Making Foreign Policy Decisions

Presidential Briefings

Christopher J. Fettweis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351507660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

It is often said that voters hold presidents responsible for two things: the economy and foreign policy. Economic performance is generally beyond presidential control, but foreign policy is defined by the president. The White House is justifiably blamed or credited for how it manages relations with the outside world.How, then, can presidents maximize their chances to achieve successful foreign policies? What kinds of considerations should they bear in mind as they make important decisions for their country? Foreign policy begins with the process of making decisions. This briefing book examines foreign policy decision-making, and offers advice to current and future presidents drawn from fields ranging from political science and history, to psychology and economics. It identifies basic guidelines that presidents should consider when making choices. Such guidelines apply to almost any area of human endeavour, and they are certainly central to choices made in and outside of the Oval Office.When the strong make mistakes, the weak often suffer. As the strongest country in the history of the world, the United States has a special responsibility to run a sagacious foreign policy. This briefing book will benefit students, policy makers, and the general public.

ONE

Misapplied History

Presidents love to read history. George Washington devoured information about the Roman Republic, and was particularly inspired by the story of Cincinnatus, the great military leader who retired to his farm rather than become dictator in 458 BC. Franklin Roosevelt apparently read as much about the founders of this country as the founders did about the Romans. In his memoirs, Harry Truman wrote that, “I had trained myself to look back in history for precedents,” and other presidents seem to operate the same way. Even George W. Bush, often caricatured as the most uncurious, unintellectual of presidents, found the time to read presidential biographies while in office. The pressure and isolation of the White House encourages its inhabitants to seek the guidance of their predecessors, to learn from their experiences and hard-won wisdom. This seems to make good sense; after all why wouldn’t presidents seek to learn from the past? Satayana’s famous warning (“those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”) has inspired many a policy maker to look back through the historical record to try to find precedents with lessons applicable to present dilemmas.

Unfortunately for those seeking guidance from the past, Satayana was wrong. History never repeats itself, no matter how urgently we sometimes wish it would. No two situations are the same, much less two people or countries, which means that actions taken in one scenario will not produce identical outcomes in another. As a result, as historian Ernest May first pointed out four decades ago, when presidents try to apply the lessons of the past to today’s problems, things don’t usually work out as they hope.

The mere fact that history offers an incomplete guide to the present will not stop policymakers from seeking its advice, however. A central part of the job is to make decisions, often impossibly difficult decisions, and presidents will take any help they can get. Some psychologists have suggested that it may be essentially impossible for people to reason or make decisions without some reference to historical experience. The human mind needs structure to interpret information, even if that structure often oversimplifies and distorts reality. History is one of the sources of structure, in the form of theories about human nature that lead to assumptions about future outcomes. It aids in decisions big and small, consciously or not, and always will. Surely, therefore, any time devoted to the attempt to apply history’s lessons wisely (or at least minimize their often corrosive effects) would be well spent.

Reasoning by Analogy

Presidents make no easy decisions. If an obvious response exists, it is set in motion by those lower on the bureaucratic ladder; only difficult dilemmas, those associated with high levels of risk, reach the desk at which the buck stops. In October 1962, President Kennedy faced an especially difficult choice when Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba. Foreign policies always seem natural or inevitable in retrospect, but there was nothing predetermined about the US reaction to the apparent provocation that set off the Cuban Missile Crisis. The decisions that Kennedy had to make were fraught with danger, especially since he had to choose based on guesses about what each option would bring. How would the Soviets react to an invasion? Would a weak response encourage further aggression, as his advisors were warning? Would Soviet ships attempt to run a blockade? The President could only speculate about the answers to these and a dozen other questions, which made any attempt to assess costs and benefits of options beforehand impossible. He had no idea what would happen, since he had to operate in what psychologists refer to as “bounded rationality,” where future costs and benefits are unknowable. Decision makers are always hampered by incomplete information and ignorance of potential consequences. Any judgment of action must take into account the reality that leaders do not have access to crystal balls when they try to set the best course for their state. What seems irrational in retrospect may well have looked quite logical in the stress of the moment to those operating without the benefit of hindsight.

