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

DURING THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, Donald Trump showed scant regard for the individuals who had been in charge of U.S. foreign policy. Saying “we have to look for new people,” Trump stated that he wasn’t going to be “surrounding myself with those who have perfect resumes but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies.” When prominent Republican foreign policy VIPs published an open letter questioning his qualifications and character, Trump retorted, “The names on this letter are the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess, and we thank them for coming forward so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place.”1

Were Trump’s criticisms justified? The answer—unfortunately—is yes, because most of the problems afflicting U.S. foreign policy are the result of conscious choices rather than unpredictable acts of fate. Primacy and “free security” made it possible for the United States to meddle in distant regions, and it insulated Americans from some of the consequences, but the specific commitments and initiatives that U.S. leaders undertake are still matters of political choice. As Thomas Oatley notes, “the United States has never been forced by foreign invasion to fight a war at home. Instead, American policymakers have been able to choose when, where, and if to participate in wars … in every instance … [they] could have chosen not to use force without placing the territorial integrity or national sovereignty of the United States at risk.”2 Yet in recent years the threat or use of force has often been the default option despite its disappointing results.

Let us therefore look more closely at the people and institutions that make or influence these decisions, and explore what is guiding their choices.

FOREIGN POLICY AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICS

In a democracy, foreign policy is not simply the product of a president’s vision. It is also shaped by competing forces in civil society and by what might be termed the “foreign policy community.” The impact of civil society will be especially large in a liberal democracy such as the United States, with its tradition of divided government, constitutional guarantees of free speech and association, and ambivalent attitude toward centralized power. These forces will be even more powerful when there is no compelling danger to focus the national mind and when policymakers are freer to act as they see fit or as domestic pressures dictate.

In theory, these features ought to make American democracy more effective at conducting foreign policy than most, if not all, authoritarian regimes. Indeed, a large scholarly literature makes precisely this argument, declaring that democracies typically outperform dictatorships in many areas of public policy.3 As the careers of Mao Zedong and Saddam Hussein illustrate, incompetent despots can cling to power for decades, even when their policies are profoundly harmful, provided they retain reliable control over the army, the police, and other tools of repression. Democratic leaders, by contrast, are accountable to the public, and the constant fear of electoral sanction disciplines the exercise of power, encourages them to appoint effective subordinates, and is said to discourage frivolous or risky initiatives.

Furthermore, the formal separation of powers and other institutional “checks and balances” supposedly makes it difficult for democratic leaders to wield power arbitrarily. The president may be the chief executive and commander in chief, but Congress controls the purse strings and in theory can limit what the president is able to do at home or abroad. An independent judiciary provides a further check on executive power and can be a potent source of accountability—again, in theory—because officials who break the law are subject to indictment, prosecution, and punishment.

Third, because democracies also encourage free speech, open discourse, and an independent media, they are said to benefit from a “marketplace of ideas.”4 Citizens in a democracy should have better access to information, and vigorous debate will supposedly winnow out bad ideas and allow better alternatives to emerge. When mistakes are made, citizens and officials in a democracy can figure out that something is amiss and correct the error more rapidly than a typical authoritarian regime would.5

In addition to these structural advantages, one might expect U.S. foreign policymaking to benefit from the dramatic expansion of state capacity and the specialized training that those charged with handling U.S. foreign relations typically receive. During the nineteenth century, notes the historian Ernest May, only a small group of U.S. leaders and private citizens showed “any deep interest in foreign affairs.”6 Even America’s rise to world power did not immediately produce a large community of foreign policy experts in and outside government. As President Woodrow Wilson prepared for the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the dearth of official foreign policy expertise led Wilson’s closest advisor, Colonel Edward House, to create an ad hoc group known as “The Inquiry” to advise the president on U.S. interests and objectives.7

Organizations and individuals engaged primarily in international affairs grew in number throughout the interwar period, though participation in the highest reaches of government was still dominated by an “Eastern Establishment,” as embodied by elite associations such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Foreign Policy Association, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Philanthropies such as the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund became active after World War II, funding a variety of international affairs programs at universities and civic associations.8 And as the Washington Post columnist Joseph Kraft later observed, “the main function [of the establishment] … was to drive isolationism from the field, to make internationalism not only respectable but beyond serious question.”9

By the 1960s, however, as America’s global role grew, education expanded, and foreign policymaking required more specialized expertise, “a revolution was taking place in the structure of America’s foreign policy leadership. Power passed almost imperceptibly from the old Eastern Establishment to a new Professional Elite, from bankers and lawyers who would take time off to help manage the affairs of government to full-time foreign policy experts.”10

At first glance, this expansion of professional expertise would appear to be a significant improvement over the “old guard” establishment, and it should have produced more intelligent and successful policy decisions. Instead of relying on a self-selected group of elites drawn primarily from the corporate world, U.S. foreign policy would be handled by a more diverse group of experts who had specialized training in economics, military affairs, history, diplomacy, or regional studies. In theory, the clash of competing views among these well-informed professionals would generate a livelier debate, thereby ensuring that alternative policy choices were vetted in advance and making major blunders less likely. When mistakes did occur—as they inevitably would—this same well-trained policy community would quickly identify the misstep(s) and alter course.

In the next three chapters I argue that this optimistic vision is an illusion, especially in an era when U.S. dominance allowed it to pursue ambitious foreign policy goals at seemingly low cost and with little risk of significant escalation.11 America’s democratic institutions did not perform nearly as well as this upbeat scenario envisioned, and the contemporary foreign policy community has been characterized less by competence and accountability and more by a set of pathologies that have undermined its ability to set realistic goals and pursue them effectively.

To put it in the bluntest terms, instead of being a disciplined body of professionals constrained by a well-informed public and forced by necessity to set priorities and hold themselves accountable, today’s foreign policy elite is a dysfunctional caste of privileged insiders who are frequently disdainful of alternative perspectives and insulated both professionally and personally from the consequences of the policies they promote. It was impolitic for the deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes to dismiss this community as “the Blob,” but the label nonetheless contains important elements of truth.12

The foreign policy community in contemporary America has been strongly committed to the strategy of liberal hegemony. Within that world, organizations and individuals committed to America’s global leadership role and to an ambitious foreign policy agenda are far more numerous and much better funded than groups arguing for greater U.S. restraint. Despite occasional differences over tactics and the setbacks of the past two decades, today’s foreign policy community still exhibits a striking consensus in favor of trying to run the world.

DEFINING THE FOREIGN POLICY COMMUNITY

By the “foreign policy community,” I mean those individuals and organizations that actively engage on a regular basis with issues of international affairs. This definition incorporates both formal government organizations and the many groups and individuals that deal with foreign policy as part of their normal activities, seeking either to shape public perceptions of international issues or to influence government policy directly.13 For an individual to be considered part of this community, working on some aspect of foreign policy must be either their principal professional vocation or a major private commitment occupying a substantial part of daily life.

