Ironically, moving higher in this world does not give most people greater latitude to take unpopular positions or to say what they really think. If anything, pressure to conform increases the closer one gets to the corridors of power. University-based scholars (and especially those with tenure) and anyone not desperate to land a job in government are freer to challenge the prevailing consensus and sometimes rewarded for doing so. By contrast, people who aspire to rise within the inside-the-Beltway establishment will be more inclined to shift with the prevailing winds. It should be no surprise, therefore, that there was little opposition to the 2003 Iraq War in the corridors of power or in the major think tanks that dominate discourse inside the Beltway. A majority of Democratic senators (including Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden) voted for the war in 2003, and prominent Democratic foreign policy experts like Richard Holbrooke and James Steinberg were open supporters as well. Experts at the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Council on Foreign Relations were among the loudest and most persistent voices backing the war, and even some moderates who opposed a full invasion, such as former Carnegie Endowment president Jessica Mathews, still favored “the selective use of military force” to enable “coercive inspections.”45 As one might expect, the most consistent voices opposing the invasion were outside Washington and had little or no effect on the decision.
There is an important personal dimension here as well. To be a respected and well-connected member of the broader foreign policy community opens doors, confers status, creates lucrative opportunities, and feeds one’s ego and sense of self-worth. It’s cool to have a White House pass or a top secret security clearance, and it’s gratifying to be nominated for membership in an elite organization like the Council on Foreign Relations or invited to testify on the Hill. It’s a heady experience to feel that one is “in the know,” to participate in conferences attended by other foreign policy VIPs, to be asked to advise a regional commander or consult for the National Intelligence Council—all the more so when one is young, ambitious, somewhat insecure, and eager to get ahead. But the higher one rises, the greater the benefits and the more exclusive the company becomes, so the incentive to avoid any steps that might lead to being cast off the heights of Olympus grows ever greater. Given how hard they have worked to make it up the mountain, it’s easy to understand why most members of the foreign policy establishment go to great lengths to stay there. And that means keeping their reputations intact and keeping their thoughts and recommendations “within the lines” (at least in public).
To be sure, the sense of community and the pressures to conform do not prevent personal animosities, tactical disagreements, and a lot of sharp-elbowed infighting from taking place inside the foreign policy world, even among those who agree on many policy issues. Individuals inside the establishment are often competing to climb the next rung up the ladder of government service, and they inevitably want their particular issues or concerns to garner more attention and resources. Because top jobs are scarce and resources are finite, there is no shortage of backstabbing, character assassination, self-promotion, and contention even among those who are all equally committed to liberal hegemony.
There will also be cases—such as the Iran nuclear deal or the merits of intervention in the Syrian civil war—where there are deep and genuine disagreements within the elite over what U.S. policy should be. But such disagreements take place within a broader climate of opinion that sees U.S. primacy and active global leadership as good for America and good for the world.
To be clear: most foreign policy professionals are genuine patriots who seek to make the world a better place, at least as they would define it. But they also have an obvious personal interest in the United States pursuing an ambitious global agenda. The busier the U.S. government is abroad, the more jobs there will be for foreign policy experts, the greater the share of national wealth that will be devoted to addressing global problems, and the greater their potential influence will be. A more restrained foreign policy would give the entire foreign policy community less to do, reduce its status and prominence, decrease the importance of teaching foreign policy in graduate schools, and might even lead some prominent philanthropies to devote less money to these topics. In this sense, liberal hegemony and unceasing global activism constitute a full-employment strategy for the entire foreign policy community.
“DON’T JUST STAND THERE, DO SOMETHING!”: THE ACTIVIST BIAS OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY INSTITUTIONS
The above features help us understand why the United States routinely errs on the side of doing too much rather than too little. Just as there is an imbalance of power between the United States and the rest of the world, there is also an imbalance of power inside America’s foreign policy community. Groups and organizations that support extensive U.S. involvement in world affairs and vigorous U.S. leadership are far more numerous, well-funded, and influential in Washington than groups or organizations that favor greater restraint, less intervention, more burden-sharing with key allies, and, overall, a more realistic foreign policy. Indeed, the latter are almost, though not quite, nonexistent. Although the various groups and individuals that make up most of the foreign policy community do not agree on every policy issue, there is a strong consensus supporting the active exercise of American power.
Within the U.S. government, agencies concerned with foreign policy must compete with other demands on national resources. For predictable budgetary reasons, therefore, the agencies of government that deal with global issues tend to favor greater U.S. activity rather than less. Senior military commanders tend to be warier of military intervention than their civilian counterparts are, but the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and the uniformed military still depict a world filled with dangers, where American power—especially military force—is the answer to a wide range of global problems.46 Just look at the U.S. Navy, which marketed itself until recently as “A Global Force for Good.” Indeed, it would be remarkable if any branches of government charged with some aspect of U.S. foreign relations did not aspire to do more, if only to maintain their present share of the budget.
