suffer all the risks and shoulder all the costs of making the world better? Foreign aid is just another way to throw good money down a bottomless hole. We could use it better at home tending — and protecting — our own garden. Yes, we have friends whom we will continue to support. We have interests that we will protect. But that’s all the involvement in the world that we want or need. During the Clinton years, Congress generally tended to back the isolationist side and was not supportive of providing resources for engagement.
“Engagement” was not an airy concept (though many portrayed it that way). It came with nitty-gritty specifics (though these varied, depending on whether the country in question was an adversary, a friend, or potentially a friend). We had very formal ways to “engage” both militarily and diplomatically (the two had to work in tandem). And we expected these to lead to clear and specific results.
For example, in a form of military engagement we call “Security Assistance,”[73] specific components — foreign military sales, foreign military financing, provision of excess defense articles, training, education in our school system, intelligence sharing, and so on — were expected to create a formal and developing military-to-military relationship.
Thus when we embarked on a new relationship of engagement (as we did in my time with the Central Asian states or Yemen), we’d usually begin programs informally, in a small way, and later we’d make them more formal… put them into one or more of the categories, set up a program to develop their actual resources, set up and fund joint training programs, and the like. In other words, engagement might start informally, but it was expected to grow into a more formal relationship. I felt that if we were more aggressive and planned and coordinated engagement programs better — military, diplomatic, economic, cultural, etc. — we could truly “shape” a more stable, secure, and productive environment in troubled regions of the world.
The Clinton administration’s engagement policies had the added effect of building on a process that the Goldwater-Nichols Act and the end of the Cold War had already started — the expansion of the role of the CINCs in their regions. Goldwater-Nichols, passed in the mid-’80s, gave more power to the CINCs, but primarily as war fighters. By the end of the ’90s, Goldwater-Nichols had come into bloom; the CINCs had become far more than war fighters; and the Clinton administration gave the CINCs all around the world a mission to shape their regions and use multilateral approaches in ways that went beyond the CINCs’ traditional military role.
This was not simply a wish. The administration strongly promoted and stressed this change; and they made it very clear that they wanted the CINCs to implement it.
But not everyone welcomed it, including the CINCs themselves. The change came because there was no other choice. No one else could do the job.
When I took over as commander of CENTCOM, I found a tremendous void in the diplomatic connections in our AOR. There was a void in expanding the personal relationships that Generals Hoar and Peay had worked hard to create. There was a void in establishing and implementing policy.
The void came from several causes.
One, the State Department had not been given the resources they needed to do their job. The neo- isolationists had cut foreign aid, leaving the State Department without the wherewithal — the people, the money, the programs — to make the impact they should have been making.
Two, while the end of the Cold War had greatly diminished any chances of a world-spanning conflict, crises had begun to pop up all over the place; and the military found itself involved in confronting all of them, even those that were not totally military problems.
Three, the CINCs now had resources the State Department did not have; the power of the CINCs was now growing (a reality recognized throughout our region); and the CINCs soon became the chief conduit to personal connections and to the resources State did not have. Much of what got done was done through the CINCs.
During my time as a CINC, I was asked to carry out presidential and other diplomatic missions that would normally have fallen to diplomats. I’m sure such things frustrated the State Department, but I don’t think they disapproved. In fact, they were very supportive. It was more a case of: “Well, if we can’t do it, at least somebody is taking care of it. If it’s the CINCs, then God bless them.”
Like most CINCs, I tried to work very closely with the State Department. In every country, our ambassador is the President’s representative. I never did anything that an ambassador did not know of and approve.
Moreover, the CINCs often had more personal presence and far more connections than the ambassadors. In many countries in CENTCOM’s region, for example, the senior government leadership is also the senior military leadership. This is not our system (and the downsides are obvious), yet the fact had practical consequences. They were usually more comfortable with soldiers than with diplomats in many cases.
In fact, more often than not, the ambassadors were very glad we were there. We not only brought them the connections we’d made, but we provided them with the ability to get things done they couldn’t ordinarily do… some small, some larger.
Anything we did for the ambassadors had to have some military overlap. We couldn’t simply blatantly set up an aid program. But even here we had some room to maneuver. In Africa, for example, we might be engaged in teaching a country’s military how to conduct peacekeeping or humanitarian operations, and we might set up training exercises in the villages. I would send out my military veterinarians, dentists, and doctors (who needed the training; they needed to practice these kinds of operations) to go into the villages with the African country’s military, and they’d conduct the exercises together. In the context of the military exercise, we’d build an orphanage or paint a school or set up a clinic as a Civic Action project. We’d be providing our guys with useful training while showing the African troops actually how to do it; and at the same time, we were benefiting needy people. When the exercises were over, we would have the American ambassador cut the ribbon for the new clinic. It was important, in my mind, to always demonstrate civilian leadership of our military and the close cooperation between our diplomats and soldiers.
The countries of Central Asia are prone to frequent and often devastating natural disasters such as earthquakes and mud slides (made all the more devastating because buildings are often made from mud bricks). When disasters hit, the normal procedure in these countries is to call in the military to preserve order and help pick up the pieces. We take care of this mission in a very different way. Our national military normally does not get involved. Rather, our National Guard units in the states are trained to handle the aftermath of earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and the like.
We decided to hold conferences on disaster assistance in some of these countries. They brought their fire, police, emergency service units, and military; we brought experts from the U.S., who showed them how to intermix the civilian and military and cooperate with each other; and we did all this in the name of the U.S. ambassadors.
We held other conferences in the region on environmental security issues — justifying them from the point of view that the military had to be good stewards of the environment, too. (We actually have many restrictions aimed at protecting the environment; and, of course, military training can damage it.) And sometimes the military is called in to police the environment — oil spills, violation of protected fisheries, hazardous waste, and so on.
In organizing environmental security conferences, the term “security” was key. An “environmental” conference on disposing of hazardous waste, for example, would not have played well back at the Pentagon. We had to have a “military” or “security” connection. Armed with that, we could bring in the EPA to talk about how to deal with hazardous waste material. Then I could bring in the ambassador and expand the conference to other issues — even human rights. (Human rights issues are very important militarily when you are trying to teach the importance of “winning hearts and minds” to military forces with no history of these considerations in their operations.)
All of these forms of engagement build strong relationships with the various countries. They tie in important military and nonmilitary programs. And from there we are able to move on to more sophisticated joint training and military assistance projects that promote strong military-to-military relationships and build better capabilities. Everybody benefits.
Not everybody back home saw things that way. The struggle went on and on between those longing to lean forward into the world and to do what we could to shape it, and the isolationist passion to block all that.[74]
During the nearly fifteen years since the end of the Cold War, talking heads and op-ed writers have spilt a lot of words on the “emergence of the American Empire.”
