The One Percent Solution

Richard N. Gardner

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2000

Article preview: first 500 of 4,215 words total.

Summary:  A successful U.S. foreign policy cannot be carried out with barely one percent of the federal budget. The next president must end this dangerous charade.

Richard N. Gardner, Of Counsel to Morgan, Lewis, and Bockius and Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia University, has been U.S. Ambassador to Italy and Spain and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. Last year, he served on the Secretary of State's Overseas Presence Advisory Panel, which made recommendations on the reform and funding of U.S. diplomacy.

SHIRKING THE COST OF WORLD LEADERSHIP

A dangerous game is being played in Washington with America's national security. Call it the "one percent solution" -- the fallacy that a successful U.S. foreign policy can be carried out with barely one percent of the federal budget. Unless the next president moves urgently to end this charade, he will find himself in a financial straitjacket that frustrates his ability to promote American interests and values in an increasingly uncertain world.

Ultimately, the only way to end the dangerous one percent solution game is to develop a new national consensus that sees the international affairs budget as part of the national security budget -- because the failure to build solid international partnerships to treat the causes of conflict today will mean costly military responses tomorrow. Those who play the one percent solution game do not understand a post-Cold War world in which a host of international problems now affects Americans' domestic welfare, from financial crises and the closing of markets to global warming, aids, terrorism, drug trafficking, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Solving these problems will require leadership, and that will cost.

MONEY CHANGES EVERYTHING

If this all sounds exaggerated, consider the way the one percent solution game is being played this year, when America has a GDP of nearly $10 trillion and a federal budget of over $1.8 trillion. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright asked the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for $25 billion in the budget for fiscal year (FY) 2001, which begins October 1, for the so-called 150 Account, which covers the nonmilitary costs of protecting U.S. national security. OMB cut that figure to $22.8 billion to fit President Clinton's commitment to continued fiscal responsibility and limited budgetary growth. The congressional budget committees cut it further to $20 billion, or $2.3 billion less than the $22.3 billion approved for FY 2000. At the same time, the budget committees raised defense spending authority for FY 2001 to $310.8 billion -- $4.5 billion more than the administration requested.

Clinton and Albright strongly protested the congressional cuts. They will undoubtedly protest even more when the appropriations committees of the Senate and the House divide up the meager 150 Account pie into inadequate slices for essential foreign affairs functions. At the end of this congressional session, $1 billion or so of the foreign affairs cuts may be restored if Clinton threatens to veto the appropriation bills -- not easy to do in an election year. Of course, the next president could make another familiar move in the one percent solution game -- ask for a small supplemental appropriation to restore the previous cuts. But if the past is any guide, Congress will do its best to force the next administration to accommodate most of its supplemental spending within the existing budget. (This year, for instance, Congress resisted additional spending to pay for the U.S. share of multilateral projects such as more U.N. peacekeeping and debt reduction for the poorest ...

End of preview: first 500 of 4,215 words total.