Similarly, membership organizations such as the World Affairs Councils of America (WACA) and the Foreign Policy Association (FPA) were created to inform the public about world affairs and encourage greater interest in an active foreign policy. As WACA’s website notes, the founders of these closely related organizations “were concerned that at the end of World War I, Americans would choose an isolationist foreign policy over one of engagement, so they worked to nurture grassroots citizen involvement in international affairs.”47 Although formally nonpartisan, both of the above organizations remain strongly committed to an active U.S. role in world affairs.
At WACA’s 2012 National Conference, for example, the keynote speakers included then-CIA director David Petraeus, former undersecretary of state Marc Grossman, former ambassador Paula Dobriansky (who chairs WACA’s board of directors), the New York Times reporter David Sanger, former national security advisor Stephen Hadley, the longtime Middle East advisor Dennis Ross, and a flock of mainstream academics, journalists, and former officials. A similar lineup of well-credentialed insiders appeared in 2014, including the army general David Perkins, Vali Nasr of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Susan Glasser of Politico, and Moisés Naím of the Carnegie Endowment. The 2015 and 2016 programs were no different, including numerous speakers from such mainstream think tanks as Brookings or the Carnegie Endowment, establishment journalists such as Evan Thomas or Michael Duffy; well-connected consultants such as former State Department officials Evans Revere (now with the Albright Stonebridge Group) or Anja Manuel of RiceHadleyGates LLC; or other former officials such as Robert Zoellick, Jeffrey Garten, and R. James Woolsey.48
These (and other) speakers are all dedicated internationalists, which is why they were invited. Experts with a more critical view of U.S. foreign policy—such as Andrew Bacevich, Peter Van Buren, Medea Benjamin, Glenn Greenwal
d, Jeremy Scahill, Patrick Buchanan, John Mueller, Jesselyn Radack, or anyone remotely like them—were notably absent. And who provides the funding for these gatherings? Not surprisingly, financial support comes from, among others, NATO, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, Goldman Sachs, and the German Marshall Fund, all organizations strongly committed to preserving U.S. global leadership.
Educating American citizens about world affairs is a worthy activity, and WACA, its local affiliates in major metropolitan areas, and the FPA do not take formal positions on specific foreign policy issues. Nonetheless, in both design and in practice, these organizations exist to encourage a more active U.S. role in international affairs and to combat any tendency to reduce the level of U.S. engagement or alter the basic outlines of U.S. policy.
The bias in favor of liberal hegemony is even more pronounced in the largest mainstream think tanks and research organizations such as the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation. These organizations do not have a strict “party line” on many issues, and the people who work at them do not always agree on specific policy problems or foreign policy priorities. Nonetheless, several of these organizations were originally created to convince Americans to play a more active role in world affairs, and all of them lean strongly in the direction of greater U.S. engagement.
Since its founding in 1922, for example, the Council on Foreign Relations—which is both a membership organization with nearly five thousand full-time members and an independent think tank with a staff of roughly eighty full-time professionals—has been committed to promoting an activist foreign policy. As former CFR president Leslie Gelb proudly wrote in 1995, “If the Council as a body has stood for anything these 75 years, it has been for American internationalism based on American interests.” Its flagship journal, Foreign Affairs, routinely publishes articles prescribing what the United States should do to address contemporary international problems, and it only occasionally offers works challenging the orthodox view of America’s global role. Its annual meeting in New York features speeches and presentations by council fellows and a bevy of mainstream foreign policy figures, with nary a dissenting voice in the mix.
Similarly, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace long ago abandoned its original mission of promoting global peace and now describes its role as “advancing cooperation between nations and promoting active international engagement by the United States.”49 The more hawkish American Enterprise Institute goes even further, consistently defending larger defense budgets and issuing reports explicitly aimed at countering alleged isolationist tendencies.50
One sees much the same pattern at the Atlantic Council, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Center for American Progress (CAP), and the New America Foundation. The Atlantic Council’s mission statement says that it “promotes constructive leadership and engagement in international affairs based on the Atlantic Community’s central role in meeting global challenges,” and its leadership and staff are drawn from a bipartisan array of experienced foreign policy insiders. Concerned that the United States might be turning inward, in 2015 the council launched a new “Strategy Initiative” intended to “reinvigorate U.S. and trans-Atlantic leadership in the world.” In short, like most inside-the-Beltway think tanks, the Atlantic Council remains firmly committed to liberal hegemony and U.S. global leadership.
The same is true of CNAS. Its cofounders—former assistant secretary of state Kurt Campbell and former deputy secretary of defense Michèle Flournoy—created the organization to give the Democratic Party a more muscular, pro-military voice on foreign and defense policy and to counter perceptions that Democrats were “soft” on national security. Partly funded by defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and led by once-and-future DOD officials and former military officers, CNAS is strongly committed to promoting U.S. engagement abroad. In 2014, for example, Flournoy and CNAS president Richard Fontaine publicly criticized what they called “the siren song of disengagement,” warning “if the United States is seen as abandoning its role as the primary supporter of international order, other powers—or the forces of chaos—will fill the gap.”51 And as we shall see, in 2016 CNAS became even more outspoken in opposing any significant adjustment in America’s global role.
