Jeremy Konyndyk is senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, and previously served in the Obama administration as Director of USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance.

Huge cuts to the international affairs budget.

Mass layoffs in the foreign service.


A push to fold the United States Agency for International Development into the State Department.

A secretary of state justifying diplomatic cuts as “a tough budget for tough times … that seeks austerity, not as a hardship to be endured but as a challenge to innovate.”

I refer, of course, to the Clinton administration.

As President Donald Trump prepares to slash the civilian side of U.S. foreign policy, he would do well to examine the last time this was tried. The quote above is from Secretary of State Warren Christopher, not Rex Tillerson, and it ushered in a major deterioration in civilian national security readiness. Over the course of his administration, President Bill Clinton allowed the foreign affairs budget to fall to half the level (adjusted for inflation) that it had enjoyed at its peak under President Ronald Reagan. Clinton also signed off on debilitating cuts—championed by Senator Jesse Helms—to U.S. civilian presence and staffing levels overseas. Ironically it was a Republican president, George W. Bush, who reversed this trend—but only after his military-centric foreign policy (sound familiar?), combined with hollowed-out capacity at State and USAID, led to disaster in post-war Iraq.

Why rehash this history now? Because Trump seems to see the Clinton-era cuts and Bush’s overreliance on the military as a good start, rather than a cautionary tale. The White House is seeking to gut civilian foreign affairs budgets in fiscal year 2018 while bulking up a military budget that is already tenfold larger. Tillerson is proposing to cut State Department staffing by 9 percent. And rumors abound of plans to fold USAID into the State Department.

Tillerson told a State Department town hall audience on Wednesday that these cuts would make his diplomats “feel better about what you’re doing.” But history tells us, instead, that these would be deadly and costly mistakes. The cuts and restructuring under consideration would actively unlearn hard-won post-9/11 lessons, and leave U.S. national security capacity thinner and weaker than it was at the end of the Clinton-Helms era. Cutting civilian capacity in relatively peaceful times only guarantees it won’t be readily available when crises arrive. To understand why, let’s jump back a few decades.

Taking office after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Clinton faced pressure to reinvest Cold War spending toward domestic priorities. In his first term, he initiated a retrenchment of U.S. civilian presence abroad. This accelerated dramatically after Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 and installed Helms, an outspoken foreign aid skeptic, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The net result was that by the end of Clinton’s presidency, USAID’s professional staff had been slashed by nearly a third, several thousand State Department positions were eliminated, and 50 USAID missions and more than 20 diplomatic posts had closed. These cuts did generational damage to both agencies, thinning out the junior and mid-career foreign service ranks. New diplomats and aid experts cannot be trained and developed overnight; these reductions would come back to bite in the decade to follow and continue to reverberate even today.

Just as important, Helms pushed Clinton to eliminate several foreign affairs agencies and consolidate their functions into the State Department. USAID escaped this fate, barely, but the U.S. Information Agency—which conducted public diplomacy during the Cold War—did not. While USIA’s people-to-people approach and long-term cultural engagements were distinct from traditional State Department diplomacy, political support for the agency had waned after the Cold War ended. America’s ideological battles had seemingly been won—why did the U.S. still need a distinct public diplomacy function? And so in 1998, Clinton signed a bill dismantling the agency and distributing pieces of it across the State Department. Public diplomacy quickly became a marginal function inside an institution consumed with more pressing priorities.

In 2001, Bush took office after campaigning for a more “humble” foreign policy and arguing that the U.S. government should avoid “nation building.” All appearances suggested continuity with the spending and staffing reductions initiated under Clinton.

But then 9/11 happened.

Over the next two years, the president whose top national security aide had sneered at “the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten” became embroiled in two massive national stabilization efforts that expanded the military’s role while explicitly marginalizing civilians. Breaking with the normal practice of civilian-led reconstruction and democratization, as the U.S. had pursued in the Balkans, Bush instead put the U.S. military in charge of post-war Iraq. The job fell to the Coalition Provisional Authority, a Department of Defense institution reporting to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Disregarding expert projections that rebuilding Iraq would be difficult and messy—many of them coming from diplomats and development experts within the government—the administration assumed the country would welcome U.S. troops as liberators and be easily able to finance its own reconstruction.

