AMERICAN.COM

The risks of debilitating cuts to our national security budget will be a critical issue for Congress when it reconvenes after the August recess. While the media focus as Congress adjourned earlier this month was on the big-picture implications of the legislation lifting the federal debt-ceiling, we cannot lose sight of the difficult—and imminent—struggles just ahead in September.

Critical appropriations measures for fiscal year 2012 (“FY 2012,” beginning October 1) will have a major impact not just in the immediate future, but will also set the stage—and budget baselines—for future force levels, research and development, weapons procurement, and budget allocations.

Resources for the continuing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are, of course, also critically important, and should reflect what is necessary to support our troops fully. But we must also necessarily keep our ongoing defense needs in the center of any broader budget decisions. Dollars well spent for our national security are simply not fungible with expenditures elsewhere in the federal budget.

The central point of concern in September will be the Senate Appropriations Committee. Many analysts believe that the committee’s budget allocation for FY 2012 defense spending will be approximately $525 billion, or roughly $4-5 billion below the level appropriated for FY 2011, the current fiscal year. (Other estimates place the figure as low as $520 billion.) A basic defense spending level of $525 billion for FY 2012 amounts to a reduction of approximately $28 billion from even President Obama’s requested level of $553 billion.

The House appropriations level for FY 2012 is $530 billion, essentially the same as the current fiscal year, despite the House’s own endorsement of the president’s level when it adopted Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget resolution.

Thus, whether Congress accepts the House number for FY 2012 ($23 billion below the Obama level) or an even lower Senate number, there will be substantial defense cuts below even the parsimonious Obama request. Also at risk under both the House and Senate numbers are funds required for nuclear weapons and infrastructure modernization, provided in another appropriations bill.

These near-term cuts for defense are disproportionate and unsustainable. They will cause palpable damage to our defense capabilities now and well into the future.

In March 2011, then-Secretary of Defense Gates said that “it is my judgment that the Department of Defense needs an appropriation of at least $540 billion for FY 2011 for the U.S. military to properly carry out its mission, maintain readiness, and prepare for the future.” (Emphasis added.)

But neither the House nor projected Senate levels for FY 2012 are at $540 billion, nor do they include even a minimal increase in Secretary Gates’s benchmark level to adjust for inflation over the prior fiscal year.

This looming debacle must be a priority for House and Senate Republicans when they return from the recess. While national security authorizers and appropriators will be responsible for the budget specifics, they cannot guarantee adequate top-line defense spending without the fullest support and protection from both their leaderships and the full party caucuses in both the House and Senate. Pro-defense Democrats must also step forward, especially in the Senate where their party holds the majority, and effective control of floor debate.

The upcoming crucial battles over appropriations levels for FY 2012 will almost certainly foreshadow the negotiations in the congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction established by the federal debt-ceiling legislation. If we fail to protect America’s defenses in the FY 2012 budget, we can only expect to fail in the Joint Committee’s deliberations, and thereby fall prey to the budget guillotine inherent in the debt-ceiling legislation’s “trigger mechanism.” That trigger could produce even further defense cuts in the range of $500-600 billion.

Hollowing out America’s military would be a catastrophic mistake in a dangerous world. Recent press reports alone have highlighted, among other threats and challenges:

(1)  the continuing dangers in Iraq and Afghanistan from terrorists and their state sponsors;

(2) al Qaeda’s ongoing and very active efforts to acquire nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, most recently al Qaeda in Yemen’s efforts to produce the pathogen ricin;

(3) the grave nuclear proliferation threats embodied in North Korea and Iran and;

(4) China and Russia’s continuing assertive and even belligerent diplomatic offensives and the build-ups in their respective conventional and strategic weapons forces.

However important it is to restrain federal spending—and it is more important now than in living memory—it is not the time to skimp on defending America. September will be a critical month.

Every indication is that the debt-ceiling negotiations are leaving the defense budget in grave jeopardy. By exposing critical defense programs to disproportionate cuts as part of the “trigger mechanism,” there is a clear risk that key defense programs will be hollowed out.

While the trigger mechanism comes into play only if the congressional negotiators fail to reach agreement on the second phase of spending cuts, it verges on catastrophe to take such a national security risk.

