The debt ceiling showdown appears to be on the verge of resolution, pending a vote in the Senate, with a deal between President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to suspend the debt ceiling in exchange for a cap on some federal spending. The deal would roughly freeze discretionary spending at current levels for the coming year. But one area of federal spending received a reprieve from Republican fiscal conservatives, the defense budget. The budget will receive a 3 percent increase in the coming year, in line with the White House’s $886 billion spending proposal.
Over half of the Pentagon’s spending goes to contractors and the CEO of the biggest weapons firm in the world, Lockheed Martin, is already taking a victory lap. Speaking at the Bernstein Annual Strategic Decisions Conference for investors, Lockheed head James Taiclet celebrated the defense budget hikes as a win for his company, telling the audience today:
"Now, there's been the political activity going on around the debt ceiling lately. Even with that, the current agreement on the table, it's not passed all the way through yet, the Senate's still got to address it, is 3 percent growth for two years in defense where other areas of the budget are being reduced. And I think, again, that's as good an outcome as our industry or our company could ask for at this point."
Lockheed Martin received 73 percent of its net sales from the U.S. government in 2022 and invested $13 million in lobbying the federal government. Their lobbyists heavily focus their efforts on the defense budget, according to OpenSecrets. And Taiclet, whose $24 million compensation consists largely of performance related bonuses, is already celebrating in anticipation of a Senate vote on a bill that will lock in growth of the defense budget and pad his bottom line while imposing austerity on other areas of federal spending.
Eli Clifton is a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute and Investigative Journalist at Large at Responsible Statecraft. He reports on money in politics and U.S. foreign policy.
Images: Dennis Diatel via shutterstock.com and Screen grab via Atlantic Council/YouTube
The latest warning from the EU High Representative on foreign policy Kaja Kallas — implying consequences for the member and candidate states if their leaders attend Moscow’s Victory Day parade on May 9 (dedicated to the defeat of the Nazi Germany in the WWII) — is a stark reminder of how the Union is dangerously overstepping its boundaries.
While Kallas did not threaten any specific punishments if her warning is ignored, she said any participation in Moscow’s parade would “not be taken lightly” by the EU, suggesting diplomatic or political repercussions against dissenting countries.
Some leaders did interpret her words as diplomatic blackmail and predictably, it sparked backlash. Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico rebuked Kallas and affirmed his own plans to attend the Moscow celebrations honoring the defeat of Nazism. “The year is 2025, not 1939,” Fico declared.
Fico’s stance reflects a core principle of the European Union: foreign policy remains the prerogative of member states under the Treaty on European Union (Article 24), not the bureaucracy in Brussels. The EU’s foreign policy framework does not grant the High Representative the ability to unilaterally sanction or penalize member states for their foreign policy choices. In that context, Kallas’ statement can be seen as an attempt to encroach on Slovakia’s right to determine its own foreign policy actions.
The Brussels’ warning might be particularly ominous for Serbia, whose president, Aleksandr Vucic, was also invited to Moscow. Unlike Slovakia, Serbia is not a member of the EU, but it is a candidate. As the EU increasingly behaves like a geopolitical bloc, it expects an unconditional foreign policy alignment from those eager to join it.
Serbia has long balanced its ties between the EU and Russia, a pragmatic stance given its history and geography. Yet the Kallas faction pushes the Balkan nation to choose a side — EU’s side — or essentially risk membership. The EU can use Belgrade’s status to arm twist it into submission, or erect hurdles on its path, if not freeze the process altogether.
There is a precedent for that: the suspension of Georgia’s candidate status, ostensibly for democratic backsliding, which some experts, however, believe to be merely a cover for the real reason — retaliation for Tbilisi’s failure to fully join the EU’s sanctions against Russia (there is some credence to that argument given how obsequiously the EU treats Azerbaijan, the real dictatorship next door to Georgia ).