To illustrate: members of the “foreign policy community” would include Foreign Service officers, intelligence analysts at the CIA, a senior fellow at a foreign policy think tank, a professor of international relations at a college or university, a staff member serving the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, or a journalist whose beat deals with some aspect of U.S. foreign relations. It would also include an active member of a local World Affairs Council chapter, a defense analyst at the Congressional Budget Office or the RAND Corporation, a lobbyist working for Human Rights Watch, or a program officer at a philanthropic foundation whose agenda includes international affairs.

There will always be borderline cases, of course, but this definition would exclude an employee at a think tank who works on health care or a congressional staffer assigned to the Judiciary Committee, unless they are actively involved in foreign policy issues in some other capacity. It would also exclude private citizens whose foreign policy–related activity is limited to voting in elections or writing the occasional letter to the editor of their local paper, but who do not engage global issues on a regular basis.14

FORMAL INSTITUTIONS OF GOVERNMENT

The foreign policy community begins with the individuals and agencies of government charged with handling different aspects of U.S. foreign relations. The list here is enormous, and it includes the president, the vice president, the National Security Council, the relevant personnel in the Departments of State, Defense, Energy, and Treasury, the various intelligence services, the relevant congressional committees, research organizations such as the Congressional Budget Office or the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the vast array of smaller agencies performing specialized foreign policy tasks.

This world has expanded dramatically over the past half century. For example, the president’s own foreign policy staff—embodied in the National Security Council—has grown from fewer than twenty people in 1961 to roughly two hundred under President George W. Bush and more than four hundred under President Obama.15

The U.S. military is down from its Cold War peak, but there are still nearly 1.4 million men and women on active duty and roughly one million in the National Guard and military reserves. The Department of Defense employs more than 700,000 civilians, and the Department of State consists of roughly 25,000 Foreign Service and civil service personnel (plus 45,000 locally employed civilians worldwide), while the intelligence community comprises seventeen separate agencies with an annual budget well in excess of $50 billion and employing some 100,000 people. More than four million Americans now hold some sort of security clearance, and close to one million are cleared to read top secret material.16

Obviously, most members of this sprawling bureaucratic agglomeration do not exercise substantial authority over major foreign policy decisions. But as Michael Glennon notes, the ability of presidents, cabinet secretaries, and other political appointees to chart a different course in foreign policy is inevitably constrained by the size, inertia, and the de facto autonomy of what he calls the “Trumanite Network” (a reference to the 1947 National Security Act), whose permanent members endure across successive administrations.17

The sheer size of the foreign policy and national security bureaucracy impedes effective policymaking in two ways. First, coordinating action across multiple agencies and constituencies is time-consuming, especially when a new policy has to be created and coordinated through the interagency process.18 Second, the presence of a vast foreign affairs bureaucracy dilutes accountability: when so many fingerprints are on any major policy decision, it becomes harder to determine responsibility for success or failure and thus harder to reward good judgment and penalize incompetence.

MEMBERSHIP ORGANIZATIONS

Outside government, elite and mass attitudes about foreign policy are also influenced by various “membership organizations” that are made up of self-selected individuals with a particular interest in America’s relations with the rest of the world. Examples include the World Affairs Councils, the Foreign Policy Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, or the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and each of these groups engages in activities intended to strengthen public awareness of critical international issues and to help members deepen their own understanding of such topics. Within this category one also finds more specialized membership organizations such as Greenpeace and Oxfam, whose work focuses primarily on other issues but sometimes has an important foreign policy dimension as well.

THINK TANKS

According to James McGann, there are more than eighteen hundred public policy “think tanks” in the United States today, approximately one-quarter of them located in the nation’s capital.19 Their ranks include broad, general-purpose research organizations such as the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Bipartisan Policy Center, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, along with dozens of smaller, more specialized organizations such as the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the Aspen Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Center for International Policy, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Resources for the Future, the Center for the National Interest, and the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The venerable Council on Foreign Relations is a membership organization—albeit a selective one—as well as a think tank, with a staff of more than eighty foreign policy professionals and offices in New York and Washington.

Think tanks perform several functions within the foreign policy community. Staff members conduct independent research, testify to Congress and other government agencies, and appear frequently as media commentators. Most think tanks engage in extensive outreach efforts via their own websites, blogs, publications, seminars, legislative breakfasts, and other events, all intended to enhance their visibility inside Washington, facilitate fundraising, and increase their influence over policy. Think tanks can also play a critical role in many stages of a foreign policy professional’s career: they provide entry-level opportunities for young policy wonks seeking to make their way into government positions, and they provide sinecures for former government officials, including those seeking to return to public service at a later date. In this sense, the D.C.-based think tank community provides an arena where foreign policy ideas can be discussed, debated, criticized, and defended, and some parts of it operate almost as a “shadow government” preparing people and policies for future administrations.20

Although certain think tanks and research organizations are explicitly nonpartisan and aspire to high standards of scholarship, the line between research and policy advocacy is increasingly blurred.21 As Steven Clemons, an experienced veteran of several think tanks, acknowledged some years ago, such organizations “are less and less committed to genuine inquiry designed to stimulate enlightened policy decisions and more and more oriented to deepening the well-worn grooves of paralyzed debate.”22

Indeed, the overall academic quality of D.C.-based think tanks has declined noticeably over the past thirty years. In the 1980s, for example, the Foreign Policy Studies group at Brookings contained a number of scholars who published regularly in top academic journals and university presses, and several senior fellows were subsequently appointed to tenured positions at elite universities.23 Although full-time Brookings fellows sometimes teach as adjunct faculty members at local universities today, they rarely publish in academic venues and would be unlikely to be considered eligible for senior positions in a top academic department.

In many cases, in fact, think tanks are advocacy organizations masquerading as independent research bodies. Organizations such as the Progressive Policy Institute or the Center for American Progress serve these functions for Democrats, while the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation work mostly on behalf of the GOP. These organizations exist to provide intellectual ammunition for partisan political warfare and are understandably sensitive to the interests of major donors and the political leaders whose agendas they seek to promote. In this way, many prominent think tanks are important adjuncts to the next category.

INTEREST GROUPS AND LOBBIES

Interest groups are a central element of American democracy. Because the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and association, groups of citizens can coalesce around any issue that unites them and try to convince politicians to adopt policies they favor. They can do so by lobbying legislators or government officials directly, helping draft congressional resolutions or formal legislation, steering campaign contributions to politicians who support their views, and engaging in activities designed to convince the public to embrace their policy preferences.24

Despite the cliché that “politics stops at the water’s edge,” foreign policy is hardly immune to interest group influence. On the contrary, there is a plethora of interest groups and lobbies on nearly every significant foreign policy issue, each trying to shape mass and elite opinion and persuade government officials to follow its preferred course of action. Here one finds advocacy groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or the Arms Control Association; ethnic lobbies like the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Armenian Assembly of America, or the United States India Political Action Committee; lobbyists and think tanks funded by corporations favoring increased defense spending; pro-peace groups such as the American Friends Service Committee; business associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; and many, many more.

