The Enduring Struggle: The History of the U.S. Agency for International Development and America's Uneasy Transformation of the World.

• Author: Myers, Desaix

American Diplomacy

November 1, 2021

www.americandiplomacy.org

Title: The Enduring Struggle

Author:Desaix Myers

Text:

The Enduring Struggle: The History of the U.S. Agency for International Development and America's Uneasy Transformation of the World

By John Norris

Rowan and Littlefield, July 2021

338 pages

John Norris' book, The Enduring Struggle: The History of the US Agency for International Development and America's Transformation of the World, comes at a most opportune time. We need a fresh look at the ways we prioritize national interests and the institutions in our national security triad--defense, diplomacy, and development--responsible for protecting them. No agency involved in national security is more overlooked or less understood than the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the country's lead agency for development and the foreign assistance programs to deliver it.

Norris fills the void. His history provides a comprehensive overview of an agency with remarkable accomplishments, but which--despite impressive successes--has often fallen short of expectations and whose history is filled with no little controversy. Norris describes foreign assistance as one of the US government's potentially important, but least recognized tools, to effect global change: "No other area of presidential decision-making in the modern era has affected more people, more profoundly, and with so little foreign fanfare than the foreign aid program."

The lack of fanfare has had costs. As Norris points out, the general public has "the mistaken belief that such assistance is the single largest item in the federal budget when, at less than one percent, of all discretionary spending it is far from being so." Congressional representatives have "vied to outdo each other with ever-more lavish denunciations of foreign aid."

As a result, Norris relates, though designated as the lead development institution responsible for foreign assistance, USAID's primacy has been increasingly challenged by the steady growth of overseas programs run by dozens other departments--State, Agriculture, Commerce, Treasury, among them--and new institutions like the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the US Development Finance Corporation. It is far smaller than the other key institutions in the national security triad. Its workforce is about one-sixth the size of the State Department, and there are more than three times the number of soldiers in military bands than USAID has...