The Fletcher School

Text of the Speech by Richard G. Lugar [R-Ind.], Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the Class Day Ceremony at The Fletcher School at Tufts University on Saturday, May 22, 2004

We come together today to celebrate a high moment in the lives of all who will receive diplomas and in the lives of all who have given love, inspiration, and support to these graduates. We say to the graduates, "You must do better than we have done. We will support your dreams because they are embodied in all that we have hoped for."

For decades, the Fletcher School has shined brightly as a prolific contributor to the skills and intellectual inquiry that our world needs to advance international peace and prosperity. It has brought together teachers, practitioners, and students from every corner of the globe, good people who exemplify creativity and optimism for the future. The exceptional influence of the Fletcher School was underscored for me two days ago, when I had the pleasure of receiving Kostas Karamanlis, the Prime Minister of Greece, at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I learned that he had earned a masters degree in political science and economics and a Ph. D. in diplomatic history from the Fletcher School. Like the Prime Minister, all of you will leave here girded for the expanded challenges that you will face in the years ahead.

We are sending you into a world that is uncertain and dangerous. We are asking you to be emissaries of international engagement within governments, corporations, schools, and communities that will not always recognize the urgency of solving global problems.

This is not new for Fletcher School graduates. The School itself was founded in troubled times. In 1933, this country and much of the world had entered the Great Depression. Many Americans believed that isolationism and protective tariffs would insulate our society and our economy from greater harm. This mistaken notion contributed to a deepening of the Depression and the onset of World War II. Today we face different global challenges, but the impulse to turn inward in difficult times is still present.

The experience of September 11, 2001, re-taught a grim lesson that our nation has periodically had to re-learn: trouble will find us whether or not we choose to be involved in the world. Because advances in transportation and communication have shrunk the world and because the United States is now universally regarded as the most powerful nation on Earth, this condition is inescapable.

The world is not benign if left alone. Our security depends on innumerable factors beyond our sovereign control. It may depend on educational practices in Pakistan, security at biological laboratories in Russia, or the skill of cyber-detectives in Germany. Similarly, our economic prosperity and environmental quality are deeply affected by the practices of nations far beyond our continent. Even maintaining individual health, once the sole province of the family doctor, now depends also on international epidemiologists and globally marketed pharmaceuticals.

As graduates of a prestigious school devoted to internationalism and effective foreign policy, you understand these complexities. As you have studied during the past several years, you have witnessed historic and often tragic changes in the world. You have seen terrorists kill thousands of people in this country and destroy the World Trade Center and a part of the Pentagon. You have seen United States military personnel engaged in two difficult and costly wars. You have seen revelations of U.S. abuses against prisoners in Iraq that have pushed international resentment and distrust of the United States to levels unprecedented in recent times. Around the United States this month, ceremonies are commemorating the entry of graduate students into their chosen fields. But few graduates, if any, are poised to have as much impact as you may have on your countries and on our world in a historic moment of need.

The United States cannot feed every person, lift every person out of poverty, cure every disease, or stop every conflict. But our power and status have conferred upon us a tremendous responsibility to humanity. In an era afflicted with terrorism, the world will not be secure and just and prosperous unless the united states and talented individuals devote themselves to international leadership.

to win the war against terrorism, the united states must assign u.s. economic and diplomatic capabilities the same strategic priority that we assign to military capabilities. there are no shortcuts to victory. we must commit ourselves to the slow, painstaking work of foreign policy day by day and year by year.

In response to September 11, 2001, the United States has created a new Department of Homeland Security, improved airport and seaport security, reconfigured our military weapons and tactics, and scrutinized the efficiency of our intelligence services. All of these steps may help to make us safer. But taking military action against terrorists and their supporters and improving homeland defense are not the same as executing a global strategy designed to overcome terrorism. Military action is necessary to defeat serious and immediate threats to our national security. But the war on terrorism will not be won through attrition - particularly since military action will often breed more terrorists and more resentment of the United States. Nor is the threat or use of military force likely to achieve national realignments that mitigate the extreme danger posed by terrorism in an age when weapons and materials of mass destruction are increasingly available.