Understanding how events unfolded following earlier decisions might help presidents anticipate reactions to the options they consider, if historical trends can be trusted. Too often, however, they cannot. While analogies allow decision makers to frame unfamiliar situations in familiar terms, they also mask new elements and sacrifice accuracy in the name of simplification. Relying on comparisons with the past too often substitutes for sustained analysis of current concerns.

National leaders also need to recall something that does not trouble many other types of decision makers: Foreign policy generally is a strategic exercise, which means the actions of others must be taken into account. The leaders of rival countries are also making decisions, many of which will not only affect US goals but undermine them. Most of the time those other leaders also have history books and smart advisors who are also familiar with prior events. The actions that worked for past presidents may not work again. Analogies are especially dangerous guides to foreign policy, therefore, because all actors will attempt to apply their lessons in different ways.

Choosing Lessons

Presidents are not historical supercomputers who can rapidly sort through centuries of US foreign policy to determine the events or trends most relevant to current times. Some types of analogies will recur with frequency, and will disproportionately affect decisions. Presidents ought to be aware that not all history is created equal, in other words, and that it is natural to emphasize some kinds of events over others. A number of cognitive processes filter history and determine the lessons that come to mind when decisions have to be made. For better or worse, consistent rules apply to the way decision makers use history.

First, people tend to learn more from recent events than from those in the more distant past. For rather understandable reasons, the ability to recall history is inversely related to its age; people tend to believe that more important lessons are taught by more current events, almost irrespective of their relevance. For example, instability in the Dominican Republic in 1965 caused President Johnson to recall immediately the revolution nearby Cuba, which had occurred only a few years earlier. His primary goal quickly became to avoid a repeat of the process that brought Castro to power, even though there was very little similarity between the cases. For one thing, unlike in Cuba, there was no central, skilled, charismatic Dominican communist leader. There were communists in the Dominican Republic, but they had very little support in the countryside or the cities; they were weak, fragmented, and not much involved in the popular revolt at all. Nonetheless, the Castro analogy weighed heavily enough on LBJ’s mind that he dispatched twenty-three thousand US troops to the island to make sure no such enemy surfaced. The intervention was essentially pointless—it prevented an outcome that almost certainly was not going to occur—and served only to prolong the conflict and damage the reputation of the United States in the region even more than it already was.

In May 1975, Cambodian naval forces boarded the US merchant ship Mayaguez and seized the ship and its crew. As President Ford and his advisors considered their response, memories of the North Korean seizure of the USS Pueblo seven years earlier weighed heavily in their deliberations. That incident had been humiliating for the Johnson Administration, because the North Koreans had held the crew hostage for nearly a year and never released the ship (they still haven’t—it is currently a floating museum of capitalist perfidy or some such nonsense on the Botang River in Pyongyang). The analogy, as usual, was imperfect. For one thing, the Mayaguez was a merchant vessel, while the Pueblo was a warship on an intelligence-gathering mission; for another, the North Korean government ordered the seizure of the Pueblo, but it was never clear how much control the Cambodian government had over the forces that snatched the Mayaguez. The earlier incident was a direct provocation, in other words, while the latter may have just been a blunder. President Ford authorized an immediate rescue mission anyway, during which forty-one servicemen died storming a Cambodian-held island while the crew was in the process of being released unharmed. Separate reviews by the military, intelligence community, and Congress all determined the mission to have been an under-considered, hastily-planned disaster; for the rest of his career, future Chairman of the Joint Chiefs David Jones considered it the primary example of how not to plan a rescue mission. The lesson of recent history did not prove terribly useful.

