DEMOCRACY-PROMOTING ON A SHOESTRING BUDGET? As you'll remember, I've argued that the administration's professed goal of bringing democracy to a post-war Iraq should be met with skepticism. In the mail on Friday I got the latest volume of PS: Political Science and Politics, the American Political Science Association's hip publication (as opposed to the American Political Science Review, its boring but professional publication). An article by Steven Hook (Kent State) provides more reason to doubt the administration's commitments here: low levels of funding at the state department.

Hook notes the decline in federal outlays spent on international affairs since 1964, from 4% of total spending in 1964 to less than 1% now (the high was 1947, with almost 17% of all federal outlays going to foreign affairs), as well as the long, slow decline in foreign assistance as a percentage of GDP (spikes in the immediate postwar period, with a high of over 3%, but now down to less than 0.25%). The president's budget does ask for increases in these areas, as Colin Powell notes in his Senate testimony here. But at the same time, the President proclaimed in his SOTU that federal spending needs to be constrained. The benchmark? Growth of median household income. The silly populist appeal of this argument aside, what this rhetoric means is that the President has already encouraged the budget hounds to snip away at his proposals.

As Hook notes, foreign aid is always vulnerable in Congress. Hook recalls Senator Jesse Helms's description of the foreign aid budget as a "rat hole." Does anyone really think that Bush is going to expend political capital in the attempt to blaze a new trail here? Signs from the SOTU rhetoric, at least, are not encouraging. I also doubt that the democracy-promoting wing of the Republican party will be strong enough for the task.