Unless the United States commits itself to a sustained program of repairing and building alliances, expanding trade, pursuing resolutions to regional conflicts, supporting democracy and development worldwide, and controlling weapons of mass destruction, we are likely to experience acts of catastrophic terrorism that would undermine our economy, damage our society, and kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.

The United States, as a nation, simply has not made this commitment. We are worried about terrorism, but the evolution of national security policy has not kept up with the threat. We have relied heavily on military options and unilateral approaches that weakened our alliances. We have engaged in self-flagellation over the September 11 tragedy rather than executing affirmative global strategies aimed at addressing the root causes of terrorism.

The United States has launched a few innovative programs such as the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the Global Aids Initiative, but we have not approached foreign policy with the determination and imagination that is required to respond to the risks that we face. Our commitment of resources has remained incremental and our suspicion of international cooperation has continued to hamper our standing and effectiveness in the world.

The debate that preceded the Iraq war in early 2003 focused on the question of whether the United States should make concessions to world opinion or pursue its perceived national security interests unencumbered by the constraints of the international community. But this was a false choice. National security decision-making can rarely be separated from the constraints of the international community, if only because our resources and influence are finite. Our security depends not on clever decision-making about when to go it alone, but on careful maintenance of our relations with other countries that ensures the international community will be with us in a crisis.

One quantitative measure of our failure to adjust to a new strategic reality is the continued under-funding of the U.S. Foreign Affairs Budget. This year, President Bush proposed a healthy 8 percent increase for the foreign affairs portion of the budget, which includes money for the State Department, embassy operations, foreign assistance, cultural and educational programs, contributions to international institutions, and many other aspects of our outreach to the world. The Senate Budget Committee cut the President's request by a billion dollars. On the Senate floor, I offered an amendment to restore the cut, and that amendment succeeded. But the House Budget Committee cut the President's request by $4.6 billion. The resulting Budget conference settled on a compromise that would trim more than $2 billion from President Bush's request. If this occurs, Congress will be doing the unthinkable - downsizing the President's foreign policy budget request for the second straight year at a time of our greatest diplomatic crisis in decades. This is the equivalent of cutting the defense budget in time of war. Yet the cuts in civilian foreign affairs spending have not penetrated the consciousness of the general public or captured the attention of the media.

Unfortunately, this is not a political aberration or the result of a budget impasse. The Foreign Affairs budget has been underfunded since the end of the Cold War. The American public generally understands that the United States reduced military spending in the 1990s following the fall of the Soviet Union. Few are aware, however, that this peace dividend spending reduction theme was applied even more unsparingly to our foreign affairs programs. In constant dollars, the foreign affairs budget was cut in six consecutive years from 1992 to 1998. This slide occurred even as the United States sustained the heavy added costs of establishing new missions in the fifteen emergent states of the former Soviet Union. In constant dollars, the cumulative effect was a 26 percent decrease in our foreign affairs programs. As a percentage of GDP, this six-year slide represented a 38 percent cut in foreign affairs programs. By the end of the decade, these cuts had taken their toll. The General Accounting Office reported that staffing shortfalls, lack of adequate language skills, and security vulnerabilities plagued many of our diplomatic posts. Meanwhile, after decades of being the largest provider of economic aid to the world, the United States fell behind Japan throughout the period between 1993 and 2001.

In the year following the September 11th attacks, President Bush and Secretary Powell prevailed upon Congress to boost foreign affairs spending. We began the process of filling the budgetary hole that we had dug for ourselves in the 1990s. But Congress' reductions in the President's foreign affairs spending requests during the last two years have halted this progress. We have yet to alter the status of foreign affairs as the neglected sibling of national security policy. The Defense Budget is more than 13 times larger than the Foreign Affairs Budget. As a percentage of gross domestic product, foreign affairs programs are still about 40 percent below their average levels of the 1980s.

