The Dangerous Desire to 'Shape' the World

The evidence of the last thirty years should tell us that U.S. leadership and “shaping the terms of the world order” have not improved the strength and quality of the American project.

Derek Leebaert criticizes amateurism in the making of U.S. foreign policy:

America may have been temporarily chastened by failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, as it was after Vietnam. But there’s no reason that fresh, exuberant ill-judgements on the scale pushed by Rice and Bundy won’t again be made, and soon. After all, those deadly fiascos were just the worst blunders in decades of U.S. foreign policy miscalculation.

Why do such bad ideas get injected into the making of U.S. foreign policy, particularly with an ease rarely found in other advanced democracies?

Much is due to the political appointments system which the country uses to staff its government, including the national security apparatus.

Leebaert makes a strong case that our system of putting political appointees in so many policymaking positions has served the U.S. very poorly, but I still question whether this is a chief reason why “bad ideas get injected” into policymaking. In many cases, when the U.S. embraces these bad ideas in its policies it is because those ideas have become widely shared in Washington among both political appointees and career officials. Many of the worst foreign policy ideas over the last seventy years have come from applying unquestioned assumptions about U.S. leadership and an activist role in the world to specific cases. If the U.S. had had fewer political appointees in top positions and relied on career diplomats instead, that might avoid some of the incompetent execution but it would be no guarantee against the influence of pernicious ideas.