This category also includes so-called letterhead organizations, such as the Committee on the Present Danger, United Against Nuclear Iran, the Project for the New American Century (or its successor, the Foreign Policy Initiative), or the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy. “Letterhead organizations” are ad hoc groups that bring together eminent figures to issue open letters and statements intended to shape public debate and influence the policy agenda.

THE MEDIA

My definition of the foreign policy community would also include those parts of the media that cover foreign affairs, for they play a key role in shaping what elites and publics know and believe about the world at large and about U.S. foreign policy itself. Prominent components include major news organizations (Reuters, the Associated Press, etc.); elite newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or The Washington Post; and influential broadcast venues such as National Public Radio, Fox News, MSNBC, C-Span, or the PBS NewsHour. Specialized journals such as Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and The National Interest belong here as well, along with general interest publications that frequently cover international issues, such as The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. Of course, individual journalists such as Thomas Friedman, Dana Priest, Helene Cooper, or David Ignatius and celebrity hosts like Fareed Zakaria, Rachel Maddow, Wolf Blitzer, and Sean Hannity must be considered part of the broad foreign policy community, along with the vast number of bloggers and websites that focus heavily on foreign affairs.

ACADEMIA

Although some university-based scholars have little interest in policy issues or other real-world concerns, many political scientists, lawyers, historians, economists, and other scholars write books and articles about foreign policy and contribute in other ways to public discourse on these topics. University-based scholars also educate and train many of the people who end up working in government, media, and the think tank world, and some of them serve in government themselves, including at very senior levels. As one would expect, the faculty ranks at most schools of public policy or international affairs are filled with people who have combined scholarly careers with periods of public service, and many of these individuals remain engaged in a variety of policy-related activities after leaving office.25

SOURCES OF SUPPORT

Nor can we exclude the private groups and individuals who provide financial support for many of these activities. Relevant actors here include philanthropies that support research or advocacy in international affairs, such as the Ford, MacArthur, Smith Richardson, Stanton, Scaife, Rockefeller, Koch, and Hewlett foundations, and the many similar but smaller philanthropies that help support groups working on foreign policy issues. Private individuals with an interest in foreign policy can donate to political action committees, universities, think tanks, or lobbies, sometimes in impressive amounts, in order to advance their particular foreign policy objectives. The financier George Soros helped fund the New America Foundation and the Center for American Progress, and the Israeli-American businessman Haim Saban has given millions of dollars to the Democratic Party and provided the initial funding for the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies and other neoconservative organizations have received generous funding from the gambling mogul Sheldon Adelson and the hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace began with a bequest from the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, and the Council on Foreign Relations has received generous support from many private individuals throughout its long history.

Corporations with a clear interest in foreign and national security policy are active here as well, and think tanks such as AEI, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and the Center for a New American Security all rely heavily on contributions from defense contractors and other major corporations. More worrisome still, in recent years a number of prominent think tanks have become partly dependent on donations from foreign governments, raising serious questions about their objectivity.26

Universities are equally reliant on donor support, of course, some of it clearly motivated by a donor’s interest in foreign policy. In 2006, for example, the neoconservative financier Roger Hertog funded grand strategy programs at several prominent U.S. universities; these were patterned after an existing program at Yale and intended to promote a more hawkish perspective on college campuses.27 Similarly, the Charles Koch Institute has recently begun funding research and training programs on international security at MIT, Tufts, Harvard, Texas A&M, and Notre Dame.28 And in 2016 the Pearson Family Foundation pledged a whopping $100 million to endow a center for the study of global conflict at the University of Chicago (a gift it subsequently regretted and has sued to reverse).29

What does this broad picture of the foreign policy community reveal? To paraphrase Karl Marx, top government officials make foreign policy, but they do not make it entirely as they please. They draw upon expertise from the think tank world and from academia, and they are often constrained by bureaucratic opposition, public skepticism, media scrutiny, and the interplay of interest groups within society. Even presidents do not operate with complete freedom, as the decisions they make are constrained by the broad consensus within the foreign policy community and by the choices presented to them by their subordinates. As Michael Glennon notes, “true top-down decisions that order fundamental policy shifts are rare … When it comes to national security, the President is less decider than presider.”30 To understand the recurring tendencies of U.S. foreign policy, therefore, we need to consider the characteristics of this broad community in greater depth.

LIFE IN THE “BLOB”

A SENSE OF COMMUNITY

Partisan differences notwithstanding, a key feature of the “foreign policy community” is that it is a community, especially at the highest levels. Many of its leading members know one another and participate in overlapping activities and organizations. The boundaries between many of these organizations are permeable, and prominent figures within this community often work for several different organizations over the course of a career, sometimes simultaneously.

For example, a typical foreign policy career path might begin on Wall Street or in academia, proceed to a period of government service, and then move to a think tank or even into journalism.31 An equally plausible trajectory might start with government service, then migrate to academia, a think tank, or the private sector before returning to government at some later stage.32 Alternatively, a different individual might rise to prominence in the private sector, academia, or journalism and then parlay that reputation into a government career or use the wealth acquired through business activity to fund a research or lobbying organization that advanced his or her political views. Some individuals wear several hats at once: teaching at a university, serving as a nonresident fellow at an inside-the-Beltway think tank, and doing private consulting for government agencies, individual officials, or for-profit corporations.33

The foreign policy community is also highly networked, with leading members connected by personal associations and by their participation in overlapping groups and activities. Senior figures often know one another personally and know other prominent figures by reputation, and many inhabit overlapping professional and social groups. There are also prominent “power couples,” such as the journalists Peter Baker (The New York Times) and Susan Glasser (Foreign Policy, Politico, and The New Yorker); the CNAS cofounder and former assistant secretary of state Kurt Campbell and former undersecretary of the treasury Lael Brainerd; or former assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland and neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan.

As a classic example of an elite foreign policy network, consider the Aspen Strategy Group (ASG). Its stated mission is “to provide a bipartisan forum to explore the preeminent foreign policy challenges the United States faces.” One of its flagship events is a four-day summer workshop, but it also organizes task forces and other meetings and publishes occasional briefings and reports on issues of interest. Participants are a “who’s who” of foreign policy luminaries, including such former government officials as Madeleine Albright, Brent Scowcroft, Nicholas Burns, Thomas Donilon, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Robert Zoellick; journalists like CNN’s Fareed Zakaria or The Wall Street Journal’s Carla Robbins; think tank presidents like Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations, former Carnegie Endowment president Jessica Mathews, former Brookings head Strobe Talbott; and academics (who may also be former officials) such as Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins, Mitchell Reiss (formerly of the College of William and Mary), and Philip Zelikow of the University of Virginia. ASG members serve in many other capacities as well: Talbott, Scowcroft, and the Clinton-era national security advisor Sandy Berger all served on the Global Board of Advisors of the Council on Foreign Relations, while Albright and Zakaria have served on CFR’s board of directors. Cohen is a member of the American Enterprise Institute’s Council of Academic Advisors, and Slaughter is the former dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs and current president of the New America Foundation.

