Our guest blogger is Natalie Ondiak, Research Associate at the Center for American Progress.

Secretary of State Clinton’s trip to Africa this week highlights two things: U.S. interest and engagement with the continent and the fact that the Washington foreign policy bureaucracy remains a mess. A Washington Post article yesterday highlighted the fact that nearly seven months into the Obama administration, no USAID administrator has yet been named.

From the beginning of the Obama administration, and even before, there have been calls for a shift in U.S. foreign policy that focuses not just on American military might, but also on diplomacy and development capabilities—the so called “Three Ds.” Secretary Clinton, in her first speech at the State Department noted:

There are three legs to the stool of American foreign policy: defense, diplomacy, and development. And we are responsible for two of the three legs. And we will make clear, as we go forward, that diplomacy and development are essential tools in achieving the long-term objectives of the United States. And I will do all that I can, working with you, to make it abundantly clear that robust diplomacy and effective development are the best long-term tools for securing America’s future.

This language describes the sustainable security concept, a more integrated approach to national security that integrates human security, collective and national security. A few days later she said:

You know, if we are serious about diplomacy and development and culture and politics and anthropology and sociology and all the things that we can bring to the table, then we’ve got to be at that table from the very beginning as we plan for the national security strategy of the United States.

But this is all rhetoric and no reality. Seven months have passed. Without an administrator, how can USAID properly function? Where are the U.S. development capabilities?

As it now stands, USAID cannot be an equal leg on the stool. It is not a cabinet-level agency and it has well documented personnel and capacity deficiencies. It is unclear what the relationship between USAID and the State Department will be. But if the State Department retains budget authority and the USAID administrator reports to the Secretary of State, the agency will be a stepchild at best.

When it comes to rationalizing the time it has taken to get an administrator in place, the conversation is dominated by mudslinging. Secretary Clinton called the vetting process a nightmare as the excuse for why no Administrator is in place. The name that has longest been bantered around is Paul Farmer, the visionary doctor and founder of Partners in Health. But recent reports suggest he is no longer in the running. No other names are being suggested. Why is the potential USAID administrator the best kept secret in Washington? Who would want to take a job at an agency whose mission is undefined?

Secretary Clinton’s arrival in Africa without an administrator in place sends an odd signal: U.S. diplomacy remains healthy, but development is a question-mark. In the countries Secretary Clinton is visiting, U.S. investments in long-term, strategic development are essential, not U.S. defense or diplomacy capabilities. The trip to Africa could have been the place where the USAID administrator was announced and the agency’s abilities and commitments toward the continent were highlighted. Instead, development remains in the background on Clinton’s Africa trip because the bureaucracy in Washington is broken.

Last night, in a segment warning of the environmental perils associated with US population growth, The Lou Dobbs Show featured Ben Zuckerman — an anti-immigrant activist who attempted a nativist takeover of the Sierra Club back in 2004. Dobbs correspondent Casey Wian allowed Zuckerman to insert himself into a discussion about a new report released by Oregon State University (OSU) which unsurprisingly shows that having fewer children lowers total carbon emissions. Zuckerman is an astronomy professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and a self-proclaimed “environmentalist.”

ZUCKERMAN: The mainstream environmental movement has entirely dropped the ball on this issue. And I think that’s really been a disaster for our country…They list literally hundreds of sort of trivial ways in which one can reduce one’s environmental impact on the earth, but they don’t even mention population…

WIAN: UCLA’s Zuckerman says the U.S. government could and should be doing more to encourage limited preproduction and population growth, including controlling immigration, educating the public about the impact of multiple child families, and perhaps even structuring child tax credits to reduce tax breaks for larger families.

Watch it:

The OSU report claims that having one American child results in an environmental impact 160 times greater than a Bangladeshi youngster due to the wealth disparity between the two nations. However, OSU provides no policy prescriptions while Zuckerman seems to imply that the world is better off if that Bangladeshi child stays in his or her home country and Bangladesh remains poor and unindustrialized. The US Census Bureau meanwhile projects that the rate of US population growth will decrease by 50% over the next six decades.

