The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy

331 Pages·2018·3.05 MB·English

by  Stephen M. Walt

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Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page

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FOR MY FAMILY
PREFACE
IN MARCH 2013, a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff invited
me to speak at the department and requested that I “be provocative.” Happy to
comply, I titled my talk “Why U.S. Foreign Policy Keeps Failing.” A lively but
friendly discussion followed, and it occurred to me afterward that my remarks
might form the basis for a short book. I estimated it would take about a year to
write.
Like the men and women responsible for U.S. foreign policy in recent years, I
badly misjudged the difficulty of the task I had undertaken. Nonetheless, a full
draft of the manuscript was complete in October 2016 and I anticipated the book
would appear near the end of Hillary Clinton’s first year as president. The timing
would be ideal, I thought, as I expected Clinton to repeat many of her
predecessors’ mistakes, making a hard-hitting critique of U.S. grand strategy
both timely and valuable.
Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in November 2016 was an awkward
surprise in more ways than one, but it was also an ideal opportunity to test my
core argument about America’s foreign policy elite. Candidate Trump had
challenged many enduring orthodoxies about U.S. foreign policy, and he was
openly dismissive of (and dismissed by) Democratic and Republican foreign
policy experts alike. Once in power, however, Trump discovered that
overcoming the foreign policy establishment was much harder than he had
expected. Trump’s presidential style is obviously different from his
predecessors’ and he has altered U.S. policy in some significant ways, but the
foreign policy revolution that he promised back in 2016 remains unrealized. This
book will help you understand why.
In some ways, this work is the logical continuation of a research program I
began pursuing in graduate school. In The Origins of Alliances (1987), I argue
that a proper understanding of the causes of international alliances could explain
why the United States and its main allies were significantly stronger than the
Soviet bloc, and could reduce concerns that key allies would realign with the
Soviet Union if the United States did not constantly reassure them. Revolution
and War (1996) explores the international effects of domestic revolutions and
argues that efforts to overthrow revolutionary powers often contribute to spirals
of hostility and thus make war with them more likely. Taming American Power
(2005) explains why both friends and foes were concerned about America’s
dominant position after the Cold War, shows how other states were trying to
counter U.S. power or exploit it for their own ends, and argues that the United
States could have defused such efforts by adopting a more restrained foreign
policy. And in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007), John
Mearsheimer and I show how a powerful domestic interest group can influence
U.S. foreign policy in significant ways, to the detriment of broader U.S. national
interests.
Each of these works cast a skeptical eye at important elements of U.S. foreign
policy and tried to show how it could be improved. The present book develops
that theme in detail, focusing on the enduring role that elite foreign policy
institutions play in shaping U.S. strategy and managing America’s relations with
the wider world.
In particular, this book seeks to explain why the United States spent the past
quarter century pursuing an ambitious, unrealistic, and mostly unsuccessful
foreign policy. Having won the Cold War and achieved a position of primacy
unseen since the Roman Empire, why did U.S. leaders decide to maintain a
military establishment that dwarfed all others and expand an already far-flung
network of allies, client states, military bases, and security commitments?
Instead of greeting the defeat of its principal rival as an opportunity to reduce
America’s global burdens, why did both Democrats and Republicans embark on
an ill-considered campaign to spread democracy, markets, and other liberal
values around the world?
This strategy—sometimes termed “liberal hegemony”—has been a costly
failure. Yet three successive administrations—under Clinton, Bush, and Obama
—clung to it, even as the costs mounted and the quagmires multiplied. Why did
Washington persist in the face of repeated setbacks, and how did the foreign
policy establishment convince the American people to support policies that were
neither necessary nor successful?
Part of the explanation is America’s remarkable combination of wealth,
power, and favorable geography. Because the United States is the world’s most
powerful nation, faces no threats in the Western Hemisphere, and is protected
from the rest of the world by two enormous oceans, it can intervene in distant
lands without placing its immediate survival in jeopardy. Yet this explanation is
not the whole story, because those same favorable circumstances would also
permit the United States to reduce many of its overseas commitments and focus
more attention on problems at home.
Instead of pursuing a more restrained grand strategy, U.S. leaders opted for
liberal hegemony because the foreign policy community believes spreading
liberal values is both essential for U.S. security and easy to do. They convinced
ordinary citizens to support this ambitious agenda by exaggerating international
dangers, overstating the benefits that liberal hegemony would produce, and
concealing the true costs. And because members of the foreign policy elite are
rarely held to account, they were able to make the same mistakes again and
again.
This book is highly critical of the foreign policy establishment, but the nature
of my critique needs to be properly understood. America’s foreign policy elite is
not a conspiracy of privileged insiders who are consciously seeking to advance
their own fortunes at the nation’s expense. On the contrary, the institutions
examined in this book are filled with dedicated public servants who genuinely
believe that U.S. dominance is good for the United States and for the rest of the
world. At the same time, however, the pursuit of liberal hegemony appeals to
this elite’s sense of self-worth, enhances their power and status, and gives them
plenty to do. These individuals also operate in a system that rewards conformity,
penalizes dissent, and encourages its members to remain within the prevailing
consensus.
In short, most of the men and women examined in this book tried to advance
the national interest as they saw it. Unfortunately, the strategy they pursued with
such energy and dedication was fundamentally flawed, and their mistakes were
sometimes egregious. With the best of intentions, America’s foreign policy elite
did great harm to others and considerable damage to the United States itself. And
unless and until a new elite emerges with a different view of America’s role and
a greater willingness to pursue a strategy of restraint, the errors of the past
twenty-five years are likely to be repeated.
A single book cannot produce a revolution in U.S. foreign policy. But it is my
hope that this book will help hasten the day when the United States adopts a
foreign policy that actually enhances its security and prosperity and makes
America’s core values more attractive to others. A foreign policy with those
qualities would be closer to what the American people actually want, and easier
to defend at home and abroad.
Stephen M. Walt
Brookline, Massachusetts