In theory, these features ought to make American democracy more effective at conducting foreign policy than most, if not all, authoritarian regimes. Indeed, a large scholarly literature makes precisely this argument, declaring that democracies typically outperform dictatorships in many areas of public policy.3 As the careers of Mao Zedong and Saddam Hussein illustrate, incompetent despots can cling to power for decades, even when their policies are profoundly harmful, provided they retain reliable control over the army, the police, and other tools of repression. Democratic leaders, by contrast, are accountable to the public, and the constant fear of electoral sanction disciplines the exercise of power, encourages them to appoint effective subordinates, and is said to discourage frivolous or risky initiatives.
Furthermore, the formal separation of powers and other institutional “checks and balances” supposedly makes it difficult for democratic leaders to wield power arbitrarily. The president may be the chief executive and commander in chief, but Congress controls the purse strings and in theory can limit what the president is able to do at home or abroad. An independent judiciary provides a further check on executive power and can be a potent source of accountability—again, in theory—because officials who break the law are subject to indictment, prosecution, and punishment.
Third, because democracies also encourage free speech, open discourse, and an independent media, they are said to benefit from a “marketplace of ideas.”4 Citizens in a democracy should have better access to information, and vigorous debate will supposedly winnow out bad ideas and allow better alternatives to emerge. When mistakes are made, citizens and officials in a democracy can figure out that something is amiss and correct the error more rapidly than a typical authoritarian regime would.5
In addition to these structural advantages, one might expect U.S. foreign policymaking to benefit from the dramatic expansion of state capacity and the specialized training that those charged with handling U.S. foreign relations typically receive. During the nineteenth century, notes the historian Ernest May, only a small group of U.S. leaders and private citizens showed “any deep interest in foreign affairs.”6 Even America’s rise to world power did not immediately produce a large community of foreign policy experts in and outside government. As President Woodrow Wilson prepared for the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the dearth of official foreign policy expertise led Wilson’s closest advisor, Colonel Edward House, to create an ad hoc group known as “The Inquiry” to advise the president on U.S. interests and objectives.7
Organizations and individuals engaged primarily in international affairs grew in number throughout the interwar period, though participation in the highest reaches of government was still dominated by an “Eastern Establishment,” as embodied by elite associations such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Foreign Policy Association, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Philanthropies such as the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund became active after World War II, funding a variety of international affairs programs at universities and civic associations.8 And as the Washington Post columnist Joseph Kraft later observed, “the main function [of the establishment] … was to drive isolationism from the field, to make internationalism not only respectable but beyond serious question.”9
By the 1960s, however, as America’s global role grew, education expanded, and foreign policymaking required more specialized expertise, “a revolution was taking place in the structure of America’s foreign policy leadership. Power passed almost imperceptibly from the old Eastern Establishment to a new Professional Elite, from bankers and lawyers who would take time off to help manage the affairs of government to full-time foreign policy experts.”10
At first glance, this expansion of professional expertise would appear to be a significant improvement over the “old guard” establishment, and it should have produced more intelligent and successful policy decisions. Instead of relying on a self-selected group of elites drawn primarily from the corporate world, U.S. foreign policy would be handled by a more diverse group of experts who had specialized training in economics, military affairs, history, diplomacy, or regional studies. In theory, the clash of competing views among these well-informed professionals would generate a livelier debate, thereby ensuring that alternative policy choices were vetted in advance and making major blunders less likely. When mistakes did occur—as they inevitably would—this same well-trained policy community would quickly identify the misstep(s) and alter course.
In the next three chapters I argue that this optimistic vision is an illusion, especially in an era when U.S. dominance allowed it to pursue ambitious foreign policy goals at seemingly low cost and with little risk of significant escalation.11 America’s democratic institutions did not perform nearly as well as this upbeat scenario envisioned, and the contemporary foreign policy community has been characterized less by competence and accountability and more by a set of pathologies that have undermined its ability to set realistic goals and pursue them effectively.
To put it in the bluntest terms, instead of being a disciplined body of professionals constrained by a well-informed public and forced by necessity to set priorities and hold themselves accountable, today’s foreign policy elite is a dysfunctional caste of privileged insiders who are frequently disdainful of alternative perspectives and insulated both professionally and personally from the consequences of the policies they promote. It was impolitic for the deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes to dismiss this community as “the Blob,” but the label nonetheless contains important elements of truth.12
The foreign policy community in contemporary America has been strongly committed to the strategy of liberal hegemony. Within that world, organizations and individuals committed to America’s global leadership role and to an ambitious foreign policy agenda are far more numerous and much better funded than groups arguing for greater U.S. restraint. Despite occasional differences over tactics and the setbacks of the past two decades, today’s foreign policy community still exhibits a striking consensus in favor of trying to run the world.