This isn’t integration; it’s coercion. And, when it comes to Serbia, it’s also a dangerous game. By criminalizing attendance at a parade commemorating the defeat of Nazi Germany, the EU risks alienating the nation which lost over a million lives in World War II fighting against the Nazis. To threaten them now over a symbolic gesture is not just tone-deaf — it can be perceived in Serbia as forcing a betrayal of its own history as a price of joining the EU.
Apart from Kallas’s overreach, the collective Brussels’ approach also demonstrably lacks pragmatism and realism in dealings with Russia, and in particular, to bring the war in Ukraine closer to an end. Yes, Russian President Vladimir Putin will use the celebrations in Moscow, particularly the presence of the foreign leaders, as a massive photo op. He will try to bridge the Soviet Union’s victory in the WWII with the war in Ukraine which he consistently frames as a “war against the Nazis.”
That said, however, trying to impose a boycott of the event on all EU members and candidates would amount to no more than a form of virtue signaling — without discernible gain for the EU. If Kallas and her allies indeed are worried about handing Putin a diplomatic victory, then their own hawkish ineptitude is already delivering it to him. They are fueling the narrative, not only in Moscow, but in Europe too, of unelected Brussels bureaucrats dictating foreign policies to sovereign nations, running roughshod their historical and political sensitivities.
The prospect of Fico and Vucic’s travel to Moscow echoes the Brussels meltdown over earlier attempts at diplomacy by Hungary’s Prime-Minister Viktor Orban. When Orban visited Moscow in 2024 and met with Putin, instead of learning about what Moscow’s bottom-line on Ukraine was, the EU tried to sabotage Hungary’s rotating presidency of the European Council.
Furthermore, when the U.S. President Donald Trump started his own talks with Moscow, the EU was left scrambling when it could have used Orban’s diplomacy, which was already a few months ahead of Trump’s efforts.
And yet, the EU is repeating the same mistake again — bullying its own members instead of using their outreach to at least explore ways in which the EU could move towards the end of the war in Ukraine, something that its own citizens increasingly expect and demand. As the prominent Cold War historian, professor of the London School of Economics Vladislav Zubok said, by rejecting the diplomacy track, the EU-guided Europe makes itself less, not more relevant in international politics.
This is one perspective in a Responsible Statecraft ‘debate’ over the value of federal aid for ‘soft power’ programs, including regional studies, think tanks, USAID, and academic exchanges. See a counterpoint by Christopher Mott, here.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has made clear it seeks to increase attention to what Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called an “Americas First” foreign policy.
But by eliminating research and educational funding for regional and international studies, the administration will find it more difficult to develop a long-term effective approach to hemispheric affairs.
The assault on expertise
Trump’s efforts to reshape the federal government will have profound implications for U.S. foreign policy. While the impact of the elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on U.S. soft power has been discussedextensively, less ink has been spilled on the administration’s efforts to eliminate various research organizations and units within the U.S. government.
Funding for these think tanks and broader social science research has served as an important tool for assessing the impact of U.S. foreign policy and identifying policy options. By seeking to eliminate these entities, the Trump administration runs the risk not only of further undermining U.S. soft power, but also of limiting the administration’s own understanding of what is happening as a result of its policies — resulting in negative outcomes in the longer term.
Gutting the next generation of expertise
In addition to cutting funding and dismantling organizations that provide policy-relevant research and expertise, the administration is eliminating various programs that generate future experts in international and government affairs.
One clear way that this is happening has been the suspension of Fulbright Fellowship funding that provides both research and teaching grants to students and faculty to study abroad. Likewise, the Trump administration has canceled the Presidential Management Fellowship (PMF) — a program designed to bring top recent graduates into the federal service. The administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education could have even longer-term implications for developing future foreign policy leaders and analysts.
At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government realized that it needed to develop a cadre of experts who could provide linguistic support and socio-political expertise that could aid their understanding of foreign countries. To ensure that experts were available, the government funded area studies at universities across the country as part of the Defense Education Act of 1958 and the Higher Education Act of 1965. The funding for area studies is now known as Title VI.