Most of Zuckerman’s environmental policy prescriptions involve curbing “over-immigration” which he claims “contributes to environmental decay.” Zuckerman is the former director of an anti-immigration group called Diversity Alliance for a Sustainable America (now Alliance for a Sustainable USA) and led Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization. As a board member of the Sierra Club, Zuckerman tried to pass a resolution in 1998 that would have reversed the Club’s neutrality policy on immigration. Zuckerman and his cronies then blatantly attempted a “takeover” of the Sierra Club’s leadership by placing anti-immigrant candidates on the Club’s board ballot in 2004. The entire controversy subsided when Zuckerman’s candidates received less than 3% of all votes casted.

In recent years Zuckerman has stuck to star-watching and planet-gazing, but his recent appearance on Dobbs signals that he’s not ready to hang up his anti-immigrant towel quite yet. Zuckerman currently serves as vice-president of Californians for Population Stabilization’s board and sits on the Statistical Oversight Board of NumbersUSA. Both groups are financed by white-supremacist John Tanton, “the puppet master of the modern anti-immigration movement” who Zuckerman has referred to as “a great environmentalist.”

Imagine that the government of a foreign country was carrying out a years-long project that involved seizing property from a disfavored ethnic group and transferring it to a favored ethnic group, in contravention of that government’s obligations under international law, as well as in violation of its previous commitments to the United States.

Now imagine that a U.S. Congressional delegation visited that country, but rather than criticizing that government for its violations, those American legislators criticized U.S. policy, and the American president for enforcing it.

I think this might be seen in some circles as controversial. Even inappropriate.

But this is precisely what just occurred in Israel, where a GOP delegation led by Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) criticized the Obama administration’s attempts to hold Israel to its previous commitments to freeze settlements and halt the eviction of Arab families from their homes in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood to make way for Jewish settlers:

[T]he delegation of 25 Republicans say their weeklong mission to Israel is designed to show solidarity with the Jewish state and promote Mideast peace. [...]

Cantor and others supported Israel’s handling of the eviction of two Arab families from a house in east Jerusalem earlier this week, a move criticized by the European Union and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“I don’t think we, in America, would want another country telling us how to implement and execute our laws,” Cantor said.

The United States and the United Nations both condemned the eviction of the families. Under President Bush’s 2003 road map, Israel committed to “freez[ing] all settlement activity,” and the Obama administration has made clear that it considers attempts to expand the Jewish presence in East Jerusalem to be covered by that commitment.

A spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) described exactly what Cantor and his colleagues are supporting:

The families, evicted in the early hours of Sunday from the homes where they have lived for more than half a century, continue to suffer distress and shock. The children are particularly traumatised. The lasting humanitarian impact on the 53 people directly affected including 20 minors cannot be over-estimated. Seeing settlers being escorted into the houses in which some family members were born, was particularly distressing for these refugees.

Not only were they surrounded by Israeli police and security personnel at dawn, their homes broken into and their families thrown onto the streets, they have had to endure the indignity and humiliation of their personal effects being loaded onto trucks and dumped in scrub land at the edge of Jerusalem’s Route One.

On Monday Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, was “summoned to the State Department for a reprimand” over the Sheikh Jarrah project, for the second time in two weeks. Oren has said that Israeli settlement activity in East Jerusalem “does not represent any attempt to alter the demographic balance” of the area, but Israeli government documents, as well as a substantial research by Israeli human rights groups, reveal his claim to be untrue.

Noting that the evicted families “were given those houses by the UN a few years after they, like tens of thousands of other Palestinians, fled their homes in west Jerusalem during the 1948 war,” Jerusalem Post columnist Larry Derfner wrote that the Sheikh Jarrah evictions “revealed our settlement policy in all its glory“:

It reminded everyone that the issue isn’t houses and zoning, it’s justice and decency — or, rather, injustice and indecency.

Maybe it’s too much to ask Cantor and his colleagues to recognize the injustice and indecency of Israeli policy toward Jerusalem’s non-Jewish residents. But it shouldn’t be too much to expect them not to go abroad and provide cover for it.