These fantasies were quickly eclipsed by reality. Viewing reconstruction and stabilization as a military, rather than a political and developmental, process led to massive missteps—such as the dissolution of the Iraqi security forces, which put hundreds of thousands of young, armed Iraqis out of work. The erosion of diplomatic and development readiness during the prior decade further compounded the disaster, as the CPA was forced to turn to costly contractors, inexperienced 20-somethings and military officers untrained in governance or reconstruction. Handing control of aid and governance to untrained military officers proved ineffective at best and wasteful or counterproductive at worst. Putting the military in charge of criminal detention, another mission for which it was ill-trained and ill-suited, led to the abuses of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. And these many additional tasks overburdened an already-stretched military force.

These missteps, along with numerous others, spurred an insurgency that killed thousands of U.S. soldiers and countless Iraqis. It turned out that putting the military in charge of aid and governance efforts worked about as well as putting aid workers or diplomats in charge of an artillery battalion.

But then something important happened. As the Iraq quagmire deepened, Bush—to his enduring credit—shifted away from a military-first approach. The focus of security efforts moved from violently hunting insurgents to a more astute approach centered on providing security and protection to the civilian population (championed by none other than current national security adviser H.R. McMaster). Military and civilian roles were rebalanced, with the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, working as an equal peer to his military counterpart, General David Petraeus. And Bush began to heed calls by his military chiefs to relieve the burden on their soldiers by strengthening their civilian counterparts. Bush invested in the recruitment of additional diplomats and launched an effort to double the size of USAID’s foreign service. These steps did much to salvage a lesser disaster from the jaws of a total cataclysm.

Bush also came to recognize the value of a strong civilian foreign policy in other areas. His PEPFAR program to fight the scourge of AIDS today supports life-saving Anti-Retroviral treatment for nearly 12 million people. This stands as a signature achievement of his presidency and an enduring reflection of American values throughout the world. He also tripled U.S. assistance to Africa during his tenure, and launched the USG’s Millennium Challenge Corporation, a major new overseas development institution.

These efforts paid continued dividends under President Barack Obama. Obama’s counter-ISIL strategy, which was explicitly civilian-military in nature, applied the post-9/11 lessons of the Bush years—deploying a mix of diplomatic, military and foreign assistance tools and working explicitly to limit collateral damage to civilians while fighting a brutal insurgency. That approach (so far largely intact under Trump) is now on the brink of fully recapturing ISIL’s capital in Mosul. The fight against Ebola—led by civilians from USAID and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with DOD in a supporting role—likewise demonstrated the importance of a balanced civilian-military toolkit.

Still, not all the damage from the Clinton-Helms restructuring could be undone. The dissolution of the USIA into the State Department bureaucracy capped a steep decline in the quality of U.S. public diplomacy. No longer a distinct discipline with its own cadre of experts, public diplomacy became simply another marginalized task for an overstretched State Department foreign service. When the U.S. once again needed to launch a global effort to combat a hostile ideology—this time Islamic extremism—it lacked the institutional expertise to effectively do so. Efforts have since been made to reinvigorate public diplomacy within State, but to little avail.

Against this backdrop, Trump’s 2018 budget plans look like an homage to the worst mistakes of the Clinton and Bush eras. The decisions during the Clinton administration to dramatically cut civilian foreign affairs capacity were motivated by a misbegotten idea that America’s biggest foreign challenges were behind us. But this attitude overlooked the fact that we rarely get to pick our own crises. Undoing the resulting damage to U.S. national security readiness has consumed more than a decade and remains incomplete. Tillerson’s recent claim that State's budget “is simply not sustainable” and that “as time goes by, there will be fewer military conflicts that the U.S. will be directly engaged in” echoes Secretary Christopher’s errant assumptions in the early 1990s. And likewise, USIA’s demise suggests that folding USAID into the State Department would badly degrade American development and humanitarian response capacity.

This is a critical moment. When 9/11 ushered in a new era of American security crises, the U.S. learned painfully that military might alone cannot solve global challenges. Former military leaders like McMaster and Defense Secretary James Mattis understand this firsthand, even if this insight seemingly eludes Trump’s chief diplomat. We may not know what our next big global crisis will look like—whether it be conflict with North Korea, the collapse of a state like Venezuela, mass famine in the Horn of Africa, a global pandemic, a trade war—but we know that robust civilian readiness will be integral to dealing with it. Here’s hoping President Trump will learn from his predecessors’ mistakes, rather than doubling down on them.