DEFINING THE FOREIGN POLICY COMMUNITY
By the “foreign policy community,” I mean those individuals and organizations that actively engage on a regular basis with issues of international affairs. This definition incorporates both formal government organizations and the many groups and individuals that deal with foreign policy as part of their normal activities, seeking either to shape public perceptions of international issues or to influence government policy directly.13 For an individual to be considered part of this community, working on some aspect of foreign policy must be either their principal professional vocation or a major private commitment occupying a substantial part of daily life.
To illustrate: members of the “foreign policy community” would include Foreign Service officers, intelligence analysts at the CIA, a senior fellow at a foreign policy think tank, a professor of international relations at a college or university, a staff member serving the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, or a journalist whose beat deals with some aspect of U.S. foreign relations. It would also include an active member of a local World Affairs Council chapter, a defense analyst at the Congressional Budget Office or the RAND Corporation, a lobbyist working for Human Rights Watch, or a program officer at a philanthropic foundation whose agenda includes international affairs.
There will always be borderline cases, of course, but this definition would exclude an employee at a think tank who works on health care or a congressional staffer assigned to the Judiciary Committee, unless they are actively involved in foreign policy issues in some other capacity. It would also exclude private citizens whose foreign policy–related activity is limited to voting in elections or writing the occasional letter to the editor of their local paper, but who do not engage global issues on a regular basis.14
FORMAL INSTITUTIONS OF GOVERNMENT
The foreign policy community begins with the individuals and agencies of government charged wi
th handling different aspects of U.S. foreign relations. The list here is enormous, and it includes the president, the vice president, the National Security Council, the relevant personnel in the Departments of State, Defense, Energy, and Treasury, the various intelligence services, the relevant congressional committees, research organizations such as the Congressional Budget Office or the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the vast array of smaller agencies performing specialized foreign policy tasks.
This world has expanded dramatically over the past half century. For example, the president’s own foreign policy staff—embodied in the National Security Council—has grown from fewer than twenty people in 1961 to roughly two hundred under President George W. Bush and more than four hundred under President Obama.15
The U.S. military is down from its Cold War peak, but there are still nearly 1.4 million men and women on active duty and roughly one million in the National Guard and military reserves. The Department of Defense employs more than 700,000 civilians, and the Department of State consists of roughly 25,000 Foreign Service and civil service personnel (plus 45,000 locally employed civilians worldwide), while the intelligence community comprises seventeen separate agencies with an annual budget well in excess of $50 billion and employing some 100,000 people. More than four million Americans now hold some sort of security clearance, and close to one million are cleared to read top secret material.16
Obviously, most members of this sprawling bureaucratic agglomeration do not exercise substantial authority over major foreign policy decisions. But as Michael Glennon notes, the ability of presidents, cabinet secretaries, and other political appointees to chart a different course in foreign policy is inevitably constrained by the size, inertia, and the de facto autonomy of what he calls the “Trumanite Network” (a reference to the 1947 National Security Act), whose permanent members endure across successive administrations.17
The sheer size of the foreign policy and national security bureaucracy impedes effective policymaking in two ways. First, coordinating action across multiple agencies and constituencies is time-consuming, especially when a new policy has to be created and coordinated through the interagency process.18 Second, the presence of a vast foreign affairs bureaucracy dilutes accountability: when so many fingerprints are on any major policy decision, it becomes harder to determine responsibility for success or failure and thus harder to reward good judgment and penalize incompetence.
MEMBERSHIP ORGANIZATIONS
Outside government, elite and mass attitudes about foreign policy are also influenced by various “membership organizations” that are made up of self-selected individuals with a particular interest in America’s relations with the rest of the world. Examples include the World Affairs Councils, the Foreign Policy Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, or the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and each of these groups engages in activities intended to strengthen public awareness of critical international issues and to help members deepen their own understanding of such topics. Within this category one also finds more specialized membership organizations such as Greenpeace and Oxfam, whose work focuses primarily on other issues but sometimes has an important foreign policy dimension as well.
THINK TANKS
According to James McGann, there are more than eighteen hundred public policy “think tanks” in the United States today, approximately one-quarter of them located in the nation’s capital.19 Their ranks include broad, general-purpose research organizations such as the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Bipartisan Policy Center, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, along with dozens of smaller, more specialized organizations such as the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the Aspen Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Center for International Policy, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Resources for the Future, the Center for the National Interest, and the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The venerable Council on Foreign Relations is a membership organization—albeit a selective one—as well as a think tank, with a staff of more than eighty foreign policy professionals and offices in New York and Washington.