Not all recent historical events receive equal consideration, of course. The second cognitive filter on history relates to magnitude of the event: people take more away from dramatic events rather than comparatively dull ones. They tend to learn too much from those things that traumatize them and too little from nonevents, those dogs that do not bark, as Sherlock Holmes once observed. May pointed out that Truman learned far more about the nature of the Soviet Union from its aggression in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria than he did from its relative passivity in Finland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. President Carter professed to have learned fundamental lessons about the Soviet Union from its invasion of Afghanistan, rather than from its attempts at cooperation during the era of détente. And of course George W. Bush’s worldview was dramatically altered by 9/11.

Dramatic events are outliers in human behavior, almost by definition. There is a great deal of danger in learning too much from them, or believing that they constitute the norm rather than exceptions. What political scientist Robert Jervis refers to as “negative outcomes,” or “aggression that does not occur, crises that are avoided, quiet compromises, and slow, peaceful transformations” teach fewer lessons, even though they are far more common in international politics. Like the modern media, the human brain tends to focus on dramatic events at the expense of what might be considered a more balanced evaluation of reality.

The third and final filter on history is personal:people learn more from those events that affected themselves, or that they were a part of. The Bush Administration learned a series of lessons on 9/11 that profoundly shaped its thinking going forward, for example. Saddam Hussein’s regime had been bothersome to that point, but once viewed through the lens forged by 9/11, it took on the appearance of a serious threat. A generation earlier, President Kennedy’s perception that he had been manipulated by his military and intelligence advisors during the Bay of Pigs fiasco led to his reluctance to trust their advice the following year once Soviet missiles were found in Cuba. Bismarck’s maxim that fools learn from experience while wise people learn from the experience of others seems to be lost on most of us.

Taken together, these filters often lead policymakers to use history badly. Presidents, like all people, tend to often make comparisons to the first case that leaps to mind, rarely giving much consideration to the applicability of the analogies they choose. They focus on the dramatic and the personal, as if those experiences are the only relevant ones. As a result, they often misapply history’s lessons. It doesn’t have to be this way, however. There are ways that presidents and laymen alike can train themselves to use history better, if perhaps never perfectly so.

Using History Better

Although examples of presidents using history poorly are easy to find, surely there are also times when they seem to have applied its lessons more wisely. One clear example is the set of decisions made by Presidents Roosevelt and Truman following the Second World War, in which they seemed to have learned lessons from the disastrous agreements that followed the First. They devised a new international institution, the United Nations, using the lessons of the failures of the League of Nations; they constructed an entirely new economic order, based in large part on the power of the dollar, to avoid the interwar monetary chaos; and perhaps most importantly, the general attitude of punishing Germany was abandoned in favor of quick rehabilitation and reintegration. They had learned quite well from the mistakes made by their predecessors.

It is not the case, then, that history should never inform decisions, even if such a thing were possible. Presidents first need to get into the habit of recognizing when the past is shaping the present, which is not as simple as it sounds. People often refer nearly subconsciously to the lessons they have learned, without thinking too hard about their genesis, applicability, or wisdom. Taking the time to examine why we believe what we believe would help to disentangle the useful precedents from those likely to mislead. Once the presence of analogy has been detected, a few further rules might help presidents and indeed anyone making decisions minimize the danger of misapplying analogy.

Examine Analogies—and WRITE DOWN the Results

Once analogies have been identified their applicability must be assessed, which is no small task. Is the previous experience an example of a unique event, or are there enduring lessons to be learned? For more than a decade at Harvard, historian May and political scientist Richard Neustadt taught a class on using history to inform policymaking, and tried to identify ways that its application could be improved. Perhaps the most crucial exercise to minimize the odds that history would be misused was to write down likenesses and differences between the past and the current situation, to help determine closeness of fit. Often the simple act of writing can help bring clarity to an issue, since muddled thinking is harder to hide on paper than it is in our heads.