Defense has already taken hugely disproportionate cuts under President Obama, and there is simply no basis for expanding those cuts further. Republican negotiators must hold the line, since the Obama administration plainly will not.

The 43 lowest-paying UN member governments, each assessed 0.001 percent for the regular budget in 2007, together pay a whopping 0.043 percent of the total UN regular budget. The 128 lowest-paying governments pay a combined 1.064 percent of the budget. By contrast, the 16 countries that each pay annual, regular budget assessments of more than 1 percent contributed, in the aggregate, 85.4 percent of the UN’s budget in 2007.

Yet, under UN rules, each of those countries has equal say in adopting the budget. That means that two-thirds of the General Assembly membership (128 out of 192 total member states)—that pays, in the aggregate, less than 5 percent of the amount that the United States alone is assessed—can, under UN rules, approve the UN budget over the objections of the United States and the 15 other countries that foot more than 85 percent of the bill. Thus, despite the UN Charter’s requirement that budgetary questions be decided by a two-thirds majority of the assembly, in practice the two-thirds provision has provided little protection to the largest contributors. Instead, the system of assessed contributions, combined with one-country, one-vote decision making, has created a kind of entitlement mentality within the UN system as governments and secretariats routinely expect that budgets will be funded without regard to agency performance, effectiveness, transparency, or accountability.

Find out what we can do about this problem here.

It should be beyond dispute that the United Nations and its specialized agencies are organizations of member governments. Member governments create the organizations, pay for them, and direct them. Accordingly, employees of these organizations (the “secretariats”) work at the collective behest of the member governments, as their subordinate staff.

The operative word should be “subordinate,” but high-ranking U.N. officials too often seem to have trouble finding dictionaries that define that word for them. Mohammed el-Baradei, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, for example, could never quite seem to understand that he worked for the IAEA’s member governments, not the other way around.

Now we see another eruption of inadequate vocabulary education from the director general of the World Health Organization, Margaret Chan of China. Reuters reports that she decided to opine on the recently enacted U.S. healthcare legislation by saying, “the people in this country and their leaders are courageous. That is an unprecedented achievement.” After interjecting herself gratuitously in one of the most hotly debated domestic political issues in the United States in recent years, Chan, a physician, then offered a little free economic advice: “Market forces, all by themselves, will not solve social problems … Health concerns can, in some instances, be more important than economic interests.”

The issue is not whether one agrees with Chan, but on what basis she is intervening in our domestic affairs to begin with. To be sure, Chan is not alone in thinking that U.N. civil servants can interfere at will in the domestic affairs of their supposed governors (not to mention paymasters). Because U.S. officials in the past have, unfortunately, routinely failed to remind U.N. secretariats to stay in their lanes, and because many European governments positively welcome their frolics as they do those of the European Union’s bureaucracy, these lapses have become more commonplace.

Re-righting the hierarchy in U.N. agencies—governments in charge, secretariats their humble servants—is a good place to start the thoroughgoing U.N. reform we and the U.N. still so desperately need.

Image by Neubie.

Google’s decision to stop censoring searches on its China-based servers, rerouting search requests instead to its uncensored Hong Kong facilities, is historic. The company has shown itself unwilling simply to be on the receiving end of whatever Beijing dishes out. When an enterprise of Google’s global dimensions and visibility reverses course in China, it sends a message to enterprises worldwide: You can do the same.

See more here.

The justifiable disgust over Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi’s release underlines what amounts to a spectacular failure of American diplomacy. “Obamamania” overseas is a dominant theme of the media, which endlessly recounts how the U.S. position in the world has improved since President Bush’s departure. “Engagement” with friend and adversary alike is the Obama administration’s hallmark, with diplomatic advances expected to flow like wine.

So what happened? The State Department said on Friday that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked “for weeks and months” to persuade Britain not to release the murderer. Both Washington and London all but begged Gaddafi not to hold public celebrations on Megrahi’s arrival in Tripoli. Yet Britain, the other half of the “special relationship,” ignored Clinton’s efforts, as did Libya, which only recently resumed full diplomatic relations with America. This is effective U.S. diplomacy?