explaining our Congress to foreign officers

oh, my

I am sitting through a course we require the International Fellows attending the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, D.C. to take. Their role at NDU is quite different from the U.S. students because we hope to orient our potential allies and partners to our values, our culture, our politix, and a lot of things we as citizens probably don’t focus upon as well as we should. We want them to go back to their home countries to explain us to their militaries, their fellow citizens, and their goverrnments by having been among us. It is eye opening for many reasons.

Many of the officers who now attend our master’s degree courses have studied here in prior assignments, though certainly not all of them. The Fellows likely have fewer formal academic credentials than U.S. officers at the same rank because the U.S. can afford the luxury of a commitment to invest in the intellectual development of military personnel. These students come for a full year rather than the ten months’ in residence for U.S. students.

The International Fellows (IFs) study the same core curriculum U.S. colleagues pursue, along with more specialised courses called ‘electives’ although some are mandatory electives like the one I am attending. The IFs also visit various cities and regions to get the flavour of the country along with sampling various institutions. They do a Constitutional convention early after their arrival so they are trying to get a real sense of how we approach governing at the federal level. It’s an innovative experiential approach to covering materials we have been studying, hopefully, since elementary school.

Today a Congressional staffer lectured about his environment.He said nothing partisan but discussed processes, timing, etc. To repeat, we are talking about Congress or the legislative branch rather than the 118th Congress, Republicans or Democrats.

Now, one cannot pretend to cover all that one needs to say in an hour or even the hour lecture plus the follow on seminar based on readings assigned. No one pretends to make these IFs into Congressional scholars or even voters in the United States but one simply must consider and have an appreciation of how Congress operates.

Oh, my goodness. Do we have a complicated legislative branch or what? Can you explain why we have caucuses for thematic topics but not for regions? Are you able to explain in a couple of sentences what an omnibus bill is and why it’s still considered an extraordinary approach to spending? Have you pondered how the Founders really would react to this system, even if they intended our legislature to be ‘deliberative’? Are the Congresses we have seen over the past thirty years deliberative or constipated? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

The IFs have been here for 9 months so they are pretty comfortable with each other, marginally less so with their American colleagues so it took about 10 minutes for their truely mystified reactions to seep out in seminar. The Americans around the table still use some jargon which does not help (if they have worked on the Hill), but the more basic gulf between the IFs and the yanks is an incredulty that we are the standard for democracy….or at least we used to be.

The seminar leaves the students with a bounty of probable discussion topics until class next week. One of the reasons they are here is because the days in residence allow them to kibbitz, argue, think and reengage with other IFs or U.S. students over their remaining months before graduation in June. Based on the conversations I heard from merely three of them walking out of the building following seminar, they were baffled and coping to grasp what they heard.

How many of our own citizens bother studying what the IFs learn? Decreasing numbers, I fear. That means more people blame Congress without understanding it. Much of the time that reaction may have merit from Representatives’ and Senators’ decisions but it also reflects on us not bothering to consider what incentives those same Representatives and Senators are responding to with their behaviour. I't’s still our Congress, good/bad/or indifferent. FIN