The Hell of Good Intentions

by Stephen M. Walt

  64. John Spencer, “How to Rethink the U.S. Military’s Troop Deployment Policy,” Politico, July 27, 2016, at www.politico.com/agenda/story/2016/07/rethinking-us-military-troop-deployment-policy-000177.

  65. See Sayed Salahuddin and Pamela Constable, “U.S. General in Afghanistan Apologizes for Highly Offensive Leaflets,” The Washington Post, September 7, 2017.

  66. As a top Afghan official told a group of senior U.S. officials, “corruption is not just a problem for the system of governance in Afghanistan; it is the system of governance.” Quoted in Corruption in Conflict: Lessons from the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: U.S. Special Inspector-General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, September 2016), at www.sigar.mil/pdf/LessonsLearned/SIGAR-16-58-LL.pdf, p. 4.

  67. See Carlotta Gall, “Afghanistan: Obama’s Sad Legacy,” New York Review of Books, January 19, 2017, p. 32.

  68. See Mohammad Samim, “Afghanistan’s Addiction to Foreign Aid,” The Diplomat, May 19, 2016, at https://thediplomat.com/2016/05/afghanistans-addiction-to-foreign-aid/; and Joel Brinkley, “Money Pit: The Monstrous Failure of U.S. Aid to Afghanistan,” World Affairs, January/February 2013, at www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/money-pit-monstrous-failure-us-aid-afghanistan.

  69. See John Judis, “America’s Failure—and Russia and Iran’s Success—in Syria’s Cataclysmic Civil War,” TPM Café-Opinion, January 10, 2017, at http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/americas-failure-russia-success-in-syrias-war (emphasis added).

  70. See Jonathan Monten and Alexander Downes, “FIRCed to be Free: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization,” International Security 37, no. 4 (Spring 2013); Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George W. Downs, “Intervention and Democracy,” International Organization 60, no. 3 (Summer 2006); Jeffrey Pickering and Mark Peceny, “Forging Democracy at Gunpoint,” International Studies Quarterly 50, no. 3 (September 2006); and Stephen Haggard and Lydia Tiede, “The Rule of Law in Post-Conflict Settings: The Empirical Record,” International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2014).

  71. See Porter, The Global Village Myth.

  72. See Chris Heathcote, “Forecasting Infrastructure Investment Needs for 50 Countries, 7 Sectors Through 2040,” August 10, 2017, at http://blogs.worldbank.org/ppps/forecasting-infrastructure-investment-needs-50-countries-7-sectors-through-2040.

  73. See especially Bruce W. Jentleson and Christopher A. Whytock, “Who ‘Won’ Libya?: The Force-Diplomacy Debate and Its Implications for Theory and Policy,” International Security 30, no. 3 (Winter 2005/2006), especially pp. 74–76; see also Ronald Bruce St. John, “Libya Is Not Iraq: Preemptive Strikes, WMD, and Diplomacy,” Middle East Journal 58, no. 3 (Summer 2004); Flynt Leverett, “Why Libya Gave Up on the Bomb,” The New York Times, January 23, 2004; and Martin Indyk, “The Iraq War Did Not Force Gaddafi’s Hand,” Financial Times, March 9, 2004.

  74. I am indebted to Barry Posen for this line of argument. Fears that the post–Cold War order might collapse completely if America retrenched is explicit in Brooks, Ikenberry, and Wohlforth, “Don’t Come Home, America,” and Kagan, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire.”

  75. For comprehensive analyses of America’s dominant global position, see Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad; idem, World Out of Balance; Nuno Monteiro, Theory of Unipolar Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 116–22; and Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder (New York: Twelve, 2014).

  76. On the “free security” produced by America’s geographic location, see C. Vann Woodward, The Age of Reinterpretation (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1961), p. 2; and Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 13–14, 19–20, 363.

  77. See Jeremy Shapiro and Richard Sokolsky, “How America Enables Its Allies’ Bad Behavior,” April 27, 2016, at www.vox.com/2016/4/27/11497942/america-bad-allies.

  3: DEFINING THE “BLOB”: WHAT IS THE “FOREIGN POLICY COMMUNITY”?

  1. Quoted in Eric Bradner, Elise Labott, and Dana Bash, “50 GOP National Security Experts Oppose Trump,” August 8, 2016, at www.cnn.com/2016/08/08/politics/republican-national-security-letter-donald-trump-election-2016/index.html. See also Doug Bandow, “Trump Criticizes Washington’s Policy Elite—With Cause,” CATO at Liberty, May 17, 2016, at www.cato.org/blog/donald-trump-criticizes-washingtons-policy-elite-cause.

  2. Thomas Oatley, A Political Economy of American Hegemony: Buildups, Booms, and Busts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 29.

  3. See Dan Reiter and Allan Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); idem, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).

  4. This idea is usually attributed to John Stuart Mill, who argued that open debate would allow democratic systems to more readily determine the best policies. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes appears to have coined the “marketplace” metaphor, arguing in his dissent to Abrams v. United States (1919) that “the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”

  5. For this reason, Amartya Sen argues, “no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy,” in part because public officials have obvious incentives to keep voters fed, but also because democratic systems transmit information more efficiently. See his Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).