Title VI funding is used to promote education through National Resource Centers (NRCs) and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships in nine regional groups—1)Africa, 2) East Asia/ Pan Asia, 3) International, 4) Middle East, 5)Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia, 6) South Asia, 7) Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, 8) Western Europe/Europe, and 9) Western Hemisphere.
Recipient universities benefit from these programs with at least one school in 27 states and the District of Columbia receiving some form of Title VI funding for one or more regions. Notably, Title VI funding has grown in recent years with funding for NRCs growing from $22.7 million in fiscal year 2019 to $29.3 million in 2024. Many of these programs also funded outreach offices that coordinated with local communities and school districts to promote greater interest in and understanding of foreign affairs in the general public.
Source: Author’s rendering based on data from the Department of Education.
As part of its efforts to dismantle the Department of Education, the administration has effectively dissolved the Office of International and Foreign Language Education — the entity responsible for Title VI funding — and this funding is reportedly under review.
While some have argued that cutting these programs should be considered within the broader context of the Trump administration’s efforts to take on “woke” education, the original national security implications for developing Title VI remain. In addition to limiting funding for current expertise on various world regions, cutting funding for area studies runs the risk of eliminating future expertise in these areas — posing a challenge into the future when different sets of experts may be needed to help the country navigate an increasingly multipolar world.
Building support to put the Americas first
While cutting funding for these programs will have implications for all areas of U.S. foreign policy, these cuts come at a time when the Trump administration — and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in particular — seek to realign national interests to focus more on issues in the Western Hemisphere.
The shift toward focusing on the Americas is critical given the traditional “benign neglect” of U.S. foreign policy toward the region. While the Trump administration is clearly focused on the region and has a senior team staffed with Latin Americanists, reorienting U.S. foreign policy will require deepening the bench not only among junior staff but also bolstering public interest in Latin American and the Caribbean relative to other regional hotspots.
Title VI funding was already playing an important role in increasing interest in the Western Hemisphere. Of the nine geographic regions targeted by Title VI, funding for the Western Hemisphere, which includes Canada, was the most, accounting for 18.3% of total funding for NRCs and 20.2% of FLAS funding.
This funding would have increased the number of course offerings of Latin American and Caribbean topics in universities—creating the opportunities for students to become more interested and involved in regional issues. These students go on to develop regional expertise with a portion of them entering the federal government or providing independent analyses that can allow for the development of better foreign policies.
While the impact will not be felt immediately, it will hamper future regional expertise within the U.S. government.
Source: Author’s rendering based on data from the Department of Education.
At the same time, decreasing funding for education on regional affairs will make Rubio’s efforts to shift the focus of U.S. foreign policy more challenging. While the U.S. general public is often ambivalent on most foreign policy issues, areas where they see a shared destiny or identity are spaces where the United States is more likely to engage. The various NRCs play a critical role in building public interest in the Western Hemisphere — from hosting events to helping develop curricula to incorporate Latin American and Caribbean themes into K-12 education.
While engaging the public to boost interest in the Western Hemisphere must go beyond the work done by NRCs, these institutions provide a necessary mechanism for engaging the public outside the DC-New York Corridor. It is also worth noting that the vast majority of Title VI funding on the Western Hemisphere was focused outside the traditional hubs of U.S. foreign policy making (with only 1 of the 22 FLAS rewards — and none of the NRC funding — devoted to a program in New York City [shared by Columbia University and New York University] and none to the DC schools).
The Trump administration’s efforts to shift the focus of U.S. foreign policy while crippling area studies at universities and dismantling government research entities will have profound consequences for its ability to improve regional relations. Funding for research and scholarship on Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada is critical to developing future cadres of foreign policy professionals essential to ensuring long-lasting foreign policy shifts while also maintaining public interest in a region that is often ignored in favor of other geopolitical hotspots.
