A thought about the State Department priorities

You can give priority to the urgent or you can give priority to the important. Members of the House of Representatives, facing election every other year, don't seem to understand that they can give priority to anything but the urgent. A President spends his first year in office implementing a program planned by his predecessor, and faces an election in his fourth year; he too has a pretty short time horizon. Diplomats get ahead by serving their appointed political leaders, and if those politicians reward solution of urgent problems rather than work on important problems, it is no wonder that diplomats also give priority to the urgent.

I attended a talk by Esther Brimmer, the head of the State Department's Bureau of International Organization Affairs. Listening to her, it occurred to me that many of the problems faced by the UN Security Council are urgent. So too are problems faced by decentralized UN agencies; thus FAO reacts to the urgency of famines, WHO to the urgency of epidemics.

On the other hand, FAO does not build agricultural capacity quickly in member nations, nor does WHO build public health capacity quickly, nor does UNESCO build educational capacity quickly. However, these UN agencies in their long term efforts are helping to build societies that will be peaceful neighbors enhancing our security, good customers enhancing our economy, and neighbors who do not export their problems to our shores. What they are doing in the long term is extremely important to the long term health of our nation.

I wondered how Dr. Brimmer balances the priority that must be given to urgent problems of foreign policy versus the priority that should be given to the less urgent programs of international organizations which may be even more important to the long term health of the nation. I fear that the culture of the State Department may lead her to repeat the errors of her predecessors by giving too much weight to the urgent and not enough weight to the important.