§9803 Global Fragility Strategy

Summary

The President must create a 10-year plan called the “Global Fragility Strategy.” The plan is made with the Secretary of State, the USAID Administrator, the Secretary of Defense, and other federal leaders. It must help stabilize places affected by conflict, reduce fragility, and make the United States a stronger leader in preventing extremism and violent conflict. The plan must look at local and national causes, outside actors, and what prevention methods work. It must set clear goals and use many types of programs to strengthen state-society relations, counter extremist ideas, and make communities less likely to turn to violence. It must support local and national leaders, empower groups like youth and women, use locally led and participatory programs (including justice, good governance, public services, and community policing), and avoid backing abusive security forces. The plan must assign roles: the State Department leads drafting, foreign policy, and security planning; USAID leads prevention and non-security development and humanitarian work; Defense actions must be jointly made and approved by the Secretary of State; other agencies support with agreement from State and USAID. The strategy must list programs and their funding by year, show how the U.S. will work with foreign governments and international groups (for example the World Bank and the UN), expand public-private partnerships, and set rules for monitoring and evaluation. It must make programs country-led and context-specific and include steps to prevent corruption or exploitation by repressive actors or extremists. The plan must be developed with civil society, local and national leaders in the listed countries and regions, international development groups, multilateral donors, private and academic partners, and Congress. The President must send the strategy to the appropriate congressional committees no later than 270 days after December 20, 2019. The report should be unclassified (with a classified annex if needed) and must at least list the objectives; involved agencies and their priorities; compact-style partnerships to ensure local leadership and shared accountability; needed authorities and staffing; how U.S. leadership will boost international prevention including G7/G20 engagement; the senior officials who will oversee the strategy; and the priority countries and regions with reasons for each.