The neoconservative movement provides another example of a mutually supportive network of well-connected insiders. Over the past three decades, neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Danielle Pletka, Eric Edelman, Elliott Abrams, William Kristol, and James Woolsey (among many others) have populated a dizzying collection of centers, think tanks, lobbies, consulting groups, and letterhead organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the Hudson Institute, the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), United Against Nuclear Iran, the Middle East Forum, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and several others while working or writing for publications like The Weekly Standard and, in some cases, for mainstream foreign policy organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations or the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.34

Connections of this kind are invaluable for individuals seeking to rise (or remain) within the foreign policy community, for there is no single, clear, and established route to power inside the U.S. political system. Unlike the professions of law, medicine, or accounting, there are no required courses of study that must be completed before one can practice foreign policy and there is no procedure for professional certification. Prominent members of this community may have advanced degrees in political science, history, international affairs, or public policy, but such training is not a prerequisite for entry or advancement. Sandy Berger was a U.S. national security advisor to Bill Clinton, and Thomas Donilon held the same post under Barack Obama: both were lawyers with little or no formal training in international affairs, yet each eventually took on major responsibilities in this area.35 Similarly, Barack Obama’s chief foreign policy speechwriter, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, was an aspiring novelist with B.A. degrees in English and political science from Rice and an M.A. in Creative Writing from NYU, but he had no advanced training in foreign policy, national security, diplomacy, or international economics. Donald Trump’s first choice as secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, spent his entire professional career at Exxon, and had never served in government before his appointment in 2017.

The point is not that these (or other) officials were unqualified; it is that the path to a prominent position in the foreign policy community is highly contingent and has no formal prerequisites. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals must devote years to formal study and pass a rigorous certifying exam, but aspiring foreign policy gurus need only establish a close relationship with a successful politician or acquire a solid reputation among established figures within some part of the existing community.36 For instance, former national security advisor Donilon worked for several Democratic Party stalwarts and at the same law firm as Secretary of State Warren Christopher (whom he served as chief of staff), and his counterpart Sandy Berger had been a personal friend of Bill Clinton’s since the 1972 McGovern campaign.

Given the recurring need to bring new blood into the establishment, a number of foreign policy institutions have created fellowships and internships designed to identify, recruit, socialize, and advance the careers of young people eager for a career in this world. The Council on Foreign Relations reserves five-year “term memberships” for candidates under thirty-five, and its International Affairs Fellowships place academics and other professionals in government positions for a year at no cost to the U.S. taxpayer. Similarly, the Center for a New American Security has its “Next Generation National Security Fellowship,” whose recipients participate in a leadership development program, a monthly dinner series, and private discussions where they can “engage with those who have led before them, developing a deeper understanding of U.S. national security interests and policies.”37 Another variant is the annual fellowships awarded by the Truman National Security Project, which is self-described as “a highly competitive leadership development program for exceptional individuals who show promise to become our country’s future global affairs leaders.”38

In this sense, today’s foreign policy community operates much as the old “Eastern Establishment” did, insofar as new entrants are recruited, groomed, and promoted based on judgments made by established figures. But there is an important difference. Until sometime in the 1950s, top foreign policy leaders usually had successful careers outside government and did not depend on working on foreign policy for their livelihoods. Men such as Paul Nitze, McGeorge Bundy, James Forrestal, John McCloy, Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, Robert Lovett, John Foster Dulles, and the like were successful lawyers, bankers, academics, or businessmen whose work in the private sector or in academia had made them financially secure before they entered public service. “Old boy” networks and organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations helped recruit and prepare them for positions of leadership in foreign policy, even if they had not established a visible public presence beforehand.

By contrast, the modern foreign policy professional has to survive inside the foreign policy community itself. Although a few individuals may alternate between foreign policy work and wholly separate activities (such as working for a law firm or an investment bank on matters unrelated to foreign affairs), today’s foreign policy experts tend to move between different sectors without changing professions: they do “foreign policy” no matter where they happen to be working. Thus, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power first rose to prominence as a journalist focusing on human rights issues, taught courses on that subject for a number of years at Harvard, then joined Barack Obama’s Senate staff and presidential campaign, was subsequently appointed a White House aide in 2009, and became ambassador in 2013 before returning to Harvard in 2017. Her roles changed, but she was “doing foreign policy” the entire time. When officials leave government, they rarely leave the field; thus, when former Brookings Institution fellow Ivo Daalder stepped down as U.S. ambassador to the European Union, he was soon chosen to be the new president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Similarly, former undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith left the Bush administration in 2005 and became a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, where he continues to work on foreign policy issues today.

The nature of the foreign policy job market encourages entrepreneurship and assiduous self-promotion, as acquiring a reputation for being smart, creative, and knowledgeable about some key aspect of foreign policy is the path to professional advancement. As Janine Wedel suggests, professional success in this world “depends not just on quick study, but on connecting and forging networks, on conferences and cross-pollination among politics, business, and media.”39 Ambitious foreign policy professionals rise by writing articles, op-eds, policy briefs, task force reports, and books that attract favorable attention, by cultivating connections to influential insiders, by impressing superiors with their dedication and effectiveness, and by convincing politicians that they are reliable and, above all, loyal.

Moreover, the days when a public servant such as George Marshall would decline opportunities to profit from public service are long gone. Today, a successful career in Washington—and sometimes even a badly tarnished one—can pave the way to a lucrative career in the private sector, provided one does not stray outside the “respectable” consensus. It has become a common practice for top officials to form or join consulting groups or lobbying organizations (e.g., Kissinger Associates, the Chertoff Group, the Scowcroft Group, the Albright Stonebridge Group, the Cohen Group, Barbour Griffith & Rogers, etc.) in order to profit from contacts made and knowledge acquired while in public service. As the journalist Mark Leibovich observes in his acerbic but entertaining portrait of Washington, This Town, “everyone is now, in effect, a special interest, a free agent, performing any number of services, in any number of settings.”40

The career of the former U.S. ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, offers a revealing but hardly unique example of the ways that members of the foreign policy community can shape perceptions and policy no matter where they are operating. A former Foreign Service officer and protégé of Henry Kissinger’s, Blackwill taught for a number of years at the Harvard Kennedy School and was one of the “Vulcans” who advised George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign.41 As Bush’s ambassador to India, Blackwill helped orchestrate an expanding U.S.-Indian security partnership and backed the controversial U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement completed in 2008. He later served on Bush’s National Security Council, where he worked on Iraq and tried to secure Ayad Allawi’s appointment as interim prime minister. After leaving government, Blackwill became president of the lobbying firm Barbour, Griffith & Rogers, where he continued to press for the policies he had backed while in government (including closer ties with India and Allawi’s candidacy in Iraq).42 He was subsequently appointed Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and he continues to write, speak, and advise prominent politicians on different aspects of foreign affairs. A lifelong Republican and staunch internationalist, Blackwill was also an early and vocal opponent of Donald Trump, helping to organize the open letters by former GOP officials that judged Trump unfit for office during the 2016 campaign.

