Why US foreign policy keeps failing

SAIS master’s student Solvej Krause reports:

Harvard Professor Stephen Walt, influential international relations scholar and co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” delivered a damning assessment last week at SAIS of the failure of US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.  Highlighting the ever-present tension between ambitions and capabilities in US foreign policy, Walt offered a realist view of what he perceives as an activist, overreaching foreign policy agenda promoted by both neoconservatives and liberal interventionists in consecutive administrations.

“We forgot that there might be limits to what we could do,” he said, referring to the extraordinarily powerful geostrategic position of the US in the international system since 1990.  Walt advocates greater restraint in American involvement abroad and a drastic reduction in the US military footprint, especially in the Middle East.  His call for more restraint has important implications for post-conflict scenarios.  Given the troubled experiences with state and nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the current administration’s appetite for complex and costly post-conflict involvement has diminished.

Between 1945 and 1950, a small group of foreign policy makers achieved extraordinary results, including the Marshall Plan and formulation of the policy of containment.  They created key arrangements that influenced foreign policy for the coming decades.

Post-Cold War foreign policy legacy is by comparison “terrible,” despite the lack of a geopolitical rival.  The US should be doing much better than it actually has, given the enormous growth of the foreign policy apparatus (more staffers, more academic research, greater diversity among officials) since 1990.  But the US has failed to secure peace in the Middle East (Israel-Palestine), failed to prevent Rwanda, and has not managed to build a lasting relationship with Russia.  9/11 was mostly “a reaction to perceived sins of US foreign policy in the Middle East.”  The Balkan wars were ended successfully but in a lengthy and costly process.  The situation there is still precarious.

Walt identifies two sources of US foreign policy failure: problems arising from the structural (geostrategic) position of the US in the international system and problems arising from inside the American foreign policy establishment.  The internal problems should be fixable, says Walt, but it won’t be easy.

Outside the system – Structural problems

The US foreign policy agenda is “perennially overcrowded.”  The primacy of the United States in the international system makes it difficult to set priorities and pick battles wisely. Since the US alone has the power to intervene and prevent atrocities, it becomes very hard not to act.  Since the scope of US foreign policy is global, the military has divided the entire world into regional military commands (Africom, Centcom). “We forgot that there might be limits to what we can do,” says Walt.  British historian Paul Kennedy said that one reason why the British Empire lasted so long was that they were smart at picking their battles.

There are no more “easy” foreign policy problems left.  The issues left today that have not been solved over the past century are the “really hard residuals.”  Today’s agenda is filled with problems we don’t know how to solve without great costs, e.g. Israel-Palestine, Iran, North Korea.  They are almost intractable.  Some require social engineering in ethnically heterogeneous societies, which is hard for anyone to do.

US primacy encourages obstructive behavior by allies and non-allies:  Non-allies Russia and China oppose  intervention in Syria because they went along with the US in the Libyan case, allowing the US to pursue a mission aimed at regime change, not only humanitarian protection.  The dominance of the US encourages “reckless driving” by smaller, weaker states, such as Georgia, Israel and Taiwan. This leaves the US vulnerable to blackmail. For example, President Karzai in Afghanistan can do pretty much everything he wants because he knows that he is the only game in town.

Inside the system – Internal problems

Within the US government, groups that favor activist foreign policy dominate groups that favor more restraint.  There is little difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists in this regard. Both are activist. Realists are an endangered species in the foreign policy apparatus.

The same is true for think tanks: the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings, Carnegie – all favor favor American leadership in the world and lean towards interventionist, activist policies. On the other end of the spectrum you have the Cato Institute, which favors greater restraint, but these institutions have less money, fewer people and less influence than the activist institutions.

There is a dangerous tendency in the foreign policy establishment to inflate threats in order to convince the public that involvement is necessary. Walt cited NSC-68, which ushered in the McCarthy era by exaggerating the threat of Communist infiltration in the US government and society.  He finds parallels to today’s inflation of the Iranian threat and the threat of Al Qaeda. “Remember: Iran’s defense budget is $$10 billion per year.”  What is called “Al Qaeda” are a bunch of loosely affiliated criminal groups that adopt the AQ brand like Baskin Robbins. The entire “war on terror” was misconceived.  AQ should have been framed as international criminals, not combatants in a global war.  The inflation of threats makes us “collectively stupid,” says Walt.

There is a lack of real debate about American foreign policy.  The range of disagreements in the foreign policy establishment is not very broad. Most think tanks lean towards activism. Politicians show enormous deference towards military leaders. To be credible in the foreign policy establishment you have to sound hawkish.

There are three taboo issues where absolutely no open debate in Washington is possible:

US policy towards Iran: For decades the US has employed threats of military action combined harsh sanctions. “We’re effectively blackmailing Iran.” This approach is not working. “Threatening others with regime change is not very effective.  But anyone who proposes a different approach is treated as a policy pariah.”

The US relationship with Israel:  Any criticism of it will end your career. There were 178 mentions of Israel during Chuck Hagel’s hearings.

The US drone program:  The problem is excessive secrecy. How can we judge the efficacy of the drone war if we don’t know what is going on? What if you have created more terrorists than you have killed?

Walt also worries about the precedent that the US is setting in using cyber warfare so generously.

The problem with these taboos is that they force policy leaders to say things they don’t really believe in.  But being deadly wrong or incompetent does not harm your career.   Being right can end your career.  Given how Iraq turned out, you’d think that the makers of the Iraq policy would be discredited now. But they are still highly influential, e.g. Bill Kristol, Elliott Abraham, Paul Wolfowitz, Tommy Franks.  If you get it right, your career suffers.  The most common reason why American military leaders are fired is sexual misconduct, not misconduct on battlefield.  There is too much blind deference to military leaders.  There is a corrupt, co-opted relationship between politicians and those who are supposed to hold them to account.

Academics, afflicted with a “cult of irrelevance,” are not doing their job. They should be using the protection of tenure to challenge foreign policy dogma.  But instead they are getting caught up in “simplistic hypothesis testing.”  The gap between the world of academia and world of policy is too wide.

We have the “worst possible system for staffing the executive branch you can imagine.” Civil service employees are few, so there is a large turnover every four years.  The appointments process has gone off the rails, leaving important positions unfilled for a long time.

The presidential term lasts four years while the election season lasts for over one year. This means that the President is preoccupied with campaigning for at least 25% of his term, which is extremely bad for good policy-making.

The problem with advances in military technology that make a “light footprint” approach (drones, special forces) possible is that they make interventions cheaper and easier – both in terms of costs and lives lost.  All of a sudden, there are many reasons to intervene. But the US cannot be everywhere. The American military was not designed to do nation-building, and there are many reasons why it is not well-suited for it.