The Power to Change the World

At a time when the United States faces enormous challenges in its relations with other countries, government leaders desperately need the best creative and strategic thinking available. Foundations can do much to supply this intellectual capital, but too often, many of the projects they support are irrelevant to the people who work in the government’s foreign-policy establishment. Much of what grant makers finance is heavy on criticism and light on constructive suggestions.

The reasons foundations are having so little influence are many. Among them:

• Few foundation grant recipients have had government experience. While such experience is not essential, it is undeniably helpful. Grantees do not understand how decisions are made or who makes them. They do not understand the appropriate entry points into the system — either in Congress or in the executive branch — to maximize their effectiveness.
• The focus of many policy recommendations is too short-term — advice on what the government should do next week or next month. This may not be the fault of nonprofit groups. The conditions of foundation grants often demand that short-term items be produced — opinion articles, monographs, and the like. The problem with this approach is the enormous imbalance in information available to people inside the government and those on the outside. It is virtually impossible for someone outside of government to have better tactical information than those inside, where one key fact can alter a policy recommendation. Grantees who wage a tactical battle over policy are unlikely to win.
• Many outside analysts are “outside” because they are not in the political camp of the incumbent administration and do not share key strategic principles with government analysts. In such cases, those who write to get something off their chest, or to patronize anti-establishment sponsors, may make themselves feel better, but they have virtually no chance of persuading people in government of their views. Alternatively, analysts of the same political party as those in power often are reluctant to be critical either because they hope to get a position in the administration or because of personal friendships. Those contributions also do little to further policy formulation.
• In many cases, outside analyses, even of longer-term issues, are simply not detailed enough to fit into a decision maker’s world. General analyses can be very influential if they seek to frame reality in a new and illuminating way. But advocacy that lacks a hook into the policy process is not likely to be influential. “Nice argument,” a busy policy maker might say, “but it doesn’t give me any idea of what to do.” Such analyses fail to illuminate in practical terms how to translate theory into policy.

The present approach foundations take to financing foreign-policy work may be fine for training young minds, and nothing is more important than building human capital. It may work to build a communal feeling among those out of government. And it may in some way affect the broad intellectual milieu in which policy is made. But as a way to influence public policy, it is an approach that is not serving grant makers well, and it is not serving those of us in the government well either. Foundations can do better, and we need them to do better.

Foundations’ advantage over government is that they are in a position to help government understand long-term trends and developments. Very few places in government have either the time or the capacity for such thinking. Most of the people at the State Department do foreign relations — the short-term, day-to-day management of our relations with the rest of the world. Very few think about foreign policy. That is where government officials have a real need for creative thinking.

For foundations that want to help provide a more-strategic perspective, the challenge is where to place their bets. Here are some suggestions:

• Help to bridge the divide between science and technology and public policy. This is an old story, well told many years ago by C.P. Snow in his book The Two Cultures. The two cultures exist today, and the gap is growing. The generation of scientist-statesmen who cut their teeth on the Manhattan Project have almost completely passed from the scene. Does anyone today have similar stature to speak authoritatively on issues of science and public policy?

  Many foundations recognize this need and support programs to deal with it, but a much larger effort is required to endow university chairs so that faculty members from the sciences can be formally encouraged — without the threat of tenure hanging over their heads. They need opportunities to branch out from their narrow disciplines and immerse themselves in those topics where science intersects with public policy.

• Build relations between the civilian and military worlds. The steady decline in the number of members of Congress and those in the executive branch who have served in the military means that we civilians owe a duty to ourselves, to the men and women in uniform, and to the country to learn how the military operates, to understand military doctrine and tactics, and to recognize the limitations of even the world’s greatest fighting force.
• Finance projects that look at the part of the world known as the broader Middle East, from North Africa to Afghanistan.

In the coming decades, probably for the next few generations, the main strategic focus of the United States — and Europe — is going to be on this region. It is a caldron of sectarian rivalries, religious disputes, ethnic conflicts, and clashing historical experiences.

The region’s difficulties are compounded by a host of social, political, and economic problems. Throughout the region, including all 22 Arab countries, only Israel and Turkey are genuinely democratic. In fact, the combined gross domestic product of all the Arab countries is less than that of Spain. Almost a quarter of the Arab world’s population is illiterate, and 15 percent of it is unemployed.

To all of those troubling statistics, add a looming demographic crisis. At present, more than half the region’s population is younger than 22, which will cause the total population of the broader Middle East to nearly double over the next 25 years. Arab economies will need to grow by 5 percent to 6 percent annually to absorb all these new workers, a pretty high bar for a region where many economies are currently flat. And it is impossible to maintain, after the September 11, 2001, attacks, that the problems of the broader Middle East can be contained. In a globalizing world, they cannot. Over the next 25 years, one of the most difficult challenges for American foreign policy will be to find a way to reach out to the many diverse peoples of this region. Helping these people create a better future for themselves is not just a moral luxury. It is a strategic necessity.

But is the United States equipped to do so? It is one thing to identify a problem and quite another to marshal the resources to solve it. In particular, does the United States have the intellectual capital that enables Americans to engage in meaningful ways with these peoples? How can Americans interact with this region, how can we have a conversation with its people, especially the young people, if we don’t speak their language, if we don’t understand their culture, if we are ignorant of their fears and aspirations? The short answer is: We can’t. We literally have nothing to say to them.

That has to change. And to be sure, the U.S. government has a role to play here, just as it did after Sputnik in providing federal funds for studies of the Russian language and the Soviet Union. But grant makers have a role to play also. They can lead the way. While many grant makers have already adopted programs to deal with some of these needs, it is vital to do more.

Foundations have the power to change the world. All of us in government need their leadership, vision, and continuing support for scholars, academics, and other experts who are also struggling to make sense of the swirl of events around us and to figure out ways to safeguard the planet, to provide peace and security around the world, and to promote American values: respect for human rights, religious freedom, and representative democracy.

Mitchell B. Reiss is vice provost of the College of William and Mary. From July 2003 to February 2005, he was director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department. In previous jobs at nonprofit organizations, he received numerous grants from foundations to support his research on arms control and nonproliferation. This article is adapted from a speech he delivered to grant makers gathered by the German Marshall Fund, in Washington. The full text of the speech can be found at http://www.state.gov/s/p.