America
has had the luxury of flourishing on a continent without serious rivals
for power, which has left us unencumbered with the enmities of the Old
World and free to devote our capital and energies to things beside doing
down the fellows on the other side of the mountain. It would be
ungrateful to regard this as anything but a blessing. The regrettable
hatreds and wars of the Old World did, however, nourish up a long
tradition of real life-or-death diplomacy—an ability to identify and
prioritize concrete national interests, a distaste for idealism, the
recognition that a bad peace may be a lesser evil than a good war, all
the tactics of sometimes cooperating, sometimes coercing, sometimes
deceiving your neighbors. The U.S. still had the diplomatic
establishment and traditions of a very secure middle power when it was
thrust suddenly into great-power status; we have never really caught up.
A
specific difficulty is that we have never developed a balance between
diplomatic professionalism and the forms of republican government.
Foreign policy is a discipline that is naturally suited to technocratic
structures; the achievement of even modest goals takes patient
development that is not characteristic of four-year presidential
politics or the two-year legislative cycle. Russian foreign policy has
been remarkably consistent in its goals for over a century, and it must
be conceded that this is in large part due to the fact that Russian
foreign policy has never been seriously threatened by popular control.
Russian aims (and even foreign policy personnel) in the First World War
remained undisturbed by the February Revolution, and only German
sponsorship of the Bolsheviks really put the kibosh on them. Those same
Bolsheviks had reverted to the same war aims within 20 years; they are
in large part substantially the same as the aims of the current war in
Ukraine. This is geographic determinism, yes, but geographic determinism
married to a policy developed and pursued largely without interruption
by democratic hurly-burly.
Such
technocratic elements are, at best, an uncomfortable fit for our own
constitutional order and notions of popular political sovereignty. And
indeed, one of the complaints of the American right is that technocratic
elements, including in the State Department, tend to pursue their own
interests without reference to the tides of politics. It is not clear in
my mind how to resolve the problem; while the tensions between clarity
in foreign policy and political government may be uniquely acute in the
United States, it is not without parallel in other democracies. (For
example, the profoundly muddled British foreign policy in the prelude to
the First World War was in part the product of changing political tides
at home.)
None
of this is fresh criticism; George Kennan was already articulating it
in the ’50s. (Interestingly, Kennan suggests that perhaps our diplomatic
structures are insufficiently democratically responsive,
causing strange tensions between popular will and policy, and that the
parliamentary system of confidence votes may be preferable in this
respect. I have my doubts.) The fundamental problem may in fact be
insoluble—republican government may just be incompatible with first-rate
foreign policy, which is one reason to reduce a republic’s involvement
in the affairs of other nations. That does not mean the problem cannot
be ameliorated.
My good friend Philip Linderman wrote, with Marcus Thornton, a proposal for changing Foreign Service hiring so
that it draws from a wider pool of talent and encourages a more
politically responsible, national interest–based outlook among our
professional diplomats. A professional formation more strongly oriented
toward American national interest would in time allow the relaxation of
certain obstacles to real diplomatic competence. For example, the
Foreign Service rotates officers on a regular basis ultimately to
prevent client capture, that is to say, to keep the officers from
becoming representatives of the countries where they work to the U.S.
rather than representatives of the U.S. to those countries. This does
seem to work reasonably well for its stated goal, but it also tends to
prevent FSOs from developing any real local expertise or clout. If we
were less worried about client capture and diplomatic freelancing, we
could allow FSOs to become better at their jobs.
This
would not change the difficulty inherent in the seasonal changes of
democratic politics (although a professional diplomatic corps whose
advice political leaders felt they could take seriously and with less
suspicion would, I think, temper certain excesses). That difficulty can
be mellowed only by a change in political culture—an electorate less
inclined to believe our own national propaganda, and politicians less
inclined to spout it. In this, President Donald Trump has been an
unequivocally salutary influence; his justifications for policy refer
back to the national interest without exception. They are not always
very good justifications, or justifications that line up with the
actions under consideration, which may in fact reflect the persistence
of ideological goals. But at least this rhetoric brings policy out of
the rarefied air of ideals into the realm of honest, pragmatic
deliberation.
This
approach assumes that Americans are adults who can be reasoned with,
rather than children to be dazzled or menaced with bedtime stories—that
is to say, that they are something like citizens in a democratic
republic. We are no longer a young country. The only way for our foreign
policy to grow up is for us to grow up, too.
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