The Hell of Good Intentions

by Stephen M. Walt

  36. The apotheosis of this tendency is the recent career of Jared Kushner, whose sole qualification for an influential White House job is his marriage to Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka.

  37. See “CNAS Announces 2018 Next Generation National Security Fellows” (press release, Center for a New American Security, January 2018); and see www.cnas.org./next-generation-programs/nextgeneration.

  38. See http://trumanproject.org/programs/lead/fellowship/. For an insightful but critical assessment of this effort, see Kevin Baron, “Meet the Insurgency: Inside the Liberal Takeover of U.S. National Security,” Defense One, June 2014, at www.defenseone.com/ideas/2014/06/meet-insurgency-inside-liberal-take-over-us-national-security/85966/.

  39. Wedel, Unaccountable, p. 181.

  40. Mark Leibovich, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus, Plenty of Free Parking!—in America’s Gilded Capital (New York: Penguin, 2013), p. 57.

  41. See James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), p. 252.

  42. See Elisabeth Bumiller, “Backing an Iraqi Leader, This Time for a Fee,” The New York Times, October 29, 2007.

  43. See Edward Luce, “The Untimely Death of American Statecraft,” Financial Times, June 1, 2007.

  44. After Barack Obama was reelected in November 2012, for example, the liberal Center for American Progress and the conservative American Enterprise Institute partnered to present a panel on national security featuring CAP’s Brian Katulis and Rudy de Leon and AEI’s Danielle Pletka and Paul Wolfowitz. See www.americanprogress.org/press/advisory/2012/11/09/44616/advisory-caps-deleon-and-katulis-and-aeis-pletka-and-wolfowitz-discuss-national-security-in-obamas-second-term/. On this general phenomenon, see Medvetz, Think Tanks in America, pp. 116–20.

  45. See “Why War,” PBS NewsHour, February 12, 2003, at www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east-jan-june03-why_war_2-12/.

  46. The classic treatment of civilian and military views on the use of force is Richard K. Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).

  47. World Affairs Councils of America, “Our History,” at www.worldaffairs councils.org/2011/main/home.cfm?Database=about_us&Category=History&Section=Main, downloaded May 25, 2014.

  48. See http://nationalconference.worldaffairscouncils.org, accessed August 4, 2016.

  49. Leslie H. Gelb, preface, in Grose, Continuing the Inquiry, p. xiv; “100 Years of Impact: A Timeline of the Carnegie Endowment,” at http://carnegieendowment.org/about/timeline100/index.html.

  50. See Joseph Lieberman and Jon Kyl, Why American Leadership Still Matters: A Report of the American Internationalism Project (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 2015), available at www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Why-American-Leadership-Still-Matters_online.pdf.

  51. See Richard Fontaine and Michèle Flournoy, “America: Beware the Siren Song of Disengagement,” The National Interest, August 14, 2014, at http://nationalinterest.org/feature/america-beware-the-siren-song-disengagement-11078.

  52. On the relationship between CAP and CNAS, see Mann, The Obamians, pp. 52–53.

  53. Brian Katulis, “Against Disengagement,” Democracy, no. 32 (Spring 2014).

  54. See “Introduction,” in Will Marshall, ed., With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). Marshall also signed several open letters advocating the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, was a member of the pro-war Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and called the invasion “undoubtedly a triumph for President Bush.” For his views on Libya, see Will Marshall, “Lessons of Libya,” Huffington Post, October 28, 2011, at www.huffingtonpost.com/will-marshall/gaddafi-al-assad_b_1063832.html.

  55. See “Where We Stand,” at http://newdemocracy.net/about/; and Ryan Cooper, “When Will Centrist Democrats Account for Their Foreign Policy Failures?” This Week, August 16, 2017.

  56. See Zack Beauchamp, “Why Democrats Have No Foreign Policy Ideas,” Vox.com, September 5, 2017, at www.vox.com/world/2017/9/5/16220054/democrats-foreign-policy-think-tanks.

  57. Examples include Michael Ignatieff, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Fareed Zakaria, Leon Wieseltier, and the celebrity “philosopher” Bernard Henri-Lévy.

  58. See Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

  59. Not surprisingly, the founder of the U.S. Committee on NATO, one of the main groups pushing NATO expansion, was Bruce Jackson, who also happened to be vice president of strategic planning at Lockheed Martin, the country’s largest defense contractor. See Stephen Gowans, “War, NATO Expansion, and the Other Rackets of Bruce P. Jackson,” What’s Left? November 25, 2002, at http://www3.sympatico.ca/sr.gowans/jackson.html.

  60. On May 29, 2003, Friedman appeared on Charlie Rose’s eponymous PBS show and said, “I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie … What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?’ You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.” Available at www.youtube.com /watch?v=ZwFaSpca_3Q.

