By ignoring and kneecapping the national security apparatus, President Trump is setting his foreign policy up for failure.
Examples of disorder in the Trump administration’s handling of foreign policy are multiplying. There is, for example, the botched possible prisoner exchange deal with Venezuela. Evidently, two different parts of the administration were talking to the same Venezuelan official but not talking to each other, while offering different terms for an agreement.
Then there was the interruption of weapons shipments to Ukraine by the Pentagon without fully coordinating with others in the administration. President Trump reportedly was displeased at being caught “flat-footed” and later reversed the move.
Process, as well as substance, matters in foreign policy. Bad process, or the lack of a process, can produce bad policy, and in ways that go beyond different component institutions working at cross purposes, as in the Venezuela and Ukraine examples. Process gets much less attention than substance, however, in foreign policy debates.
The lack of a process does not automatically produce bad policy if the policymakers in question have a firm grasp on the relevant issues, what they intend to accomplish, and how best to accomplish it. The great-power diplomacy of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the 1970s, including the opening to China, is widely and appropriately considered a successful episode in the history of American statecraft, even though much of it was conducted without the institutions normally involved in making and executing foreign policy. The success of the policy owed much to Nixon’s extensive thinking while out of power about how global politics works.
But Nixon and Kissinger’s practice of conducting much of their foreign policy out of a vest pocket and excluding input from the bureaucracy fared less well on other issues, where that input would have been useful. An example was the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, which Nixon and Kissinger viewed in simple Cold War terms that overlooked many of the regional dynamics. As a result, the policy did not serve US interests in South Asia well and may have hastened India’s development of a nuclear weapon.
Today, much of US foreign as well as domestic policy reflects the impulses of one man, Donald Trump. Even Trump’s most ardent defenders do not contend that he spent the four years between his presidential terms brooding Nixon-like about the nature of world politics and developing a carefully thought-out diplomatic strategy to advance US global interests.
Much of the back-and-forth chaos of Trump’s conduct of foreign relations is a matter of a short attention span and Trump’s personal leanings at any one moment. This is perhaps most apparent in the on-again–off-again–on-again nature of his use of tariffs and threats to impose tariffs.
Beyond overcoming any disorder in the mind of the man at the top, a good policy process requires full involvement of the relevant parts of the bureaucracy. Trump’s war on the federal bureaucracy works against an orderly and effective process for generating any policy, foreign or domestic. If nothing else, this means an unwillingness to listen to, much less accept, the judgment of relevant specialists within the government.
The wholesale deconstruction of the federal bureaucracy means many of those specialists are already gone, or on their way out the door. This has included parts of the bureaucracy most directly involved in foreign policy, including severe cuts to an already under-resourced Department of State.
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For those in the national security bureaucracy who remain, the Trump administration’s prioritization of political loyalty over competence is a strong disincentive against the kind of honest, uninhibited contributions that are needed for an effective policy coordination process. The administration is carrying the politicization of agencies to extremes, such as by using polygraph tests to ferret out any FBI officials not totally supportive of the partisan activists Trump has appointed to run the bureau.
In the FBI and elsewhere in the national security bureaucracy, there will be no ability for truth to speak to power. With power being used for political intimidation, those feeling intimidated will speak only what they believe the powerful want to hear.
The part of the bureaucracy most directly responsible for ensuring an orderly foreign policy process is the National Security Council. The NSC’s staff has been hit with at least as much heavily politicized deconstruction as the rest of the bureaucracy. In April, the far-right activist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer brought a black list to the Oval Office and persuaded Trump to fire several senior members of the NSC staff.
Of course, to perform its central role of coordinating the crafting and execution of foreign policy, the NSC staff does not have to be, and should not be, large. Indeed, past dysfunction in the NSC has arisen when the body was too bloated and functioned more like an operating agency. Indeed, one of the most notable examples of this was the Iran-Contra affair. But the NSC of today has been crippled.
A measure of Trump’s lack of interest in an orderly and comprehensive policy process is that he does not have a full-time national security adviser—the official who oversees the NSC—since he removed Mike Waltz from the job in April. Marco Rubio is ostensibly in charge of the NSC, but he also has the day jobs of secretary of state, administrator of what is left of the Agency for International Development, and national archivist.
The outstanding example in modern American foreign policy of the cost of an inadequate policy process is the Iraq War. Notwithstanding all the other retrospective debates about that costly mistake, the most remarkable thing about President George W. Bush’s decision to launch the war in 2003 is that no policy process preceded the decision. No options papers. No meetings in the Situation Room. No extended discussion on whether launching this war was advisable. There was plenty of discussion within the administration about selling the war to the public and some about executing the war, but none about whether the war was a good idea in the first place.
There was much relevant information and many insights in the bureaucracy that should have been taken into account—and that could have helped to foresee many of the war’s consequence, like the spawning of a major terrorist group and an insurgency that caused thousands of American casualties. However, without a policy process, none of this was input into the president’s decision.
Today, the lack of orderly policy processes, the mechanisms to manage them, and the appetite at the top to use them is likely to result in similarly unforeseen, if foreseeable, ill consequences. The problem is likely to be all the greater with a president who is as far removed from Nixon’s capacity for strategic thinking as Donald Trump is.
About the Author: Paul Pillar
Paul R. Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier, he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA, covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His most recent book is Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.
Image: White House / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain.
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