Blackwill’s example illustrates how prominent members of the foreign policy community can exercise influence regardless of where they are employed, in good part because they are experienced, well-connected, and respected by people in power. But as discussed at greater length in chapter 4, this environment also creates powerful incentives for conformity. Because professional success depends first and foremost on one’s reputation, those who wish to rise to power and wield continued influence must take pains to remain within the acceptable range of opinion. As the Financial Times’ Washington correspondent Edward Luce observes, “Today’s climate makes it hard for a contrarian to advance in government. It is better to be wrong in good company than right and alone.”43 This pressure to conform also helps explain why Washington think tanks with ostensibly different political orientations sometimes sponsor joint events: the goal is to attract as large an audience as possible, and the range of disagreement is often less than one might suppose.44

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 Greenwald, 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 debate 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

Yet Hirsh is not really an outlier. In addition to Friedman, for example, The New York Times’ lineup of foreign affairs columnists also includes David Brooks, Bret Stephens, Nicholas Kristof, and (less frequently) Roger Cohen. Each of these commentators would use U.S. power for somewhat different purposes, but all are dedicated internationalists who believe the United States should pursue a wide array of goals in distant lands. Brooks is a neoconservative who wrote for the National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and The Weekly Standard before coming to the Times; he was also an ardent proponent of the invasion of Iraq, and he continues to favor a muscular approach to U.S. foreign policy. In 2014, for example, he complained that President Barack Obama’s handling of foreign affairs suffered from a “manhood” problem, and he warned of a “spiritual recession” that might discourage Americans from pursuing idealistic missions abroad. “If America isn’t a champion of universal democracy,” he fretted, “what is the country for?” Stephens has a similar profile to Brooks; he is an unapologetic neoconservative, a former columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and the author of America in Retreat, a polemical attack that accused the Obama administration of “isolationism.”62 Cohen and Kristof focus more on human rights issues and are less inclined to favor military solutions than Friedman, Brooks, or Stephens, yet each is a strong proponent of using American power to right wrongs in faraway places, even when U.S. vital interests are not engaged.63

The editorial stances of The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal are even more consistently interventionist than that of the Times. Since the end of the Cold War, for instance, the Post’s op-ed page has been given over to regular columnists such as Charles Krauthammer, Robert Kagan, Richard Cohen, David Ignatius, former Bush administration speechwriter Michael Gerson, George Will, Jim Hoagland, the late Michael Kelly, Max Boot, and William Kristol (longtime editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard and briefly a columnist for The New York Times as well). Each of these pundits supported an interventionist foreign policy, though Will became increasingly skeptical of military intervention as the failures continued to mount.64 Guest commentators skeptical of liberal hegemony or in favor of a more restrained U.S. role appear occasionally in the Post, but they have never been part of its regular stable of writers. Needless to say, the editorial page editor Fred Hiatt is an enthusiastic proponent of liberal hegemony as well.

Such views deserve a place in America’s elite press; the problem is that alternative views are largely absent. In particular, none of these newspapers features any regular columnist representing a libertarian view of America’s global role, or even one that might be characterized as consistently “realist” in orientation. The latter omission is especially striking insofar as realism is a venerable tradition in the academic study of foreign policy, and realists such as Henry Kissinger, George Kennan, Brent Scowcroft, Richard Nixon, and Colin Powell were prominent and influential figures in the past. Yet one would be hard-pressed to find someone regularly espousing a similar worldview in any major media outlet today.

In fact, rather than broaden the range of views they present on foreign policy, the Times, the Post, and the Journal have been doubling down on mainstream hawkish pundits instead. The Times hired the hardliner Bret Stephens away from the Journal in 2017, and in 2018, the Post added the neoconservative writer Max Boot and the Journal selected the right-wing historian Walter Russell Mead. All three men are ardent defenders of liberal hegemony (and each was an enthusiastic proponent of the Iraq War); more to the point, their hiring merely duplicated perspectives that were already well represented at all three publications.

What about right-wing media outlets such as Fox News, Breitbart, and the Drudge Report? Although these outlets were consistently critical of Clinton’s and Obama’s handling of foreign policy, they did not call for significant reductions in America’s global role. Moreover, these outlets feed viewers an alarming diet of stories about the growing threat from Islam, terrorism, a rising China, immigrants, etc., along with any number of other global dangers. Far-right media outlets are skeptical of the global institutions favored by liberal internationalists (if not actively hostile to them), but they are strongly supportive of U.S. military primacy and do not believe the United States should decrease its global role significantly.

America’s media landscape is not a monolith, of course, and mainstream media figures such as Dana Priest, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Jane Mayer, Matt Lee, and James Risen have produced important critical accounts of key aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Outside the mainstream, people such as the late Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings, Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, Tom Engelhardt of Truthdig, and the left-wing broadcaster Amy Goodman of Democracy Now have offered well-informed critiques of America’s imperial tendencies. The Public Broadcasting Service documentary series Frontline has produced a number of hard-hitting programs questioning key elements of recent U.S. foreign policy, and satirists such as Jon Stewart, Trevor Noah, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, and Stephen Colbert have been sharp-eyed and witty critics of some of America’s foreign policy follies. The work of these individuals reminds us that media coverage of foreign affairs is not one-dimensional and that alternative views are available if one knows where to look. But on the whole, the commanding heights of U.S. media are still dominated by individuals who favor an active U.S. foreign policy—however much they disagree over specific priorities or programs—and that view shapes what they tell readers, viewers, and listeners about world politics in general and U.S. foreign policy in particular.

Last but not least, the academic institutions most relevant to issues of foreign policy exhibit many of the same traits as the rest of the foreign policy community. This tendency is especially evident at schools of public policy and international affairs, whose raison d’être emphasizes identifying global problems and proposing solutions for them. And despite academia’s reputation as a bastion of dovish, left-wing thought, most of these institutions do not question the strategy of liberal hegemony.

This situation is to be expected. The leadership and faculty at most of these institutions tend to be leading figures in the foreign policy community, and they are inclined to favor maintaining U.S. leadership. Past deans of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government include Joseph S. Nye, Albert Carnesale, and Graham T. Allison, who all held senior foreign policy positions in the U.S. government or important advisory posts. The current dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University is former NATO supreme allied commander James Stavridis, and his predecessor was Ambassador Stephen Bosworth, a career diplomat who served as Obama’s special envoy to North Korea. Former deputy secretary of state James Steinberg was dean of the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and now heads the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse. The arms control expert and former State Department official Michael Nacht ran the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC-Berkeley, and Anne-Marie Slaughter was dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School prior to her appointment as director of policy planning and her subsequent hiring by the New America Foundation. The list goes on: the career State Department official Robert Gallucci was dean of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service before assuming the presidency of the MacArthur Foundation, and former Clinton-era NSC staffer James Goldgeier was until recently dean of American University’s School of International Service.

There is nothing conspiratorial about the tendency of these institutions to favor liberal hegemony and active U.S. leadership. After all, students enroll in schools of public policy and international affairs because they care about the real world and want to make it better. Faculty members at these institutions write books and articles and serve in government for similar reasons: they want to make the United States more secure or more prosperous or to benefit humankind more broadly. It would be odd, therefore, if most scholars working on international topics—especially those working in professional schools—opposed an active U.S. role on the world stage or were consistently skeptical about the wisdom of using American power to advance supposedly worthy ends.

