as a single strategy in which to better coordinate the agency’s often fragmented activities. Where feasible and safe, USAID should also look to channel more aid through countries’ own national budgets and implement programs through state systems to support governments in learning to deliver results for their own citizens. This shift in strategy will be difficult, but the nomination of a prominent figure like former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power to lead USAID is an early sign that the Biden administration views international development as critical to its larger foreign policy agenda.
Along with foreign aid, the Biden administration will also need to leverage the GFA’s authors on Capitol Hill in implementing its strategy. As Congress’s influence in foreign policymaking has wained over the years, representatives have often sought to champion the cause of individual countries and initiatives — Sen. Jim Inhofe’s (R-OK) crusade for solving the conflict in Western Sahara is a prime example. The GFA provides a useful framework for the White House and State Department to engage Congress on such issues, coordinating U.S. government policy around preventing conflict and building state capacity while also giving representatives a tool to influence strategy and provide meaningful oversight over U.S. strategy in a particular state, conflict, or region. In turn, improved consultation with Congress on issues of state fragility will help the Biden administration make its case for robust funding for the GFA’s programs and activities. The reform and rebuilding (and in some cases, just building) of government institutions takes significant time, money, and attention, requiring sustained and predictable support well beyond typical campaign cycles of four, six, or even eight years. Importantly, the GFA is designed so that Congress does not have to go it alone in this regard — their early funding can encourage allies and partners to contribute their fair share to the Multi-Donor Global Fragility Fund also established by the bill.
Critics will argue that the GFA and its institution-building ethos is just a repackaging of the traditional foreign policy thinking that has led to the “forever wars” of Iraq and Afghanistan. In reality, the GFA represents the first whole-of-government effort to learn from these conflicts. Propping up weak governments reliant on long-term U.S. assistance is neither desirable nor sustainable, and the GFA’s diplomacy-development-defense nexus provides a roadmap for the U.S. to responsibly head-off emerging national security threats via non-military means. In addition, the GFA’s focus on building local institutional capacity means U.S. assistance will not be continuous, with the clear goal of building sustainable state capacity to chart a country out of fragility.
As the new Biden administration grapples with the enormous tasks of attaining a responsible end to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and countering China and Iran, they will be best served by adopting a proactive foreign policy to ensure other crises do not end up on its desk. The Global Fragility Act provides a roadmap for this approach, and, most importantly, is a way for the United States to responsibly address national security challenges via a strategy that promotes responsive and accountable governance in a time when the world is in desperate need of stability.
