Shall we sit at the table as a peer?
I’m riffing on the ‘domestic summit’ suggestion from Jim Goldgeier and Bruce Jentleson.
What if we, as America, reset our international development and diplomacy agenda, abandon the fiction of our exceptionalism, acknowledge that we sit at the international table as a peer?
We no longer demand a place of privilege at the head of the table. We too are struggling.
Some thoughts:
Yes, we need a process that recommits the nation’s political leadership to our democratic systems and institutions and to the effort to overcome injustice and inequality. Focusing on our flawed and deeply damaged polity is a priority we must invest in both by attending to it collectively and publicly, and by embedding it in the Biden-Harris actions to control the pandemic and support economic recovery.
The act of bringing together a bipartisan group of congressional leaders, governors, and mayors to pledge the renewal of American democracy matters, but the substance of those conversations is what will endure.
The ‘domestic summit’ idea includes these suggested domestic priorities:
- enact and implement the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act
- increase police accountability
- protect the freedom of the press
- combat disinformation
Some of that matters in our international aid and development agenda, too. Here are the echoes I hear:
- deepen support for democratic reforms beyond an obsessive focus on elections … what about mechanisms for redress against an unresponsive bureaucracy, and inclusive access to social safety nets?
- re-examine the entire (fractured) network of US programs that focus on violence prevention, criminal justice reform, and security assistance in other countries, using Rachel Kleinfeld’s A Savage Order as a primer
- advocate a digital ecosystem that acknowledges that combatting disinformation and protecting a free press depend not only on laws but in large measure on ‘digital+ guardrails’, requiring both infrastructure and policies that protect rights and data
In the process Goldgeier and Jentleson envision, I also see paths toward priorities that could animate our foreign policy and international development actions:
- a preference for multifaceted problem-solving efforts that draw upon multidisciplinary teams
- a nudge to multilateral and international finance institutions to create structured ways to bring provincial/state and local actors into processes usually dominated by national governments
- a rebalancing of attention to rural communities and marginalized urban neighborhoods, including explicitly addressing the bias against those groups that a preference for large-scale low-unit-cost solutions can create.