Think tanks perform several functions within the foreign policy community. Staff members conduct independent research, testify to Congress and other government agencies, and appear frequently as media commentators. Most think tanks engage in extensive outreach efforts via their own websites, blogs, publications, seminars, legislative breakfasts, and other events, all intended to enhance their visibility inside Washington, facilitate fundraising, and increase their influence over policy. Think tanks can also play a critical role in many stages of a foreign policy professional’s career: they provide entry-level opportunities for young policy wonks seeking to make their way into government positions, and they provide sinecures for former government officials, including those seeking to return to public service at a later date. In this sense, the D.C.-based think tank community provides an arena where foreign policy ideas can be discussed, debated, criticized, and defended, and some parts of it operate almost as a “shadow government” preparing people and policies for future administrations.20
Although certain think tanks and research organizations are explicitly nonpartisan and aspire to high standards of scholarship, the line between research and policy advocacy is increasingly blurred.21 As Steven Clemons, an experienced veteran of several think tanks, acknowledged some years ago, such organizations “are less and less committed to genuine inquiry designed to stimulate enlightened policy decisions and more and more oriented to deepening the well-worn grooves of paralyzed debate.”22
Indeed, the overall academic quality of D.C.-based think tanks has declined noticeably over the past thirty years. In the 1980s, for example, the Foreign Policy Studies group at Brookings contained a number of scholars who published regularly in top academic journals and university presses, and several senior fellows were subsequently appointed to tenured positions at elite universities.23 Although full-time Brookings fellows sometimes teach as adjunct faculty members at local universities today, they rarely publish in academic venues and would be unlikely to be considered eligible for senior positions in a top academic department.
In many cases, in fact, think tanks are advocacy organizations masquerading as independent research bodies. Organizations such as the Progressive Policy Institute or the Center for American Progress serve these functions for Democrats, while the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation work mostly on behalf of the GOP. These organizations exist to provide intellectual ammunition for partisan political warfare and are understandably sensitive to the interests of major donors and the political leaders whose agendas they seek to promote. In this way, many prominent think tanks are important adjuncts to the next category.
INTEREST GROUPS AND LOBBIES
Interest groups are a central element of American democracy. Because the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and association, groups of citizens can coalesce around any issue that unites them and try to convince politicians to adopt policies they favor. They can do so by lobbying legislators or government officials directly, helping draft congressional resolutions or formal legislation, steering campaign contributions to politicians who support their views, and engaging in activities designed to convince the public to embrace their policy preferences.24
Despite the cliché that “politics stops at the water’s edge,” foreign policy is hardly immune to interest group influence. On the contrary, there is a plethora of interest groups and lobbies on nearly every significant foreign policy issue, each trying to shape mass and elite opinion and persuade government officials to follow its preferred course of action. Here one finds advocacy groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or the Arms Control Association; ethnic lobbies like the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Armenian Assembly
of America, or the United States India Political Action Committee; lobbyists and think tanks funded by corporations favoring increased defense spending; pro-peace groups such as the American Friends Service Committee; business associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; and many, many more.
This category also includes so-called letterhead organizations, such as the Committee on the Present Danger, United Against Nuclear Iran, the Project for the New American Century (or its successor, the Foreign Policy Initiative), or the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy. “Letterhead organizations” are ad hoc groups that bring together eminent figures to issue open letters and statements intended to shape public debate and influence the policy agenda.
THE MEDIA
My definition of the foreign policy community would also include those parts of the media that cover foreign affairs, for they play a key role in shaping what elites and publics know and believe about the world at large and about U.S. foreign policy itself. Prominent components include major news organizations (Reuters, the Associated Press, etc.); elite newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or The Washington Post; and influential broadcast venues such as National Public Radio, Fox News, MSNBC, C-Span, or the PBS NewsHour. Specialized journals such as Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and The National Interest belong here as well, along with general interest publications that frequently cover international issues, such as The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. Of course, individual journalists such as Thomas Friedman, Dana Priest, Helene Cooper, or David Ignatius and celebrity hosts like Fareed Zakaria, Rachel Maddow, Wolf Blitzer, and Sean Hannity must be considered part of the broad foreign policy community, along with the vast number of bloggers and websites that focus heavily on foreign affairs.
The Hell of Good Intentions Page 11