3: DEFINING THE “BLOB”: WHAT IS THE “FOREIGN POLICY COMMUNITY”?
1. Quoted in Eric Bradner, Elise Labott, and Dana Bash, “50 GOP National Security Experts Oppose Trump,” August 8, 2016, at www
2. Thomas Oatley, A Political Economy of American Hegemony: Buildups, Booms, and Busts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 29.
3. See Dan Reiter and Allan Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); idem, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).
4. This idea is usually attributed to John Stuart Mill, who argued that open debate would allow democratic systems to more readily determine the best policies. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes appears to have coined the “marketplace” metaphor, arguing in his dissent to Abrams v. United States (1919) that “the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”
5. For this reason, Amartya Sen argues, “no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy,” in part because public officials have obvious incentives to keep voters fed, but also because democratic systems transmit information more efficiently. See his Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).
6. See Ernest May, American Imperialism: A Speculative Essay (New York: Athenaeum, 1968); and idem, “American Imperialism: A Reinterpretation,” Perspectives in American History 1 (1967), p. 187.
7. Ironically, Wilson ignored the group’s recommendations and relied on his own counsel instead. According to Robert Schulzinger, Wilson “refused to take the advice of the corps [of experts] he had taken with him to Paris. Left to themselves, the experts brooded.” See The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs: The History of the Council on Foreign Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 3; also Peter Grose, Continuing the Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996 (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1996), chap. 1; and Lawrence E. Gelfand, The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 1917–1919 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963).
8. See Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); and Edward Berman, The Influence of the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy: The Ideology of Philanthropy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1983).
9. Joseph Kraft, Profiles in Power: A Washington Insight (New York: New American Library, 1966), p. 188.
10. I. M. Destler, Leslie H. Gelb, and Anthony Lake, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Unmaking of American Foreign Policy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), p. 91.
11. For similar critiques of the foreign policy establishment and the standard view of U.S. foreign policy institutions, see Michael Glennon, National Security and Double Government (New York: Oxford, 2015); Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (New York: Viking, 2016); Tom Engelhardt, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015); Scott Horton, Lords of Secrecy: The National Security State and Amerca’s Stealth Warfare (New York: Nation Books, 2015); and Patrick Porter, “Why U.S. Grand Strategy Has Not Changed: Power, Strategy, and the Foreign Policy Establishment,” International Security 42, no. 4 (Spring 2018).
12. See David Samuels, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru,” The New York Times Magazine, May 5, 2016.
13. An invaluable survey of the literature on the foreign policy establishment is Priscilla Roberts, “‘All the Right People’: The Historiography of the American Foreign Policy Establishment,” Journal of American Studies 26, no. 3 (December 1992).
14. As with most social groups, the “foreign policy community” has a core of individuals and organizations whose membership is indisputable—such as the top officials of the Council on Foreign Relations, members of the U.S. Foreign Service, or the professional staff of the Arms Control Association—and a surrounding penumbra of members who are less extensively engaged.
15. See Karen DeYoung, “White House Tries for Leaner National Security Staff,” The Washington Post, June 22, 2015.
16. See “U.S. Military Personnel End Strength,” GlobalSecurity.Org, at www
17. See Glennon, National Security and Double Government, chap. 2.
18. As the bipartisan Project on National Security Reform noted back in 2008, “Although departments have become proficient at generating functional capabilities within their mandates, the national security system cannot rapidly develop new capabilities or combine capabilities from multiple departments for new missions. As a consequence, mission essential capabilities that fall outside the core mandate of a department receive less emphasis and fewer resources.” See Project on National Security Reform, Ensuring Security in an Unpredictable World: The Urgent Need for National Security Reform (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of the Presidency, 2008), p. v.
19. James G. McGann, 2017 Global Go To Think Tanks Index Report (Philadelphia: Think Tanks and Civil Society Program, University of Pennsylvania, 2017) at https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&context=think_tanks, p. 8. Two recent examinations of this evolving world are Thomas Medvetz, Think Tanks in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Daniel W. Drezner, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats Are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
20. See Janine Wedel, Unaccountable: How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security (New York: Pegasus Books, 2014), especially chap. 7.
