Trump’s Democracy Man

It’s a rare point of foreign-policy consistency for the president. As a candidate, he railed against “nation building”: “We’re trying to force democracy down their throats,” he said during a September 2016 rally. “We are spending trillions of dollars, and they don’t even want it.”

The disdain remained steady after Inauguration Day, even as Trump shifted on other foreign-policy issues. In August, he announced that he would keep troops in Afghanistan, a move he acknowledged as a reversal. But he vowed: “We will no longer use American military might to construct democracies in faraway lands, or try to rebuild other countries in our own image. Those days are now over.”

Green hopes that’s not true for development and foreign assistance. With a slight Midwestern twang, the clean-shaven 57-year-old tells me that he sees the spread of democracy as integral to global stability and American prosperity. Before heading up USAID, he was president of the International Republican Institute, a nonprofit organization that seeks to support and encourage democracy overseas. Now, in what ought to be his dream job, he is serving a president whose foreign policy prioritizes military force and security at home.

The Trump administration has signaled broad skepticism about soft power. Its May budget proposal featured a 30 percent cut in the State Department and USAID budget, with a specific 32 percent cut in funding for democracy-promotion programs, according to the Congressional Research Service.

“It is not a soft power budget,” Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney explained in March. “This is a hard power budget. And that was done intentionally.”

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said that values must be subordinated to American interests. “In some circumstances, if you condition our national security efforts on someone adopting our values, we probably can’t achieve our national security goals or our national security interests,” he observed in May.

These are rocky shoals for a head of USAID to navigate. But Green has an arsenal of experience behind him. For one thing, he has been on the other side of the dais. A four-term Wisconsin congressman (1999-2007), he describes himself as a “known quantity” on Capitol Hill. His reputation there allowed for a breezy confirmation with heaps of bipartisan praise. Green says he leaves politics at the door with his Hill friends, preferring instead to talk Packers football and hunting. (A Wisconsin cheese-head sits atop a bookshelf in his light-filled office in the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center.) Even so, his relationships on the Hill could prove helpful if tensions with the administration bubble over.

“What’s going to be interesting to watch is when he has conflicts with his own administration. How much is he able to—either behind-the-scenes or more overtly—find allies on the Hill and work with them?” says Scott Morris, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. “Does he see himself doing battle with Mulvaney at OMB, arm-in-arm with people like Lindsey Graham?”

Even the most hawkish of lawmakers side with Green on the value of development. Graham, chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee that oversees foreign aid, slammed Trump’s budget proposal for “destroying soft power” and diminishing American leadership. “I believe, after 42 trips to Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re never going to win this war by killing terrorists alone,” the South Carolina Republican told Tillerson during a hearing. “I believe, as the generals do—if you don’t believe me, listen to the generals—that the State Department’s role in the war on terror is very important . . . just as important as any military power we have.”

Whether Trump grows to embrace soft power may be irrelevant; Congress controls the purse strings, and lawmakers have soundly rejected the administration’s foreign-assistance cuts. “They may just put the money in the account and say we don’t really care what you guys want to do,” says Andrew Natsios, who headed USAID under George W. Bush. “If you don’t do what Congress wants, let me tell you—there’s hell to pay.”

But there is also room to hope that the president will have a come-to-Jesus moment on development.

Green recalls a scene shortly after the presidential election. “The team at IRI were wondering what’s next for democracy work, for development work, for foreign assistance?” And rightly so: Trump had not been shy about his “America First” outlook.

In the midst of this uncertainty, one of Green’s senior staffers stood up and read a statement from the president. “It said we really need to focus everything back here at home, we shouldn’t be doing so much around the world,” Green remembers. The staffer then revealed that the words were from President George W. Bush’s early days.

“It was just a reminder that every president inherits a complicated world. I would suggest this president has inherited a particularly complicated world,” Green says. “As time goes on, they begin to think more and more about what makes up our leadership—what is the juice of our leadership. In many parts of the world it’s what we do here at USAID.”

Green has been upfront with both Trump and Tillerson about his development philosophy and his belief in fostering democracy. “I gave them examples of how I believe that our tools in development, including democracy promotion, can really help them achieve their objectives of national security, economic security,” he recalls. “They’ve been nothing but supportive since day one.”

He can also take comfort in the fact that Trump has not been consistent on foreign policy. Despite signaling on the campaign trail that he would limit engagement abroad, he has either made military moves or threatened to do so in Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, and Afghanistan. He has also shown signs of reflexive humanitarianism, particularly with his military response to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s chemical attack on Khan Shaykhun in April. “When you kill innocent children, innocent babies—babies, little babies—with a chemical gas that is so lethal . . . that crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line,” Trump said after the attack. “I now have responsibility.”

Some see discord between Trump’s denunciations of democracy promotion and his military moves overseas. “I’m confused by the messages from the White House on these issues,” Natsios says. “One day, they’re opposed to democracy programs and they don’t care about human rights. The next day, they’re announcing military intervention because of an abusive dictatorship in Venezuela.” “They bombed the chemical site in Syria, which I applauded—but why did they do that? What’s the geo-strategic purpose in that if you’re a hard realist?” he continues. “To try to take their statements and translate it into an aid program would be chaotic because there appears to be no strategy.”

Green seems comfortable cutting through the noise. His commitment to international development stems from the late 1980s, when he and his wife moved to a small Kenyan village to teach English. Years later, he returned to Africa as ambassador to Tanzania under George W. Bush. It was that experience, curiously, that Green says president-elect Trump appeared most interested in during their first meeting.

“It wasn’t ‘Mark, would you like to head up USAID?’ That wasn’t the conversation,” he says. “Instead, he was asking me: What was Tanzania like? What did you see? What were the challenges?”

The most rewarding aspect of his ambassadorship was implementing programs that he had a hand in crafting in Congress. That includes the successful AIDS initiative started by Bush and largely implemented by USAID. Such programs bolster his faith in the positive impact of developmental aid.

It is a progression as he sees it: “helping countries go from recipients, to partners, to fellow donors.” “We should always be looking at helping people to help themselves,” Green explains, “working with those who wish to rise.” Foreign assistance, he adds, is not inevitable or an entitlement: “The purpose of foreign assistance is to end the need for its existence.”

Jenna Lifhits is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.