Nor is the devaluation of foreign affairs programs and capabilities purely a matter of parsimony. Because of political disputes and disinterest, Congress has not passed a comprehensive foreign assistance authorization bill, which revises the laws that govern foreign aid programs, since 1985. In contrast, failure in even a single year to pass a defense authorization bill is seen as a glaring dereliction of congressional duty.

Between 1995 and 2002 the United States - the economic engine of the world -- effectively constrained itself from entering into significant new trade agreements by failing to pass trade promotion authority (TPA). This monumental political failure hurt U.S. workers and businesses, perplexed allies, ceded markets to competitors, and slowed development overseas. President Bush secured TPA by a close vote in 2002, but much damage had been done.

On another front, the United States has repeatedly failed to exert the leadership necessary to conform multilateral treaties to important U.S. interests. The result has been problematic agreements like the Kyoto Treaty, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the International Criminal Court Treaty that lack sufficient support in the United States and divide us from our allies. Partisan posturing continues over whether to support these treaties, when the real question is why the United States -- occupying a seemingly unrivaled position in the world - cannot negotiate satisfactory agreements that would be supported both at home and overseas.

Most recently, the Foreign Relations Committee has attempted to secure Senate passage of the Law of the Sea Convention. This treaty, to which 145 countries are a party, is clearly in the national security and economic interest of the United States. It is supported by the President, the Defense Department, the Navy, the Coast Guard, all affected ocean industries and the environmental community. It was passed out of the Foreign Relations Committee by a 19-0 vote. Yet the treaty is being held up by unfounded fears of a few Senators that it will undercut U.S. sovereignty or subject the United States to interference by multi-lateral institutions.

The september 11 attacks may have jarred the united states out of its complacency toward foreign threats. but our ability and will to exert u.s. leadership outside the confines of military action have been eroded by inattention, budget incrementalism, and an increasing partisanship that afflicts foreign policy decision-making. as a result, we are conducting diplomacy without sufficient funding and sometimes without public support in an era when we are depending on diplomats to build alliances, reconstruct nations, and explain the united states worldwide.

Despite our national resistance to asserting diplomatic leadership, America's unrivaled position in the world, our fundamental traditions of freedom and altruism, and the desperate need for international cooperation in a time of potential chaos have placed the United States in a position to determine whether the world advances or declines.

My message to you today is that you not only will have to lead in international settings, you also must lead your fellow citizens. Those of you who are Americans must be able and willing to explain persuasively why diplomacy is important and why the United States must engage the rest of the world. Those of you who are from other parts of the world must build support for global cooperation within your nations.

I am convinced that the majority of American people do understand that we have a moral responsibility to foster the concepts of opportunity, free enterprise, the rule of law, and democracy. They understand that these values are the hope of the world. They are ready to make sacrifices, particularly in response to thoughtful leadership.

Many of you will choose the calling of diplomacy, politics, humanitarian work, or military service. Those who will make the difference are the diplomats who have the language and cultural skills to listen and communicate with people of other nations and faiths. They are the business executives who can make the ethical decisions and sound investments that will create jobs and expand global prosperity. They are the humanitarian aid workers who can manage programs and projects in difficult and sometimes hostile environments. They are the UN officials, the NGO leaders, and the economic aid experts who can help construct the building blocks for healthy societies. They are the military officers who will risk their lives on a routine basis for a more peaceful world. And they are the elected officials who will lead their constituents to support all these efforts.

Assuming such roles does not require conformity of thought or agreement with government policies. It does not require sacrifice of individual goals and dreams of family and material prosperity - though some may make those sacrifices. But it does require that each of you think beyond your immediate concerns and find within yourself the will to lead. And it does require that you understand how blessed you are to sit here today and how much your countries and the international community will depend on you.

I am confident that you will not be intimidated or defeated by the difficult work before you. You will affirm the importance of the diploma you have earned by growing in your abilities to continue learning, and expand your capacity to love and to build strong relationships. You will surely find excitement in serving others in a world without limits that invites you to lead.