Secretary Baker: You Can Find Extra Foreign Aid Money Without Hurting Other US Friends

In a hearing yesterday before the House Appropriations Subcommittee responsible for foreign assistance, Secretary of State James Baker essentially endorsed an ill-advised proposal made in January by Senator Robert Dole for reallocating U.S. foreign aid. The idea is to make more funds available to help emerging democracies by reducing the assistance provided other valued friends and allies around the world.

The Center for Security Policy believes that both the original Dole initiative and the refinement just embraced by Secretary Baker should be put on ice — at least until another, essentially painless option is thoroughly explored. This option was laid out in a recent article by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director, that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on 18 January 1990 (a copy of which is attached).

Gaffney observed today, "Before we start wreaking havoc on our relations with the most important recipients of U.S. foreign aid — as Senator Dole would have us do — or on all recipients of that aid — as Secretary Baker prefers, we should divert funds already granted to an ally, Greece, that has chosen not to use them."

The United States has been obliged by Congress for years under the so-called "seven-ten" ratio to provide seven dollars in military assistance to Greece as the price for giving every ten dollars in urgently needed aid to Turkey. Under the Papandreou regime, Greece chose not to use hundreds of millions of dollars worth of these U.S. foreign military sales (FMS) credits. Despite the fact that Greece currently has an $818 million backlog in such uncommitted FMS credits, all other things being equal, the United States is going to grant Greece roughly a further $350 million in such assistance in FY1990.

The Center calls on the Bush Administration and the Congress to give urgent attention to the possibility of reallocating funds that an ally has elected not to spend — and evidently does not need — before it risks serious harm to U.S. relations with other friendly nations. Not only is this a more judicious and equitable way to approach the task of allocating limited U.S. foreign aid resources; it also offers a way to minimize the impact of new demands on those resources (e.g., emerging democracies) on states whose security situation has not been measurably improved by the events in Eastern Europe (e.g., Israel and Turkey).

The Center believes that, in every case, decisions governing who receives U.S. foreign assistance and how much should be made on the basis of the merits of the recipients’ needs — not as a result of an arbitrary formula or some other political caprice.