GlobalSecurity.org In the News

Monday, December 1, 2003

U.S. NGOs Coordinate to Revitalize Arms Control Efforts

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Dozens of leading U.S. arms control and national security experts and their major financial backers have been quietly conducting a major organizational initiative aimed at reversing downward funding trends and a perception of decreasing relevance and effectiveness. One of their aims is to better challenge Bush administration changes to U.S. international security policies.

Since January, a “who’s who” of arms control advocacy groups have been meeting together and with major funding organizations — including the Ploughshares Fund, the Carnegie Corporation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the U.N. Foundation and the Nuclear Threat Initiative — to develop a broad, coordinated strategy.

As a result, a core group of nongovernmental and foundation participants produced a strategic plan in October for a three- to five-year effort to “reorient national security policy and achieve specific policy goals.”

The closely held “collaborative action plan” obtained by GSN calls for a range of measures. They include:  increasing collaboration between organizations and funders; developing “a suite of position statements and policy frameworks;” strategically tailoring messages for influencing the general public; possibly hiring professional lobbyists; creating a central Web site for communication, marketing and information dissemination; and increasing efforts to “recruit and engage a number of messengers from Congress, academia, think ranks, business, and the media.”

“It’s an unprecedented effort, in the sense that it’s the first time that representatives from major foundations have sat down for extended periods with the practitioners in the field to discuss the challenges, and issues and solutions to our common work,” said Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association, one of the drafters of the strategy.

He noted a “remarkable level of agreement about the fundamental challenges that exist and how we need to organize ourselves to meet them.”

The strategy further recommends reaching out to other interest groups, including the antiwar movement that emerged in opposition to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq with the aim of increasing membership and organizational partnerships “10-fold.” 

It also suggests identifying new sources of revenue and improving grant-solicitation techniques “aimed at overcoming immediate funding shortfall[s].”

Short-term action would include establishing policy, communications, and outreach working groups, including one for influencing Congress, and teams for soliciting prospective donors.

The document gives a “very rough” estimate of $750,000 to implement its recommendations.

Prominent experts participating the discussions came from such interest groups as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Arms Control Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Henry L. Stimson Center, the Council for a Livable World, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Defense Information and the Federation of American Scientists.

The coordination effort, financed so far mainly by the Ploughshares Fund, was spurred by hard times experienced by the arms control and peace community since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the document says.

“The impetus for this effort came from two sobering realities,” said the report, citing “dramatic changes in the national and international security situation following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the end of the Cold War” that have provided “new urgency to regain lost political relevance and effectiveness” and have resulted in a “significant reduction in foundation support for nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation,” it says.

That Bush administration policies are a central target of the plan is also implicit in the report’s depiction of the policies it intends to change.

“Unfortunately, the Bush administration has embarked on a path that complicates and, in some cases, compounds these and other key challenges to global and national security,” it says, citing various regional security issues.

“This is certainly not an effort to impact the elections,” said Naila Bolus of the Ploughshares Fund, a member of the core drafting committee.

“But, it is an effort that recognizes that these issues are front and center in the public debate and that this community certainly be more effective in crafting its message, in disseminating its message, in building partnerships with other likely allies, and being more strategic in its approach to public education efforts,” she said.

The arms control and peace community has appeared to suffer a decline in annual funding since Sept. 11, with some estimating that support has been cut by one-third to between $30 million and $50 million annually, driving a number of organizations to cut staff and scale back activities.

The decrease has been attributed to reduced public concern with WMD issues following the Cold War, the exit of two major foundations from the field, and reduced support from foundations and major philanthropists that is attributed to the current U.S. economic situation.

“At this point, working in this field is a lifestyle choice, it’s not a career,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org. 

He said he cannot afford to provide employee health insurance or a retirement plans and may soon close shop and claimed his organization is not alone.

“I’ve done some site visits of some other organizations that I think do good work and you walk into some of these places and, you know, they’re like little squirrel holes above a neighborhood grocery story, and it’s like one adult and four interns,” he said.

Some experts, however, disagree that the community is doing poorly. Conservative analyst Peter Huessy, of the partially foundation-funded National Defense University Foundation, has ridiculed arms control funding as extravagant, describing some experts as “self-appointed wise men in the arms control palaces along Massachusetts Avenue.”

In an article this year, he outlined the support some groups received from foundations in 2002, including $90,000 for the Union of Concerned Scientists, $1.4 million for the Carnegie Endowment, $250,000 for the Arms Control Association, $500,000 for the Center for Defense Information, and $300,000 for the Federation of American Scientists.

The “antidefense enthusiasts have millions to spend in grants from liberal wealth dispensers at the MacArthur, Rockefeller, Carnegie and other foundations,” Huessy wrote in a commentary last year.

“That’s chump change,” said Pike.

“The defense budget has gone from $280 billion to $470 billion in less than three years. The lines on the graph are moving in opposite directions,” he said.

At the same time, the community’s influence has been in decline, various experts say.

In terms of influencing the policy debate, “I think they’ve been completely blown out of the water,” Pike said, citing the U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty and other setbacks to the arms control community.

Michael Krepon, who heads the Stimson Center, said the arms control community has failed to match the administration in the international security debate.

“The language that we use, including the words ‘arms control,’ no longer resonate to the American public or to decision-makers, and we are not offering our fellow citizens and the decision-makers a new strategic concept that relates to the dangers we face and that we can put up against the Bush administration’s strategic concept of dominance,” he said.

Huessy, in his article, argued the community is quite effective as it is.

“The president’s [missile defense deployment] plan can still be blocked by a small but formidable group of determined opponents,” he wrote.

Significantly increased funding is key for regaining influence, some experts said. Pike said a precedent was set during the early years of the Reagan administration.

“There was roughly a 10-fold increase in funding in this field in the early 1980s. Basically it happened through a process like this, the core funders and the core actors got together and basically said they needed to substantially enlarge the community and the financial resources for that community, at a time when [former President] Ronald Reagan had scared the living daylights out of everyone.”

Wayne Jaquith, a community fundraising expert, said though that finding new sources of funding has been made more difficult because the Bush administration has aggressively advanced conservative agendas on a range of other issues.

“The assault is across the board … the environment, human rights, population, immigration. … Especially for the bigger funders that fund in several different areas, their resources are being stretched and their fighting loosing battles all the way across,” he said.

Even if additional foundation resources are found, they probably would not pour into the community quickly because of two- to three-year foundation planning cycles, said John Isaacs, head of the Council for a Livable World.

“If you’re asking have the floodgates open and the money come washing down upon us, no. But I wouldn’t have expected it to happen that quickly,” he said.

“I don’t know whether any of this is going to make any difference, and I don’t know whether I’m going to be around to find out,” said Pike.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The Nuclear Threat Initiative is the sole sponsor of Global Security Newswire, which is published independently by National Journal Group.]

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