It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of writing these lists down, even if it is, as they say, “only on the back of an envelope.” To explain this point, these two senior scholars approvingly quote former Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca: “In conversation you can get away with all kinds of vagueness and nonsense, often without even realizing it. But there’s something about putting your thoughts on paper that forces you to get down to specifics. That way, it’s harder to deceive yourself—or anybody else.” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos apparently also forces his senior executives to write-out long memos, often as long as six single-spaced pages, prior to senior-management meetings. The value of writing down the specific aspects of analogies allows their underlying assumptions to come to the surface in ways that do not happen in thought and speech. It is a simple, underemployed exercise, well worth the expenditure of even a busy president’s time.

Writing down likenesses and differences of historical comparisons does not guarantee success, but it certainly makes success more likely. President Obama seems to have agreed during the deliberations regarding the 2009 “surge” in Afghanistan, when he was assessing comparisons to previous experience in Iraq. The President instructed his national security team to compile a number of such lists, which certainly helped clarify the issue. While the jury is still out on the wisdom of the decision, there is no doubt that the process was aided by a deeper consideration of the relevance of the analogy rather than mere blind faith that history would repeat itself.

The process of evaluation (and writing out the results) should not end once the initial lists are made. As crises unfold, Neustadt and May suggest that the accounting of likenesses and differences should be updated and revised to reflect new information. The general utility (or lack thereof) of the comparison should begin to become clear over time. As long as decision makers remain (1) cognizant of the analogies they employ and (2) willing to alter or drop those that do not fit well with the present, the dangers of being misled by the past can be kept under control.

Identify the Theoretical Justification

Once the similarities and differences between the two situations have been explicitly identified, a decision maker can hopefully shed light on the central questions that should accompany any application of analogy: Why does history help here? Why was the analogy chosen over other possible choices? And why should anyone believe that the present concern is part of a recurring pattern? Some sort of underlying belief or reason has to be identified to help make the case that the past event has lessons to teach that are not only enduring, but relevant to the current situation. In other words, it has to be connected in some way by a coherent—if unspoken, because the policy world instinctively rebels against this term—theory.

Perhaps the past instance reveals something fundamental about state behavior that today’s policymakers need to learn. Perhaps it demonstrates an enduring lesson regarding human nature, or the nature of those in power. Good theories can be general or specific, addressing broad trends or particular aspects of opponents or rival leaders. If Slobodan Milosevic had ordered the mistreatment of minorities before, for example, logic might suggest that he would be willing to do so again should the situation present itself.

Often, however, no such underlying reasoning (theory) will emerge. The flaws in unstated beliefs can become obvious once subjected to such scrutiny, and the more specious analogies can be quickly exposed and abandoned. Without solid theoretical justification, analogies are worse than useless—they impoverish debate and thought, and mislead action.

Trends Are More Useful than Single Events

If indeed a particular historical incident has a theoretical justification, it will probably not be a unique event. It should go without saying that more wisdom is contained in repeated incidents than singular, in trends rather than anomalies. Patterns are much more likely to be reflections of traits common to human nature rather than merely situation- or era-dependent idiosyncrasies. It is very dangerous to learn any meaningful lessons from one event, no matter how significant or recent, personal or traumatic.

It is striking how often even the most repetitious historical evidence is ignored in favor of one powerful belief or another. Consider, for example, strategic bombing, or the attempt to break the will of an enemy population through attacks from the air. From the London “Blitz” through the various bombing operations of North Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s through to Hamas’s periodic rocket attacks into Israel today, history contains precious few examples of a time when bombing has achieved its main stated goal, to break popular morale. The opposite reaction is almost always observed: victims of bombing tend to become quite angry with the people destroying their cities and killing their neighbors, oddly enough, and rally around the cause for which they are being bombed. Governments have been slow to learn the lesson that strategic bombing is generally counterproductive, acting instead as if societies are like individuals who can be tortured into acquiescence.

In 2003 George W. Bush ignored other patterns in history while contemplating the invasion of Iraq. If he had taken time to consider historical trends in Middle Eastern security, he might have seen that resistance to oppression—real and imagined—had become a point of pride across the region. Perhaps in part because the...