If the Trump administration wants an “Americas First” foreign policy to last, it needs to recognize the risks of its actions on regional affairs and expertise.
This is one perspective in a Responsible Statecraft ‘debate’ over the value of federal aid for ‘soft power’ programs, including regional studies, think tanks, USAID, and academic exchanges. See a counterpoint by Adam Ratzlaff, here.
It is undeniable that the social sciences are under attack from the Trump Administration.
A sense of incuriosity about the world seems to pervade the various cost-cutting measures which are inconsistently applied to many aspects of the federal government by organizations such as DOGE. Obvious flaws in the argument for such bureaucratic downsizing become apparent when the President announces a record breaking 1 trillion dollar defense budget for the coming year.
The problems with a brute force only approach to foreign affairs are manifold, and it can be easy to see the ending of funding for social science research and student exchange programs as uniformly negative across the board, particularly with dramatic scenes such as the closure of the U.S. Institute for Peace playing out in the news.
And yet, amidst the chaos, a chance for an honest reckoning about what did and did not work with the old soft power machine is undeniably necessary. For those wishing to pivot to a restraint-focused foreign policy, many of these institutions served as ideological self-reinforcement mechanisms that created a monoculture which upheld rampant interventionist narratives.
Far from contributing to peace, they often served as erudite and fashionable justifications for endless war. Even the protests to keep many of these organizations open emphasized their role in power projection and providing competitive services against other countries.
The Fulbright Program, for example, took part in the noble goal of allowing international exchange for students engaged in topics with an international focus to live and study abroad. The logic behind this, however, was tied to the vision of its founder, the late Senator J. William Fulbright, which was liberal internationalism. The dominant ideology of the postwar- and especially post-Cold War era, this world view preached cosmopolitanism but had a disturbing trend of universalizing all international issues into that of a cosmic struggle, opening the potential of endless interventionism as the default position of the up and coming professional managerial class.
Such institutions are part of a global network of so-called ‘soft power’ which is less about being worldly in a way that fosters understanding of the world as it is, but rather seeks to create a global cadre of evangelists bent on changing the world in ways amenable to the project of American civic missionaries.
These groups serve as a kind of screening process that limit the ideological and world view and intellectual diversity of people entering the foreign policy field all while claiming to be purveyors of multiculturalism.
Take USAID, for example. While the organization undeniably did many things that benefited people abroad as well as facilitated U.S. diplomacy in certain sectors, these causes were often human shields for the actual goal of soft regime change and infiltration into the affairs of sovereign states. The faux-president of Venezuela, Juan Guaido, received $52 million from USAID to claim to be some kind deposed legitimate ruler when he was anything but. This followed years and years of USAID-funded attempts to depose Nicolas Maduro, following failed efforts to overturn his predecessor Hugo Chavez.
More relevant to the echo chamber of interventionism, however, is the effect these organizations had on reinforcing narrative control within the United States. In much the same way that scholarships and exchange programs can just as easily create a monoculture feedback loop, so too did USAID-backed funding networks prop up activists and political networks that could claim to be independent sources and activists when interviewed by U.S. media while they were actually being funded by the United States government.
The Trump Administration’s attack on free and open scholarship, particularly in regards to Israel and Palestine, is a very real threat to open and critical inquiry on foreign affairs. But it is a continuation, not a divergence, from trends within academic, media, and NGO establishments that see a consensus building around endless war, sanctioning, and interventionism in the service of a groupthink fueled ideology.
This network is effectively a velvet glove placed over the mailed fist of a declining quest for global hegemony. If we are to save the humanities and an actual robust and worldly education for future diplomats and policy makers, we must reconceptualize what it means to be worlds away from the missionary impulse of the colonial administrator and into that of the culturally and politically tolerant scholar. Of what use can education and exchange be if it does not assist in adapting to the world as it really is rather than what one country’s aspiring elite wishes it to be?
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