  61. See Michael Hirsh, At War with Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 39–40, 254.

  62. See Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder (New York: Sentinel, 2015). Stephens’s hiring by the Times in 2017 added scant intellectual diversity to its roster of regular columnists, insofar as his worldview was already well-represented by Brooks.

  63. Cohen was a consistent advocate of U.S. military intervention in Ukraine and especially the Syrian civil war, declaring Obama’s failure to act there to be the “greatest blot” on his presidency. See his “Intervene in Syria,” The New York Times, February 4, 2013; “Make Assad Pay,” The New York Times, August 29, 2013; “The Diplomacy of Force,” The New York Times, June 19, 2014; “Western Illusions Over Ukraine,” The New York Times, February 9, 2015; and “Obama’s Syrian Nightmare,” The New York Times, September 10, 2015.

  64. See George Will, “On Libya, Too Many Questions,” The Washington Post, March 8, 2011; and “McChrystal Had to Go,” The Washington Post, June 24, 2010.

  65. G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century (Final Report, Princeton Project on National Security, 2006), downloaded from www.princeton.edu/~ppns/report/FinalReport.pdf.

  66. In fact, the only way Iran will dominate the Middle East in the near future is if the United States keeps toppling its rivals, as it did when it foolishly invaded Iraq in 2003 (a step most of the signatories of the report supported).

  67. One could say the same for the American Enterprise Institute’s 2015 report Why American Leadership Still Matters.

  68. See Lawrence R. Jacobs and Benjamin I. Page, “Who Influences U.S. Foreign Policy?” American Political Science Review 99, no. 1 (Feb. 2005), pp. 113, 121.

  69. See Benjamin Page and Jason Barabas, “Foreign Policy Gaps Between Citizens and Leaders,” International Studies Quarterly 44, no. 3 (September 2000), p. 344. Similarly, Daniel Drezner concludes his own comparison of U.S. mass and elite attitudes in foreign policy by saying “the elite public is more liberal internationalist than the mass public.” See his “The Realist Tradition in American Public Opinion,” Perspectives on Politics 6, no. 1 (March 2008), p. 63.

  70. See Benjamin I. Page with Marshall M. Bouton, The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don’t Get (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 201–02, 240.

  71. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs has posed this question repeatedly in its annual surveys of public opinion. See Dina Smeltz et al., America Divided: Politica
l Partisanship and U.S. Foreign Policy (Chicago: Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 2016), p. 10.

  72. Eighty-three percent favored the United States “doing its share in effort to solve international problems,” and 82 percent supported a “shared leadership role.” See Program for Public Consultation, Americans on the U.S. Role in the World: A Study of U.S. Public Attitudes (College Park, MD: University of Maryland, January 2017), p. 3.

  73. See “Worldviews 2002: American Public Opinion and Foreign Policy” (Chicago: Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 2002), p. 26.

  74. See Public Agenda, “America in the World,” September 2006, at www.americans-world.org/digest/overview/us_role/concerns.cfm.

  75. Pew Research Center, Public Sees U.S. Power Declining as Support for Global Engagement Slips, December 3, 2013, at www.people-press.org/2013/12/03/public-sees-u-s-power-declining-as-support-for-global-engagement-slips/.

  76. Americans on the U.S. Role in the World, p. 4.

  77. Pew Research Center, “U.S. Seen as Less Important, China as More Powerful,” December 3, 2009, at www.people-press.org/2009/12/03/us-seen-as-less-important-china-as-more-powerful/.

  78. Pew Research Center, America’s Place in the World 2013 (December 2013), at www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/12-3-2013%20APW%20VI.pdf, p. 67.

  79. “American Views on Intervention in Syria,” The New York Times online, at www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/10/world/middleeast/american-views-on-intervention-in-syria.html?_r=0.

  80. CNN/ORC poll, September 6–8, 2013, downloaded at http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2013/images/09/09/6a.poll.syria.pdf.

  81. “WSJ/NBC Poll,” April 27, 2014, The Wall Street Journal (online), at http://graphics.wsj.com/wsjnbcpoll/.

  82. See “Public Uncertain, Divided Over America’s Place in the World,” Pew Research Center, May 5, 2016, at www.people-press.org/2016/05/05/public-uncertain-divided-over-americas-place-in-the-world/.

  83. See Andrew Kohut, “American International Engagement on the Rocks,” Pew Research Center, July 11, 2013, at www.pewglobal.org/2013/07/11/american-international-engagement-on-the-rocks/.

  84. In September 2013, shortly after President Obama announced a campaign of air strikes and military training to counter ISIL, 61 percent of Americans said that military action against ISIL “was in America’s national interest.” See “WSJ/NBC Poll: Almost Two-Thirds Back Attacking Militants,” The Wall Street Journal (online), September 10, 2014, at http://online.wsj.com/articles/wsj-nbc-poll-finds-that-almost-two-thirds-of-americans-back-attacking-militants-1410301920.