21. This point is emphasized in James McGann, “Academics to Ideologues: A Brief History of the Public Policy Research Industry,” PS: Political Science and Politics 25, no. 4 (1992). See also Medvetz, Think Tanks in America, chap. 3.
22. See Steven Clemons, “The Corruption of Think Tanks,” JPRI Critique 10, no. 2 (February 2003) at www
23. For example, former Foreign Policy Studies senior fellow Richard Betts eventually left Brookings for a tenured position at Columbia University; Yahya Sadowski moved to Johns Hopkins; Joshua Epstein joined the Santa Fe Institute, and the Foreign Policy Studies director John Steinbruner took a tenured faculty position at the University of Maryland.
24. On the impact of interest groups in American politics, see Allan J. Cigler, Burdett Loomis, and Anthony Nownes, eds., Interest Group Politics (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 9th ed., 2015); Frank R. Baumgartner and Beth L. Leech, Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and Political Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Helen V. Milner and Dustin Tingley, Sailing the Water’s Edge: The Domestic Politics of American Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), chap. 3; Richard L. Hall and Alan V. Deardorff, “Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 1 (2006); and Robert G. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government (New York: Vintage, reprint ed., 2010).
25. Recent examples would include my colleagues Joseph S. Nye, Graham T. Allison, Ashton B. Carter, Nicholas Burns, Samantha Power, and Meghan O’Sullivan, among others. Condoleezza Rice was professor of political science and provost at Stanford University before serving as national security advisor and secretary of state under George W. Bush, and both Stephen Krasner and Anne-Marie Slaughter held prominent academic posts before directing the Bureau of Policy Planning at the State Department. Colin Kahl was a tenured professor at Georgetown before serving as national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, Paul Wolfowitz taught at Yale and was dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) before his stint as deputy secretary of defense in the Bush administration, and one of his successors at SAIS, Vali Nasr, was an advisor to the late Richard Holbrooke in the latter’s capacity as special envoy for Afghanistan. These names are but a small sample of the academics who have served in important foreign policy positions in recent years.
26. The United Arab Emirates reportedly gave some $20 million to support the Middle East Institute, a well-known D.C. think tank, and the Brookings Institution, the Atlantic Council, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies have all received millions of dollars’ worth of grants from a number of foreign countries in recent years. See Ryan Grim, “Gulf Government Gave Secret $20 Million Gift to D.C. Think Tank,” The Intercept, August 9, 2017 at https://
27. See Steve Horn and Allen Ruff, “How Private Warmongers and the US Military Infiltrated American Universities,” Truthout.org, at http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=4905:how-private-warmongers-and-the-us-military-infiltrated-american-universities.
28. See Greg Jaffe, “Libertarian Billionaire Charles Koch Is Making a Big Bet on National Security,” The Washington Post, November 11, 2017. Full disclosure: I am codirecting one of these programs, which provides research fellowships for pre- and postdoctoral students working on U.S. foreign policy topics.
29. In March 2018, the foundation filed suit against the University of Chicago, claiming the university had failed to fulfill the terms of the gift and seeking the return of the funds it had already provided. See “International Security Center Receives $3.5 Million Grant,” at https://
30. Glennon, National Security and Double Government, pp. 58–59.
31. The career of Leslie H. Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), exemplifies this pattern. After receiving a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University in the early 1960s, Gelb taught for several years at Wesleyan University before becoming an aide to Senator Jacob Javits (D-NY). Moving to the Pentagon, Gelb directed the in-house study of Vietnam decision-making (the “Pentagon Papers”) before moving to the Brookings Institution in 1969. Gelb served as director of political-military affairs at the Department of State during the Carter administration and became national security correspondent for The New York Times in 1980. After leaving the Times, Gelb was a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace before being chosen to head the CFR in 1993.
32. The career of Richard Holbrooke offers a different but equally viable pattern: after serving in the Foreign Service and the Peace Corps, he became managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine from 1972 to 1976. An inveterate networker, he served as assistant secretary of state for East Asia in the Carter administration and then joined Lehman Brothers in 1981. He was also vice chair of a private equity firm, served on corporate and nonprofit boards, and later held prominent diplomatic positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations.