This commitment to improving the world is admirable, but self-interest and ambition play important roles as well. The more foreign policy problems that the United States tries to solve, the greater the demand for trained experts to work on them and the greater the need for schools in which they can receive this training. Identifying new and urgent problems facilitates fundraising from foundations and alumni and creates more opportunities for ambitious faculty members to go to Washington to address their pet issue. Support for liberal hegemony also minimizes cognitive dissonance: if you’ve invested years of your life defending the necessity for U.S. global leadership, thinking about its shortcomings, costs, or failures might be uncomfortable if not actively painful. To a large extent, therefore, the most important academic institutions concerned with the real world of foreign policymaking will be strongly inclined to support the strategy of liberal hegemony.

The existence of an “activist bias” within the broad foreign policy community does not mean that this approach is necessarily wrong or imply that the policies that this community develops, promotes, and implements are always misguided. Similarly, to point out that people within the broad foreign policy community have an interest in lots of U.S. involvement overseas is not to suggest that they embrace liberal hegemony solely for selfish, greedy, or vainglorious reasons.

Rather, it is simply to observe that there is a broad and strong consensus uniting most people who work on a regular basis on issues of international affairs and foreign policy. Until the Trump experiment, this consensus was shared by the two main political parties, most government officials, and the bulk of the policy analysts, journalists, editors, and academics who work on these issues. Despite repeated failures over the past two decades, liberal hegemony was largely unchallenged within the foreign policy community.

LIBERAL HEGEMONY UNDAUNTED:
A TALE OF THREE TASK FORCES

To see this phenomenon more clearly, let us examine three prominent efforts to identify what U.S. grand strategy should be in the twenty-first century. The first attempt was conducted in the aftermath of September 11 but before the 2008 financial crisis; the second was written after the crisis hit, and when it was also clear that the Iraq and Afghan wars were going badly; and the third emerged near the end of the Obama administration and after the Ukraine crisis and the emergence of ISIS. All three reports were bipartisan efforts, and each offered remarkably ambitious and strikingly similar blueprints for America’s role in the world.

THE PRINCETON PROJECT ON NATIONAL SECURITY: FORGING A WORLD OF LIBERTY UNDER LAW (2006)

Between 2003 and 2006 the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University sponsored an ambitious bipartisan initiative, known as the Princeton Project on National Security, with the goal of developing “a sustainable and effective national security strategy for the United States.” The project was directed by Anne-Marie Slaughter and G. John Ikenberry, and the honorary cochairs were former secretary of state George Shultz and former national security advisor Anthony Lake. Funded by grants from the Ford Foundation and the philanthropist David Rubenstein of the Carlyle Group, the project brought nearly four hundred participants from the foreign policy community together in an extended series of conferences, workshops, round tables, and working groups. Its stated purpose was “to write a collective ‘X article,’ to do together what no one person in our highly specialized and rapidly changing world could hope to do alone.”65

Completed in 2006, the result was a dense, sixty-page report entitled Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century (hereafter FWLL). It is a textbook expression of the strategy of liberal hegemony that has united neoconservatives and liberals since the end of the Cold War.

FWLL’s first sentence begins with a stern warning: “On the fifth anniversary of September 11, the world seems a more menacing place than ever.” The United States “feels increasingly alone,” and faces “many present dangers.” A far-reaching and ambitious response is needed: U.S. national security strategy “must address all the dangers we face—diffuse, shifting and uncertain as they are—and seize all the opportunities open to us to make ourselves and the world more secure.” In short, like most national security documents, the report begins by portraying a world brimming with numerous threats, all of them requiring a U.S. response.

The report then prescribes a breathtaking set of national security imperatives based on the overarching belief that “America must stand for, seek and secure a world of liberty under law.” In short, the ultimate aim of U.S. foreign policy is not to protect the well-being of the American people, but rather to ensure that every citizen on the entire planet lives in a stable and well-governed liberal democracy. To do this, the United States cannot simply be a status quo power; it “must develop a more sophisticated strategy of recognizing and promoting the deeper preconditions for successful liberal democracy.” In particular, U.S. power must be used to create “Popular, Accountable, and Rights-regarding (PAR) governments” around the world, a process it describes (without irony) as “bringing the world up to PAR.”

But that’s not all. Washington must also “make UN reform a top priority, as part of a broader effort to rebuild a liberal international order.” The report recommends creating a “Concert of Democracies,” calls for “reviving the NATO alliance,” and says that Washington must lead “efforts to reform the main international financial and trade institutions.” High levels of defense spending are necessary to preserve “a balance of power in favor of liberal democracies,” and the United States must simultaneously maintain a strong U.S. nuclear deterrent while working to “revitalize the Non-Proliferation regime.” The latter goal will require “a range of counter-proliferation measures,” including (as a last resort) “preventive military action.” America’s “primary task” regarding a rising China is to convince Beijing that it can “achieve its legitimate ambitions within the current international order,” though it is left to Washington to decide whether Beijing’s ambitions are “legitimate” or not.

Wait, there’s more! The United States must also “make critical investments in our public health system,” “establish an East Asia security institution that brings together the major powers,” “invest more in public education,” and “do everything possible to achieve a peace settlement” between Israel and the Palestinians. Nor can Americans shy away from interfering in other countries’ political systems: on the contrary, “U.S. strategy must include the creation of institutions and mechanisms whereby the international community can … encourage sound practices within states without using force or illegitimate modes of coercion.”

This list is but a sample of the report’s recommendations; and admonitions to “rectify our irresponsible fiscal policies” and reallocate “enough public resources to provide sufficient economic security for American workers” are thrown in for good measure. By the time one is finished reading, it is hard to think of any international issue the authors do not regard as a vital concern for the United States, even though no president could attempt—let alone achieve—more than a handful of these initiatives.

The Princeton Project’s overweening ambition was partly the result of its inclusive design: if you ask four hundred experts to devise a grand strategy, everyone’s pet project will have to be mentioned and a lot of logrolling is inevitable. Yet FWLL is hardly an outlier insofar as it mirrors other important statements of post–Cold War grand strategy, including the Clinton administration’s National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (1995) and the Bush administration’s post-9/11 National Security Strategy (2002). Like these earlier documents, FWLL depicts a hostile world where diverse dangers lurk, sees U.S. power as a consistent force for good, and believes the United States must remake the world in its image without compromising the very principles it is trying to promote. The report ends with Henry Kissinger observing that the “ultimate test of U.S. foreign policy” lies in protecting “the extraordinary opportunity that has come about to recast the international system.” If that lofty goal is indeed the “ultimate test” of U.S. foreign policy, then the United States has an awful lot to do.

