A Culture of Inclusion
A Culture of Inclusion:
Defense, Diplomacy, and Development as a Modern American Foreign Policy
by Captain Nathan Finney
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Observers and commentators on modern American foreign policy have consistently identified that collaboration between the elements of national power appear to be punctuated by years of uncoordinated programs and internecine fighting. In the past the U.S. approach (to foreign policy) was a rather messy amalgam of the dominant preoccupations of the Department of Defense, State Department, and USAID, oftentimes in that order. Broadly speaking, the Pentagon views fragile and post-conflict states primarily through the national security prism, as part of a larger counterterrorist and counterinsurgency agenda, with a particular focus on the Muslim world; the State Department is preoccupied with transforming a wider range of weak and war-torn states into effective democracies; and USAID regards state weakness as a developmental challenge to be addressed by working with local actors to create the institutional foundations of good governance and economic growth.
In response a 3D (defense, diplomacy, and development) approach is a recent concept described by senior U.S. government officials, including the Secretary of Defense in his Landon Lecture at Kansas State University and the then Secretary of State-select in her testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee. This approach highlights the need for an increased focus on balancing defense, diplomatic, and developmental elements of national power. It provides “a national security tool chest that has been enhanced with a wide variety of capabilities which would flow from the integration of our nation’s soft power.”
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Captain Nathan K. Finney, U.S. Army, is a strategist and currently serving with the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan in Kabul, Afghanistan. Captain Finney was previously a doctrine writer and wrote the Security Sector Reform section of Joint Publication 3-07, Stability Operations.