  6. See Ernest May, American Imperialism: A Speculative Essay (New York: Athenaeum, 1968); and idem, “American Imperialism: A Reinterpretation,” Perspectives in American History 1 (1967), p. 187.

  7. Ironically, Wilson ignored the group’s recommendations and relied on his own counsel instead. According to Robert Schulzinger, Wilson “refused to take the advice of the corps [of experts] he had taken with him to Paris. Left to themselves, the experts brooded.” See The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs: The History of the Council on Foreign Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 3; also Peter Grose, Continuing the Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996 (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1996), chap. 1; and Lawrence E. Gelfand, The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 1917–1919 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963).

  8. See Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); and Edward Berman, The Influence of the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy: The Ideology of Philanthropy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1983).

  9. Joseph Kraft, Profiles in Power: A Washington Insight (New York: New American Library, 1966), p. 188.

  10. I. M. Destler, Leslie H. Gelb, and Anthony Lake, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Unmaking of American Foreign Policy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), p. 91.

  11. For similar critiques of the foreign policy establishment and the standard view of U.S. foreign policy institutions, see Michael Glennon, National Security and Double Government (New York: Oxford, 2015); Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (New York: Viking, 2016); Tom Engelhardt, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015); Scott Horton, Lords of Secrecy: The National Security State and Amerca’s Stealth Warfare (New York: Nation Books, 2015); and Patrick Porter, “Why U.S. Grand Strategy Has Not Changed: Power, Strategy, and the Foreign Policy Establishment,” International Security 42, no. 4 (Spring 2018).

  12. See David Samuels, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru,” The New York Times Magazine, May 5, 2016.

  13. An invaluable survey of the literature on the foreign po
licy establishment is Priscilla Roberts, “‘All the Right People’: The Historiography of the American Foreign Policy Establishment,” Journal of American Studies 26, no. 3 (December 1992).

  14. As with most social groups, the “foreign policy community” has a core of individuals and organizations whose membership is indisputable—such as the top officials of the Council on Foreign Relations, members of the U.S. Foreign Service, or the professional staff of the Arms Control Association—and a surrounding penumbra of members who are less extensively engaged.

  15. See Karen DeYoung, “White House Tries for Leaner National Security Staff,” The Washington Post, June 22, 2015.

  16. See “U.S. Military Personnel End Strength,” GlobalSecurity.Org, at www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/end-strength.htm, downloaded July 28, 2017; U.S. Department of State, “Mission,” at https://careers.state.gov/learn/what-we-do/mission/; Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2015 Annual Report on Security Clearance Determinations, June 5, 2016; at www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Reports%20and%Pubs/2015-Annual_Report_on_Security_Clearance_Determinations.pdf; and Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little Brown, 2011).

  17. See Glennon, National Security and Double Government, chap. 2.

  18. As the bipartisan Project on National Security Reform noted back in 2008, “Although departments have become proficient at generating functional capabilities within their mandates, the national security system cannot rapidly develop new capabilities or combine capabilities from multiple departments for new missions. As a consequence, mission essential capabilities that fall outside the core mandate of a department receive less emphasis and fewer resources.” See Project on National Security Reform, Ensuring Security in an Unpredictable World: The Urgent Need for National Security Reform (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of the Presidency, 2008), p. v.

  19. James G. McGann, 2017 Global Go To Think Tanks Index Report (Philadelphia: Think Tanks and Civil Society Program, University of Pennsylvania, 2017) at https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&context=think_tanks, p. 8. Two recent examinations of this evolving world are Thomas Medvetz, Think Tanks in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Daniel W. Drezner, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats Are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

  20. See Janine Wedel, Unaccountable: How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security (New York: Pegasus Books, 2014), especially chap. 7.

  21. This point is emphasized in James McGann, “Academics to Ideologues: A Brief History of the Public Policy Research Industry,” PS: Political Science and Politics 25, no. 4 (1992). See also Medvetz, Think Tanks in America, chap. 3.

  22. See Steven Clemons, “The Corruption of Think Tanks,” JPRI Critique 10, no. 2 (February 2003) at www.jpri.org/publications/critiques/critique_X_2.html.

  23. For example, former Foreign Policy Studies senior fellow Richard Betts eventually left Brookings for a tenured position at Columbia University; Yahya Sadowski moved to Johns Hopkins; Joshua Epstein joined the Santa Fe Institute, and the Foreign Policy Studies director John Steinbruner took a tenured faculty position at the University of Maryland.

  24. On the impact of interest groups in American politics, see Allan J. Cigler, Burdett Loomis, and Anthony Nownes, eds., Interest Group Politics (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 9th ed., 2015); Frank R. Baumgartner and Beth L. Leech, Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and Political Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Helen V. Milner and Dustin Tingley, Sailing the Water’s Edge: The Domestic Politics of American Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), chap. 3; Richard L. Hall and Alan V. Deardorff, “Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 1 (2006); and Robert G. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government (New York: Vintage, reprint ed., 2010).