“THE PROJECT FOR A UNITED AND STRONG AMERICA” (2013)

Roughly ten years after the Princeton Project began its deliberations, a second bipartisan task force presented a new set of recommendations for U.S. grand strategy. Cochaired by James Goldgeier of American University’s School of International Service, a Democrat, and Kurt Volker of Arizona State University’s McCain Institute, a Republican, the bipartisan Project for a United and Strong America had a similar objective: to examine the role “the United States should play in the world.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Though written in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and after the Bush Doctrine had crashed and burned in Iraq and Afghanistan, the project’s final report is every bit as ambitious as the earlier Princeton version. Indeed, its central message is that setbacks abroad and financial pressures at home are no reason to scale back U.S. global involvement. Convinced that “any short-term savings would come at significant long-term cost,” the report calls for the United States to “remain true to the principles of advancing democratic values and exercising strong American global leadership.”

The authors make their case through the usual rhetorical devices and arguments. The United States is portrayed as an exceptional nation with “the unique ability to lead but an imperative to do so—for the protection of its own national interests and values.” The United States “remains in an extraordinarily strong position globally” (which makes an ambitious foreign policy possible), yet “the challenges confronting U.S. interests and values remain substantial and complex.” These challenges range “from a full spectrum of security threats” to economic, environmental, ideological, political, and humanitarian challenges. Moreover, the Internet and globalization have “ushered in an unprecedented empowerment of individuals and small actors” and created “unprecedented risk.” The United States may be a global superpower with no peer competitors, but it still faces a troubled and dangerous world.

The solution, as always, is American “leadership,” with the ultimate aim of spreading democracy. The United States “must play an active, day-to-day role in shaping events” and “work to advance a liberal, democratic world order” through “tangible and sustained actions” (including the use of military force).

To be sure, the report acknowledges that fiscal pressures may require the United States to “absorb some reductions in defense spending.” But not to any significant degree, for it also calls for the United States to maintain “the capacity to deter any potential military rival and defeat any potential adversary.” In addition, the United States must protect the global commons, curb nuclear proliferation, conduct counterterrorism operations around the globe, and “anchor regional stability” in several distant areas. Washington should act with allies when it can but still preserve “the capacity to conduct successful operations on its own, anywhere in the world.”

Why? Simple: because vital interests are everywhere. “Europe remains crucial to our common efforts to manage global challenges,” the report opines, and “the United States must also … give priority to alliance relationships in the Asia-Pacific region” while “[s]imilar efforts are needed with our security partnerships in the Middle East.” But that’s not all: the United States should upgrade its partnerships with Brazil, Indonesia, and Turkey, keep Iran from achieving a nuclear capability, prevent reversals in Afghan stability, rebuild cooperative ties with Pakistan, counter Al Qaeda (everywhere), and end the civil war in Syria (among other things). By the time one finishes reading, there isn’t a square inch on the planet left to itself.

Mindful of economic constraints, the report also recommends prompt action to reduce the national debt, strengthen economic competitiveness, and maintain a level playing field in global markets. Revealingly, the justification for these actions is not the well-being or comfort of the American people; instead, the report places “a priority on strength at home in order to underpin a strong U.S. role in the world” (my emphasis). A strong economy is desirable not because it would allow Americans to lead more bountiful or fulfilling lives; it is necessary so that the United States can swing a big stick around the world.

EXTENDING AMERICAN POWER: STRATEGIES TO EXPAND U.S. ENGAGEMENT IN A COMPETITIVE WORLD ORDER (2016)

A final example of a blue-ribbon defense of liberal hegemony is the Center for New American Security’s Extending American Power, released in May 2016. Like the reports already discussed, it views the United States as the “indispensable” linchpin of the present world order, warns that any alteration of America’s role in the world would have catastrophic consequences, and offers up a lengthy to-do list of projects Washington must undertake around the globe.

Given the composition of the task force, these conclusions are precisely what one would expect. The cochairs were former Clinton-era State Department official James Rubin and the ubiquitous neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan. Participants included experienced foreign policy VIPs: Michèle Flournoy, Robert Zoellick, Kurt Campbell, Stephen Hadley, James Steinberg, and Eric Edelman, and the witnesses invited to testify at the group’s working sessions were equally familiar faces, including Stephen Sestanovich, Elliott Abrams, Dennis Ross, Victoria Nuland, and Martin Indyk. The only mildly contrarian witnesses were Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group and Vali Nasr of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, but neither occupies a position outside the foreign policy mainstream.

The result—surprise!—is another well-worn defense of liberal hegemony. The report begins by lauding the “immense benefits” the current world order has produced and declares that “to preserve and strengthen this order will require a renewal of American leadership in the international system.” Yet it never tells the reader exactly what that “order” is or acknowledges that recent U.S. efforts to “extend” it have produced costly quagmires and deteriorating relations with other major powers instead. Nor does it ask if there are elements in the existing order that should be rethought. Instead, the report simply posits that a liberal world order exists and that it cannot survive without the widespread application of American power.

To maintain America’s “leadership role,” the report calls for significant increases in national security spending and recommends that the United States expand its military activities in three major areas: Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It leaves open the possibility that the United States might have to do more in other places too, so its real agenda may be even more ambitious.

In Europe, Washington must “stabilize Ukraine and anchor it in Europe,” “establish a more robust US presence in Central and Eastern European countries,” and “restore capacity for European strategic leadership.” The latter goal is not something the United States can do alone, however, and the contradiction here is hard to miss. Why should one expect Europe to develop a renewed capacity for “strategic leadership” if the United States reserves that role for itself and Europe’s leaders can still count on Uncle Sam to ride to the rescue?

In Asia, the United States should continue the Obama administration’s “pivot” and implement the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and it may have to “impose regional costs” on China for its actions in the South China Sea and inflict “commensurate economic penalties to slow Chinese dominance.” At the same time, Washington should “facilitate China’s continued integration so as to blunt its historical fears of ‘containment.’” In other words, the United States should make a sustained effort to contain China—and maybe even work to retard its rise—but Beijing won’t mind if Washington does so politely.

In the Middle East, the task force wants to “scale up” the effort against ISIS, with the United States taking the leading role. It also calls for a no-fly zone in Syria and says that Washington “must adopt as a matter of policy, the goal of defeating Iran’s determined effort to dominate the Middle East.” The report does not explain how Persian Iran will manage to “dominate” the Arab Middle East with a defense budget that is less than 5 percent of America’s and in the face of potential opposition from more heavily armed states such as Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and several others.66

In short, the CNAS report recommends that the United States maintain every one of its current international commitments, double down on policies that have repeatedly failed, and take on expensive, risky, and uncertain projects in several regions at once. Although some of its individual recommendations may make sense, the overall package is the same boundless vision of U.S. “leadership” that has guided U.S. foreign policy since the Soviet Union broke apart.

And like the two earlier reports discussed above, Extending American Power is silent regarding America’s geographic position, resource endowments, demographic characteristics, underlying economic interests, or core strategic requirements. It does not try to rank vital interests, assess potential threats to those interests, or consider different ways these dangers might be reduced. Like its predecessors, the CNAS report simply declares that the U.S. has vital interests everywhere, says that a liberal world order will preserve them, and maintains that preserving this order requires deploying and using American power in every corner of the world.

