On the military and HIV/AIDS - the Pentagon has already been engaging on this in Africa - a notable success was their engagement with the Angolan military, though most of the credit, in my view, should go to their Angolan counterparts in FAA (Forcas Armadas Angolanos). However this was a tightly focused intervention working with a high risk group i.e. soldiers, where the Pentagon has a distinctive competence over agencies like USAID. I'm not so sure I'd want them running broader programs targetting other high risk groups or the general populaton, though another voice advocating for funds to be released to agencies with the ability to do that more general kind of work well would be a good thing.
Why are we worrying about potential militarization, when it has already happened? Will the State Department ever recover from Armitage and Powell?
A third broad issue is what about the role of EUCOM.
Obviously, EUCOM is a lot less important than it was 1989 or even 2001. It used to be that a deployment to Africa would have come out of Europe or units dedicated to reinforce Europe so the alignment made some sense. Now any units going to Africa would come out of the US so EUCOM is off to the side not near it’s area and not near the units with which it would use.
Also with the recent differences opinion with Europe it is possible that a European country or organization would claim jurisdiction to protect EU role as (stike out) hegemon with a regional order / empire (end strike out) the international order and issue European wide arrest warrants.
It would seem that the disadvantages of keeping that function in Europe long term are also a key part of this decision.
I seem to recall Ms. Frazer was a key player as she pushed the Ethiopians to war, occupation and backing a transitional government for Somalia. Yes, it had an Islamist goverment, but there are Islamists and there are Islamists. That bunch rather were pussycats. Was it really necessary to empty out Mogadishu and reintroduce the war lords? Anyway, if all we get is war from the high-profile diplomats, well.. draw your own conclusions.
Interesting.
Peter notes that "...there is the price of securitizing development, AIDS, etc., but the lesson in Washington is that this is how things get done these days...."
It is of course easier to get Congress to authorize and appropriate money if the particular issue is presented as both humanitarian/moral and a matter of national security, rather than just one or the other. This dual-justification approach has probably helped the Admin. increase development assistance and global disease funding in recent years (though the US still lags well behind a lot of other rich countries on these scores in percent-of-GDP terms and questions have been raised about the effectiveness of the Millennium Challenge Account, etc.).
Nice discussion on the soft power bit. You may want to check out on the matter of soft power, from an Indian perspective here
It's all very well to build soft power, but it's a very different matter to translate into support for specific policies and positions. That's hard.
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