Foreign Policy Sausage

 It's often said of sausage that you never really want to know how it's made. The same cannot be said about policy. What goes into the policy-sausage is as important as the policy-sausage itself, especially if it turns out badly.

There is a fantastic piece by Karen DeYoung in today's Washington Post about the inner workings of the Obama Administration's National Security Council (linked here). It describes bureaucratic bloat, indecision, sketchy inter-agency coordination, infighting, and competition, and an all too frequent emphasis on process that has often generated more paralysis than meaningful policy; foreign policy sausage-making at its finest.



It's a wonderful window into the challenges of making foreign policy and the many ways in which even well-intentioned policy initiatives can stall, be ineffective, or go off the rails altogether. Some of you will know that I think one of the bigger stories of the ugly aftermath of America's 2003 invasion of Iraq is the bureaucratic fight between the Department of State (headed by Colin Powell) and the Pentagon (run by Donald Rumsfeld) over who would handle the bulk of those duties. Both departments had done a fair bit of work on how to handle the anticipated aftermath. Well,... the Pentagon won the day and we all know how things subsequently transpired. It's impossible to say whether the State Department's prewar planning would really have been any different, but....

I am not the biggest fan of President Obama's foreign policy efforts (a link or two here), and view some of them as possibly too little too late in terms of contributing to his presidential legacy. Obama is not alone among presidents in turning their attention to foreign affairs late in their second terms. Yet, foreign policy is tough business that doesn't lend itself to timelines measured in weeks and months. Moreover, the establishment of a consistent doctrine is fraught with many of the ambiguities, personalities, and "unknown unknowns" (borrowing Don Rumsfeld's amusing formulation) noted in DeYoung's piece.

War or Peace?

One final note here about the selling-job that foreign policy initiatives often require; not in terms of the complications of that effort, but the seeming requirement that they be sold in terms that are as stark as possible (does anyone remember weapons of mass destruction in 2002-2003?). Note the starkness of the language being used by the Obama Administration to sell the nuclear deal with Iran; the President himself is depicting a rejection of the deal as a kind of inevitable on-ramp to war. Secretary of State, John Kerry has been doing likewise in his testimony before Congress and his interviews with journalists.

It is probably a topic for a much longer post, but I am continually struck by how the convoluted qualities of the policy-making process always seem to result in a sales-job that is over-simplified; as though the public cannot digest anything more complex. Moreover, that sales pitch always depicts the policy-makers in a light that makes it seem as though they knew what they were doing all along, when in almost every instance we discover things were not quite so clear.