My point is not that these three studies (and others like them) provided specific blueprints for action that had a direct and immediate impact on the foreign policy of particular administrations. Rather, such reports are simply a revealing window into the mind-set of the U.S. foreign policy community. Indeed, they tell us more about the way this community thinks than they do about the actual strategic challenges the United States faces.67 Such documents define the range of “acceptable” opinion within the community and thereby serve to set limits on the policy options that can be proposed without jeopardizing one’s professional reputation. By ruling out alternatives from the beginning, such exercises help keep U.S. grand strategy within the same narrow and familiar contours.

What is perhaps most striking about these three exercises in mainstream grand strategizing is how insensitive they are to the actual state of the world. It doesn’t matter where the United States is located, what its internal condition is, where principal dangers might lie, how the balance of power in regions might be changing, or whether the main challenge the United States faces is a large and well-armed peer competitor like the former Soviet Union, a rising revisionist power like China, a complex multipolar world of contending regional powers, or a shadowy terrorist network like Al Qaeda. No matter what the question is, the answer is always the same: the United States must take the lead in solving every global issue, and it must keep interfering in other countries in order to keep the liberal world order alive.

MIND THE GAP: ELITES VERSUS THE PUBLIC

The American people, however, have a different view. Members of the foreign policy community may share similar policy preferences, but in the words of the political scientists Lawrence R. Jacobs and Benjamin I. Page, “the general public stands somewhat to the side.”68 The foreign policy community has been firmly wedded to liberal hegemony, but the American people have a more sensible and realistic view of what is desirable and feasible.

According to Page and another coauthor, Jason Barabas, “the most conspicuous gap between citizens and leaders is a familiar and long-standing one: more leaders than citizens tend to be ‘internationalists,’ at least in the simple sense that they say they favor the United States taking an ‘active part’ in world affairs.”69 More recently, Page and Marshall Bouton of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs have documented a persistent “disconnect” between elite and mass attitudes on foreign affairs, one they believe presents “serious problems for democratic values.” In their words, “official U.S. foreign policy often differs markedly from the policies most Americans want” (i.e., a less costly, ambitious, and burdensome foreign policy).70

Needless to say, this is precisely the sentiment Donald Trump tapped into in 2016. On the one hand, most Americans reject out-and-out isolationism, with more than 60 percent saying that the United States should “take an active part in world affairs” (as opposed to “staying out”). On the other hand, most do not believe that the United States should be the only “global leader,” and they remain wary of unilateral U.S. action. This percentage, it is worth noting, has been more or less constant since the late 1970s.71 In 2016, for example, fewer than 10 percent thought the United States should be the “preeminent world leader in solving international problems,” and only 37 percent thought it “should be the most active of leading nations.”72

U.S. citizens also believe that the United States is bearing too large a share of global burdens, and they are far more skeptical about an “activist” foreign policy than most members of the foreign policy community appear to be. In 2002, for example, immediately following the 9/11 attacks, public support for U.S. military action and general interest in world affairs rose significantly. Yet even then, 62 percent of Americans believed that the United States did not have the responsibility to play the role of “world policeman,” and 65 percent felt that Washington was playing that role “more than it should.”73 In 2006, 57 percent of Americans said that the United States was “doing more than its share” to help others in the world.74 By 2013, more than 52 percent of Americans surveyed agreed with the statement “the US should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own”—the highest percentage ever recorded since the question was first asked in the 1960s. In 1964, 54 percent of Americans believed that “we should not think so much in international terms but concentrate on our own national problems and building up strength here at home”; by 2013, the number endorsing that sentiment had risen to 80 percent.75 And in 2016, 64 percent felt that “the United States is playing the role of world policeman more than it should be.”76

The gap between elites and the public is equally evident when specific scenarios are invoked. In 2009, for example, 50 percent of Council on Foreign Relations members supported Obama’s Afghan “surge” and said that U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan should be increased, but only 32 percent of the general public agreed. Eighty-seven percent of CFR members thought the initial U.S. decision to use force there was correct, but only 56 percent of the public shared that view. (Ironically, CFR members also had a gloomier view of the U.S. military effort, with 90 percent believing the war was not going well, as compared with 57 percent of the general public.)77 A similar gap between elites and the public was apparent in 2013: 51 percent of the public believed the United States “did too much” in world affairs, and 17 percent thought it did “too little,” but only 21 percent of CFR members thought the country was doing too much and 41 percent maintained that it was doing “too little.”78

This same pattern recurred as the Obama administration debated military action in response to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war. According to a New York Times poll, although 75 percent of Americans believed the Assad regime had used chemical weapons and 52 percent saw this act as a potential threat to the United States, majorities in excess of 80 percent said they were either “very” or “somewhat” concerned that U.S. intervention would cause civilian casualties, be long and costly, and “lead to a more widespread war.” And contrary to the foreign policy community’s reflexive commitment to spreading U.S. values, when ordinary citizens are asked whether the United States “should try to change a dictatorship to a democracy where it can” or “stay out of other countries’ affairs,” 72 percent choose “stay out” and only 15 percent say “change where it can.”79 A CNN poll yielded similar results, with 69 percent of respondents saying it was not in the U.S. national interest to get involved in the Syrian conflict.80

Public support for global activism continued to decline in subsequent years. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in April 2014 found that only 19 percent of those asked wanted the United States to be “more active” in world affairs (down from 37 percent in 2001), while the percentage favoring a “less active” role increased from 14 in 2001 to 47.81 As the 2016 election campaign intensified in the spring of 2016, the Pew Research Center reported that 57 percent of Americans believed that the United States should “deal with its own problems and let other countries deal with theirs the best they can,” while only 37 percent felt that the United States “should help other countries deal with their problems.” Forty-one percent now felt that the country was doing “too much” in world affairs; only 27 percent thought it was doing “too little.”82 In 2007, public opinion was evenly split (39 percent to 40 percent) over whether the president should focus more on domestic or foreign policy; by 2013, 83 percent said the former and only 6 percent (!) chose the latter.83

Public opinion can be fickle, and it often responds to vivid events or to the cues provided by elites. For example, support for military action against ISIS soared after the extremist group beheaded two American journalists in the summer of 2014, only to fall to earth again a few months later.84 Furthermore, when elites are strongly united behind some foreign policy action, public opinion tends to follow along.85 As the next chapter will show, Americans have tolerated an overly ambitious foreign policy in part because the foreign policy establishment keeps telling them it is necessary, feasible, and affordable.

Nonetheless, there is a persistent and significant gap between the foreign policy community’s enthusiasm for liberal hegemony—with the costs and risks it entails—and the views of the American people at large. The latter do not want to retreat to Fortress America, shut down the Department of State, or sever all foreign alliances, but the broader public is far less supportive of the ambitious crusades that the foreign policy establishment has conducted since the end of the Cold War and far more concerned with conditions back home.

The obvious question, therefore, is how has the foreign policy elite overcome the public’s reluctance to take on costly overseas commitments—a reluctance borne of the remarkable security that the United States already enjoys? I tackle that question directly in the next chapter.