33. To take a typical example: Thomas J. Christensen is simultaneously a professor at Columbia University, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a sometime advisor to the Department of State, where he served as deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian Affairs from 2006 to 2008.
34. For in-depth summaries of the neoconservative policy network, see Janine Wedel, Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market (New York: Basic Books, 2009), chap. 6; Justin Vaisse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard/Belknap, 2010); and John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), pp. 128–32.
35. Donilon was a lawyer and lobbyist who worked primarily on domestic political issues and electoral reform before becoming chief of staff to Secretary of State Warren Christopher in 1993. He also served as assistant secretary of state for public affairs under President Clinton. See “National Security Advisor: Who Is Tom Donilon?” November 29, 2010, at www.allgov.com/news/appointments-and-resignations/national-security-advisor-who-is-thomas-donilon?news=841821. Similarly, Berger worked on domestic issues as an aide to New York mayor John V. Lindsay and two different congressmen before being appointed deputy director of policy planning in the State Department in 1977. He also worked as a lobbyist on international trade issues.
36. The apotheosis of this tendency is the recent career of Jared Kushner, whose sole qualification for an influential White House job is his marriage to Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka.
37. See “CNAS Announces 2018 Next Generation National Security Fellows” (press release, Center for a New American Security, January 2018); and see www
38. See http://
39. Wedel, Unaccountable, p. 181.
40. Mark Leibovich, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus, Plenty of Free Parking!—in America’s Gilded Capital (New York: Penguin, 2013), p. 57.
41. See James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), p. 252.
42. See Elisabeth Bumiller, “Backing an Iraqi Leader, This Time for a Fee,” The New York Times, October 29, 2007.
43. See Edward Luce, “The Untimely Death of American Statecraft,” Financial Times, June 1, 2007.
44. After Barack Obama was reelected in November 2012, for example, the liberal Center for American Progress and the conservative American Enterprise Institute partnered to present a panel on national security featuring CAP’s Brian Katulis and Rudy de Leon and AEI’s Danielle Pletka and Paul Wolfowitz. See www
45. See “Why War,” PBS NewsHour, February 12, 2003, at www
46. The classic treatment of civilian and military views on the use of force is Richard K. Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).
47. World Affairs Councils of America, “Our History,” at www
48. See http://
49. Leslie H. Gelb, preface, in Grose, Continuing the Inquiry, p. xiv; “100 Years of Impact: A Timeline of the Carnegie Endowment,” at http://
50. See Joseph Lieberman and Jon Kyl, Why American Leadership Still Matters: A Report of the American Internationalism Project (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 2015), available at www
51. See Richard Fontaine and Michèle Flournoy, “America: Beware the Siren Song of Disengagement,” The National Interest, August 14, 2014, at http://
52. On the relationship between CAP and CNAS, see Mann, The Obamians, pp. 52–53.
53. Brian Katulis, “Against Disengagement,” Democracy, no. 32 (Spring 2014).
54. See “Introduction,” in Will Marshall, ed., With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). Marshall also signed several open letters advocating the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, was a member of the pro-war Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and called the invasion “undoubtedly a triumph for President Bush.” For his views on Libya, see Will Marshall, “Lessons of Libya,” Huffington Post, October 28, 2011, at www
55. See “Where We Stand,” at http://
56. See Zack Beauchamp, “Why Democrats Have No Foreign Policy Ideas,” Vox.com, September 5, 2017, at www
57. Examples include Michael Ignatieff, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Fareed Zakaria, Leon Wieseltier, and the celebrity “philosopher” Bernard Henri-Lévy.
58. See Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
59. Not surprisingly, the founder of the U.S. Committee on NATO, one of the main groups pushing NATO expansion, was Bruce Jackson, who also happened to be vice president of strategic planning at Lockheed Martin, the country’s largest defense contractor. See Stephen Gowans, “War, NATO Expansion, and the Other Rackets of Bruce P. Jackson,” What’s Left? November 25, 2002, at http://
60. On May 29, 2003, Friedman appeared on Charlie Rose’s eponymous PBS show and said, “I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie … What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?’ You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.” Available at www
61. See Michael Hirsh, At War with Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 39–40, 254.
62. See Bret Stephens, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder (New York: Sentinel, 2015). Stephens’s hiring by the Times in 2017 added scant intellectual diversity to its roster of regular columnists, insofar as his worldview was already well-represented by Brooks.
