Treasury does, of course, coordinate with State, but State doesn’t set the agenda nor does it control the message. Policy is set, government-wide, by the White House. State and Treasury are both supposed to be supporting that policy, using their individual areas of expertise.

I understand about pressure from Treasury. Perhaps the system from ~25 years ago would have been superior: Treasury (and Commerce) would have sent their own officials. Sure, State would sacrifice some control – but if you are made to serve another bureaucracy there may be no way to ever satisfy ‘em; there is always something that needs more clarification, some point that could have been made, something else they can say should have been done differently. It is no skin off their nose to apply pressure, and their priorities aren’t yours.

Might not State do a better job if it concentrated on keeping track of things (policy coordination) rather than controlling them?

And how did supervision of NGOs/charities become a PD issue, rather than a political one? Let me guess: everybody else was busy so it got dumped on the shoulders of the new PD man: “He just came over from USIA, he has nothing important to do…”

Setting priorities is tough. Congress wants to “earmark” their own. The bosses have their own ideas. The “core” responsibily – who advocates that?

But there are only a handful of PD officers in KSA. Trying to do everything would seem to guarantee doing at least some things poorly. (What I heard that Treasury did when they were faced with a similar situation was to testify to the relevant congressional committee, quite frankly, that they were not going to obey Congress because Treasury lacked the time, funds, and will to do the task demanded by law. The congressmen choked a bit but Treasury got away with it.)

But there’s a matter of degree involved here. Not every issue or every detail of every issue can be go-to-the-mat. If everything is important, then nothing’s important.

One can–and State Dept. does–prioritize. It says, “We’re not happy with the way you’re monitoring the international charity groups. We understand you can’t/won’t just follow our dictates, but we still expect to see progress. Find another means to meet the end and we’ll be happy, but you’ve got to reach the end.”

Prioritizing issues means that some matters will get more attention and some will get less. “Democratization”–more realistically, what the USG is looking for is actually an increase in representation, not necessarily democracy–is getting the major attention as nearly all we’ve asked in countering terror financing is already being done.

Paradox! As long as American diplomats defer to such attitudes and hand out goodies or favors based on the “we-can’t-stay-to-close-to-America” attitude, American diplomats discourage and neuter the influence (and careers) of pro-American officials, and even legitimize official anti-Americanism. The American diplomat may receive a short-term boost to his career, but the U.S. may suffer the consequences of losing out long-range strategic objectives.

Don’t give in, and pro-American officials may gain influence – and thus step up the career ladder. The primary function of Public Diplomacy should be to encourage attitudes in the target populace that make standing with America not just conceivable, but something that should be actively favored.

As for international charities in the Muslim World: too many of them have been compromised not to have multiple checks and balances built into their monitoring systems. Even then it becomes a question of Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The issue at hand is whether or not the international charities should be monitored from the headquarters, in the KSA, or in the various countries in which they actually work. The latter is the Saudi position and makes sense, to an extent. The US position is that some of these countries are truly third-world countries, with incompetent bureaucracies, and thus unable to do proper monitoring.

The issue is still actively being argued between the US and the KSA.

If a young man is gainfully and engagingly employed, perhaps…