The other predominantly Democratic think tank, the Center for American Progress, generally takes a more moderate line than CNAS does, but its positions on most foreign policy questions nonetheless reflect the same commitment to liberal hegemony.52 In 2014, for example, the CAP senior fellow Brian Katulis published a full-throated defense of U.S. global engagement that accused progressives of “muddled thinking” and opposed any meaningful reduction in U.S. military power or America’s global role.53
Yet another Democratic Party institution, the Progressive Policy Institute, purveys an even more hawkish line on most foreign policy issues. Its president, Will Marshall, was an outspoken advocate for war in Iraq and Libya, openly advocates what he calls “muscular liberalism” and U.S. military dominance, and has written that “advancing democracy—in practice, not just in rhetoric—is fundamentally the Democrats’ legacy, the Democrats’ cause, and the Democrats’ responsibility.”54 Marshall redoubled his efforts in 2017, launching a new think tank and political action committee (New Democracy) intended to counter left-wing tendencies in the Democratic Party and warning of the need to “close the security confidence gap” and affirm “the animating principle of liberal internationalism.”55
The evolution of the New America Foundation (NAF) is in some ways the most revealing tale of all. Founded in 1999, NAF was originally intended to be an incubator for unconventional ideas on foreign, domestic, and economic policy. Consistent with that mission, it hosted a realist-oriented American Strategy Program headed by Steve Clemons. That program included an innovative project on Middle East policy run by a former Israeli peace negotiator, Daniel Levy, and its ranks eventually included South Asia and Middle East expert Anatol Lieven and the husband-and-wife team of Flynt and Hillary Leverett, two former government officials with decidedly independent views on U.S. Middle East policy. NAF was also home to iconoclastic public intellectuals such as Michael Lind, a prominent Reagan-era conservative who had become increasingly skeptical of U.S. interventionism. In its initial incarnation, therefore, NAF was a notable outlier in the Washington think tank world.
Over time, however, NAF moved steadily toward the inside-the-Beltway mainstream. Its second president, the journalist Steve Coll, was a consistent advocate for U.S. global engagement and a vocal proponent of nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Coll’s successor, Anne-Marie Slaughter (former dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and former director of policy planning at the State Department), is a staunch liberal internationalist who openly supported U.S. interventions in Iraq, Libya, and, most recently, Syria. By 2015, what had begun life as an outside-the-box research and advocacy organization—in particular, one that openly questioned Washington’s interventionist proclivities—had joined the chorus of mainstream foreign policy think tanks.
Apart from a handful of left-wing or antiwar organizations—such as the Institute for Policy Studies, the Center for International Policy, and the American Friends Service Committee—the only major inside-the-Beltway think tank that consistently challenges the dogma of liberal hegemony is the Cato Institute, whose libertarian, small-government philosophy inclines it to a skeptical attitude toward America’s overactive foreign policy agenda. But the ranks of once-and-future officials and ambitious policy wonks clamoring to sell assorted internationalist missions are larger, much more generously funded, and significantly louder than this modest set of dissenting voices, and they can usually drown out the latter without much difficulty.
The result, notes Vox.com’s Zack Beauchamp, “is that Washington’s foreign policy de
bate tends to be mostly conducted between the center and the right. The issue is typically how much force America should use rather than whether it should use it at all, or how to tweak a free-trade agreement rather than whether it should be accepted at all. Debates over pressing policy issues … lack a left-wing voice of any prominence.”56
Many of the special interest groups and lobbies active on foreign policy issues help reinforce America’s expansive global role because their chief purpose is to persuade the public and the U.S. government to take action to support their particular pet projects. Human rights advocates want the United States to do more to protect the victims of abuse by foreign governments, which explains why some prominent “liberal hawks” supported military action against Saddam Hussein in 2003, Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and Bashar al-Assad in 2014.57 Ethnic lobbies want Washington to do more to support Israel, India, Armenia, Poland, or whomever; and exiles from countries like Cuba or Iran want Washington to do more to weaken the foreign regimes from which they fled.58 Arms control organizations want U.S. officials to use the power at their disposal to prevent the spread of WMD or to make existing nuclear arsenals more secure. Corporations want government officials to help them gain greater access to foreign markets, and defense contractors want the Defense Department (and U.S. allies) to buy more weapons.59 Some of these objectives might be desirable, at least some of the time, but if each of these different groups gets even a fraction of what it wants, the United States will be very busy indeed.
The activist bias is equally evident in the most influential parts of the establishment press. Although editorial boards and columnists of elite newspapers such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post are sometimes critical of specific foreign policy initiatives, liberal hegemony remains the default setting, and they rarely present their readers with alternative perspectives. The days where a noninterventionist like Robert McCormick, the late publisher of the once-isolationist Chicago Tribune, could occupy a prominent place in media circles are long gone. A more typical view today is The New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman, who was a prominent supporter of the invasion of Iraq and remains a consistent cheerleader for U.S. global activism.60 But even Friedman was outdone by Politico’s Michael Hirsh, who once wrote that “for all its fumbling, the role played by the United States is the greatest gift the world has received in many, many centuries, possibly all of recorded history.”61
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