63. Cohen was a consistent advocate of U.S. military intervention in Ukraine and especially the Syrian civil war, declaring Obama’s failure to act there to be the “greatest blot” on his presidency. See his “Intervene in Syria,” The New York Times, February 4, 2013; “Make Assad Pay,” The New York Times, August 29, 2013; “The Diplomacy of Force,” The New York Times, June 19, 2014; “Western Illusions Over Ukraine,” The New York Times, February 9, 2015; and “Obama’s Syrian Nightmare,” The New York Times, September 10, 2015.
64. See George Will, “On Libya, Too Many Questions,” The Washington Post, March 8, 2011; and “McChrystal Had to Go,” The Washington Post, June 24, 2010.
65. G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century (Final Report, Princeton Project on National Security, 2006), downloaded from www
66. In fact, the only way Iran will dominate the Middle East in the near future is if the United States keeps toppling its rivals, as it did when it foolishly invaded Iraq in 2003 (a step most of the signatories of the report supported).
67. One could say the same for the American Enterprise Institute’s 2015 report Why American Leadership Still Matters.
68. See Lawrence R. Jacobs and Benjamin I. Page, “Who Influences U.S. Foreign Policy?” American Political Science Review 99, no. 1 (Feb. 2005), pp. 113, 121.
69. See Benjamin Page and Jason Barabas, “Foreign Policy Gaps Between Citizens and Leaders,” International Studies Quarterly 44, no. 3 (September 2000), p. 344. Similarly, Daniel Drezner concludes his own comparison of U.S. mass and elite attitudes in foreign policy by saying “the elite public is more liberal internationalist than the mass public.” See his “The Realist Tradition in American Public Opinion,” Perspectives on Politics 6, no. 1 (March 2008), p. 63.
70. See Benjamin I. Page with Marshall M. Bouton, The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don’t Get (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 201–02, 240.
71. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs has posed this question repeatedly in its annual surveys of public opinion. See Dina Smeltz et al., America Divided: Political Partisanship and U.S. Foreign Policy (Chicago: Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 2016), p. 10.
72. Eighty-three percent favored the United States “doing its share in effort to solve international problems,” and 82 percent supported a “shared leadership role.” See Program for Public Consultation, Americans on the U.S. Role in the World: A Study of U.S. Public Attitudes (College Park, MD: University of Maryland, January 2017), p. 3.
73. See “Worldviews 2002: American Public Opinion and Foreign Policy” (Chicago: Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 2002), p. 26.
74. See Public Agenda, “America in the World,” September 2006, at www
75. Pew Research Center, Public Sees U.S. Power Declining as Support for Global Engagement Slips, December 3, 2013, at www
76. Americans on the U.S. Role in the World, p. 4.
77. Pew Research Center, “U.S. Seen as Less Important, China as More Powerful,” December 3, 2009, at www
78. Pew Research Center, America’s Place in the World 2013 (December 2013), at www
79. “American Views on Intervention in Syria,” The New York Times online, at www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/10/world/middleeast/american-views-on-intervention-in-syria.html?_r=0.
80. CNN/ORC poll, September 6–8, 2013, downloaded at http://
81. “WSJ/NBC Poll,” April 27, 2014, The Wall Street Journal (online), at http://
82. See “Public Uncertain, Divided Over America’s Place in the World,” Pew Research Center, May 5, 2016, at www
83. See Andrew Kohut, “American International Engagement on the Rocks,” Pew Research Center, July 11, 2013, at www
84. In September 2013, shortly after President Obama announced a campaign of air strikes and military training to counter ISIL, 61 percent of Americans said that military action against ISIL “was in America’s national interest.” See “WSJ/NBC Poll: Almost Two-Thirds Back Attacking Militants,” The Wall Street Journal (online), September 10, 2014, at http://
85. See Adam J. Berinsky, “Assuming the Costs of War: Events, Elites, and American Public Support for Military Conflict,” Journal of Politics 69, no. 4 (November 2007); and Jon Western, Selling Intervention and War: The Presidency, the Media, and the American Public (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).