  85. See Adam J. Berinsky, “Assuming the Costs of War: Events, Elites, and American Public Support for Military Conflict,” Journal of Politics 69, no. 4 (November 2007); and Jon Western, Selling Intervention and War: The Presidency, the Media, and the American Public (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

  4: SELLING A FAILING FOREIGN POLICY

  1. He added: “Why forgo the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand on foreign ground?” See “Washington’s Farewell Address, 1796,” at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp.

  2. Quoted in Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2016), p. 6.

  3. See George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education (Boston: Little Brown., 1999), p. 214.

  4. See John A. Thompson, “The Exaggeration of American Vulnerability: The Anatomy of a Tradition,” Diplomatic History 16, no. 1 (1992), p. 38.

  5. Prominent examples of this argument are Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Dan Reiter and Allan Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

  6. One 2010 source estimated that the U.S. government has classified more than a trillion pages of material since the late 1970s. See Peter Grier, “WikiLeaks’ Trove Is a Mere Drop in Ocean of U.S. Classified Documents,” Christian Science Monitor, December 21, 2010; at www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/Decoder-Buzz/2010/1221/WikiLeaks-trove-is-a-mere-drop-in-ocean-of-US-classified-documents. A 2012 report by the Public Interest Declassification Board found that “the current classification system is fraught with problems … [I]t keeps too many secrets and keeps them too long; it is overly complex; it obstructs desirable information sharing inside of government and with the public.” See Transforming Classification: Report to the President (Washington, DC: Public Interest Declassification Board, 2012), p. 2.

  7. See Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, “Classified Report on the C.I.A.’s Secret Prisons Is Caught in Limbo,” The New York Times, November 9, 2015.

  8. See Chaim Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling of the Iraq War,” International Security 29, no. 1 (Summer 2004); Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush’s America (New York: Penguin, 2006); John Schuessler, Deceit on the Road to War: Presidents, Politics, and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), pp. 105–09; and John J. Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 49–55. See also Eric Alterman, When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences (New York: Penguin, 2004).

  9. For a devastating chronology of the Bush administration’s false statements (along with evidence showing that they were aware that their assertions were untrue), see “Lie by Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq,” Mother Jones, at www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/leadup-iraq-war-timeline/.

  10. See John Schuessler, Deceit on the Road to War, p. 3.

  11. See Bob Woodward, “McChrystal: More Forces or Mission Failure,” The Washington Post, September 21, 2009, at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/20/AR2009092002920.html.

  12. In addition to the well-known case of Chelsea Manning, the army corporal who gave WikiLeaks a trove of diplomatic documents, the U.S. government has also prosecuted the journalist James Risen of The New York Times (who allegedly disclosed classified information about the NSA), former NSA official William Drake, former CIA official John Kiriakou (who served a prison term for confirming to journalists that the agency had tortured prisoners), former State Department employee Peter Van Buren (who put a link to a previously released WikiLeaks report on his blog), former TSA air marshal Robert MacLean (who gave reporters unclassified information about a TSA decision to cancel heightened security measures), and former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James “Hoss” Cartwright (who pleaded guilty to confirming the U.S. cyber campaign against Iran to a journalist and lying to the FBI and was subsequently pardoned by President Obama). On these various cases, see Peter Van Buren, “Leaking War: How Obama’s Targeted Killings, Leaks, and the Everything-Is-Classified State Have Fused,” TomDispatch, at www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175554/; idem, “Least Transparent Administration Ever: A New Front in the Obama Administration’s War on Whistleblowers,” www.juancole.com/2014/03/transparent-administration-whistleblowers.html; and Charlie Savage, “James Cartwright, Ex-General, Pleads Guilty in Leak Case,” The New York Times, October 17, 2016.

  13. David Pozen argues that this behavior is an “adaptive response to key external liabilities—such as the mistrust generated by presidential secret-keeping and media manipulation—and internal pathologies—such as overclassification and fragmentation across a sprawling bureaucracy—of the modern administrative state.” See David Pozen, “The Leaky Leviathan: Why the Government Condemns and Condones Unlawful Disclosures of Information,” Harvard Law Review 127 (December 2013), p. 518.

  14. See Benjamin I. Page with Marshall Bouton, The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don’t Get (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 220.

  15. As Page and Bouton put it, “[E]ven electorally mindful politicians [may] slight the preferences of the mass public and instead res
pond to the intense preferences of well-organized interest groups, activists, and money givers. The diffuse and uncertain threat posed by foreign policy–oriented voters may often be less intimidating … than concentrated pressure and tangible threats of retribution from party activists, interest groups, financial contributors, and business threatening disinvestment from the United States,” Foreign Policy Disconnect, p. 221.

  16. Groups opposing the deal were far better funded (with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its allies reportedly spending upward of $40 million to counter the deal), but pro-agreement organizations such as the antinuclear Ploughshares Fund were able to organize a potent coalition of experts and former officials to support it. See Elizabeth Drew, “How They Failed to Block the Iran Deal,” New York Review of Books, October 22, 2015.