  25. Recent examples would include my colleagues Joseph S. Nye, Graham T. Allison, Ashton B. Carter, Nicholas Burns, Samantha Power, and Meghan O’Sullivan, among others. Condoleezza Rice was professor of political science and provost at Stanford University before serving as national security advisor and secretary of state under George W. Bush, and both Stephen Krasner and Anne-Marie Slaughter held prominent academic posts before directing the Bureau of Policy Planning at the State Department. Colin Kahl was a tenured professor at Georgetown before serving as national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, Paul Wolfowitz taught at Yale and was dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) before his stint as deputy secretary of defense in the Bush administration, and one of his successors at SAIS, Vali Nasr, was an advisor to the late Richard Holbrooke in the latter’s capacity as special envoy for Afghanistan. These names are but a small sample of the academics who have served in important foreign policy positions in recent years.

  26. The United Arab Emirates reportedly gave some $20 million to support the Middle East Institute, a well-known D.C. think tank, and the Brookings Institution, the Atlantic Council, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies have all received millions of dollars’ worth of grants from a number of foreign countries in recent years. See Ryan Grim, “Gulf Government Gave Secret $20 Million Gift to D.C. Think Tank,” The Intercept, August 9, 2017 at https://theintercept.com/2017/08/09/gulf-government-gave-secret-20-million-gift-to-d-c-think-tank/; Eric Lipton, Brooke Williams, and Nicholas Confessore, “Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks,” The New York Times, September 6, 2014; Tom Medvetz, “The Myth of Think Tank Independence,” The Washington Post, September 9, 2014; and Tom Hamburger and Alexander Becker, “At Fast Growing Brookings, Donors May Have an Impact on Research Agenda,” The Washington Post, October 30, 2014.

  27. See Steve Horn and Allen Ruff, “How Private Warmongers and the US Military Infiltrated American Universities,” Truthout.org, at http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=4905:how-private-warmongers-and-the-us-military-infiltrated-american-universities.

  28. See Greg Jaffe, “Libertarian Billionaire Charles Koch Is Making a Big Bet on National Security,” The Washington Post, November 11, 2017. Full disclosure: I am codirecting one of these programs, which provides research fellowships for pre- and postdoctoral students working on U.S. foreign policy topics.

  29. In March 2018, the foundation filed suit against the University of Chicago, claiming the university had failed to fulfill the terms of the gift and seeking the return of the funds it had already provided. See “International Security Center Receives $3.5 Million Grant,” at https://al.nd.edu/news/latest-news/international-security-center-receives-3-5-million-grant/; and “$100 Million Gift Creates Institute to Confront New Era of Global Conflicts,” at http://harris.uchicago.edu/news-and-events/features/student-campus-news/100-million-gift-creates-institute-confront-new-era-glo; and Dawn Rhodes, “Pearson Family Members Foundation Sues University of Chicago, Seeking to Have $100 Million Gift Revoked,” Chicago Tribune, March 6, 2018.

  30. Glennon, National Security and Double Government, pp. 58–59.

  31. The career of Leslie H. Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), exemplifies this pattern. After receiving a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University in the early 1960s, Gelb taught for several years at Wesleyan University before becoming an aide to Senator Jacob Javits (D-NY). Moving to the Pentagon, Gelb directed the in-house study of Vietnam decision-making (the “Pentagon Papers”) before moving to the Brookings Institution in 1969. Gelb served as director of political-military affairs at the Department of State during the Carter administration and became national security correspondent for The New York Times in 1980. After leaving the Times, Gelb was a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace before being chosen to head the CFR in 1993.

  32. The career of Richard Holbrooke offers a differe
nt but equally viable pattern: after serving in the Foreign Service and the Peace Corps, he became managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine from 1972 to 1976. An inveterate networker, he served as assistant secretary of state for East Asia in the Carter administration and then joined Lehman Brothers in 1981. He was also vice chair of a private equity firm, served on corporate and nonprofit boards, and later held prominent diplomatic positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations.

  33. To take a typical example: Thomas J. Christensen is simultaneously a professor at Columbia University, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a sometime advisor to the Department of State, where he served as deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian Affairs from 2006 to 2008.

  34. For in-depth summaries of the neoconservative policy network, see Janine Wedel, Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market (New York: Basic Books, 2009), chap. 6; Justin Vaisse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard/Belknap, 2010); and John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), pp. 128–32.

  35. Donilon was a lawyer and lobbyist who worked primarily on domestic political issues and electoral reform before becoming chief of staff to Secretary of State Warren Christopher in 1993. He also served as assistant secretary of state for public affairs under President Clinton. See “National Security Advisor: Who Is Tom Donilon?” November 29, 2010, at www.allgov.com/news/appointments-and-resignations/national-security-advisor-who-is-thomas-donilon?news=841821. Similarly, Berger worked on domestic issues as an aide to New York mayor John V. Lindsay and two different congressmen before being appointed deputy director of policy planning in the State Department in 1977. He also worked as a lobbyist on international trade issues.