Biden’s Foreign-Policy Problem Is Incompetence

As the New York Mets compiled a record of 40 wins and 120 losses during their comically inept inaugural season, manager Casey Stengel famously lamented: “Can’t anyone here play this game?” I thought of Stengel’s remark when I learned that the temporary pier the United States had built to bring relief aid into Gaza had collapsed. It was an apt metaphor for the Biden administration’s handling of the whole Gaza conflict, as critics on social media were quick to point out. Constructing the pier was essentially an expensive PR stunt undertaken because U.S. officials were unwilling to force Israel to open the border crossings and allow sufficient relief aid for civilians facing a man-made humanitarian catastrophe. This largely symbolic effort managed to deliver about 60 truckloads of aid before rough seas damaged the structure and aid deliveries were suspended. Repairs are now underway and will reportedly take at least a week, and the cost of the whole operation is already hundreds of millions of dollars and rising.

One might see this sorry episode as just a small part of a larger tragedy, but I think it raises larger questions about American ambitions and pretentions. Foreign-policy experts in the United States obsess about preserving “credibility,” largely to justify spending vast resources on conflicts and commitments that are of minor strategic importance. In the 1960s and 70s, U.S. leaders understood that South Vietnam was a minor power of little intrinsic strategic value, yet they insisted that withdrawing short of victory would cast doubt on America’s staying power, undermine its credibility, and encourage allies around the world to realign toward the communist bloc. None of these gloomy forecasts came to pass, of course, but the same simplistic arguments get recycled whenever the United States finds itself in an unwinnable war for minor stakes.

Those who fetishize credibility typically assume all that is needed is sufficient resolve. They believe the United States can achieve whatever goals it sets if it just tries hard enough; in their minds, victory is just a matter of staying the course. But seeing credibility and influence solely as a matter of will overlooks another key ingredient, one that is arguably more important. That key ingredient is competence.

If the main institutions charged with conducting America’s foreign relations—the National Security Council; the departments of state, defense, treasury, and commerce; the intelligence services; and various congressional committees—are not very competent, all the will in the world will not convince others to take our advice and follow our lead. The Berlin airlift in 1948 was a clear signal of Western resolve, for example, but it would have backfired if the United States and its partners had been unable to pull off a complicated logistical effort successfully. Building a superfluous pier in the Mediterranean and having it fall apart about 9 days later sends a rather different message.

Unfortunately, there is ample reason to question whether America’s foreign-policy institutions can fulfill the lofty global role that U.S. leaders have taken on. The list of dismal performances keeps getting longer: a Middle East “peace process” we were told would yield a two-state solution but which has produced today’s “one-state reality” instead; an avoidable and clumsily waged war over Kosovo in 1999, which included the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade; the policy errors and intelligence failures that enabled the Sept. 11 attacks; the disastrous decision to invade Iraq in 2003; the 2008 financial crisis; a series of scandals and collisions at sea involving the U.S. Navy; a bloated defense procurement process that can’t pass an audit and buys aircraft that are rarely ready for action; the failure to anticipate where open-ended NATO enlargement would eventually lead; the vain hope that economic sanctions would quickly crash Russia’s economy; or the cheerleading that overlooked the abundant signs that Ukraine’s summer 2023 counteroffensive was doomed to fail. If I tossed in the failed interventions in Afghanistan and Libya, you’d accuse me of piling on, and I haven’t said a word about the clown asylum that the U.S. House of Representatives has become.

I take no pleasure in reciting this troubling litany, and I’m aware that Washington has gotten some important things right on occasion. The Clinton administration helped avert a major war in South Asia during the 1999 Kargil crisis; the Bush administration’s PEPFAR program was by all accounts a major humanitarian success; the Obama administration backed the local forces that toppled the Islamic State’s short-lived “caliphate”; and the Biden administration coordinated the initial response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine effectively. U.S. intelligence failed to anticipate Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, but it correctly foresaw what Russian President Vladimir Putin was preparing in 2022.

So I’m not suggesting the U.S. government fails at everything.

But the overall record is disappointing, and I’ve devoted years (and one whole book) trying to figure out why this is so. I suspect part of the problem is America’s unusual combination of power and impunity: Because it is simultaneously very powerful and unusually secure, its leaders can do all sorts of dumb things and let other states suffer most of the consequences. There’s also the Blob’s tendency to assume that the whole world will fall apart if the United States is not actively trying to manage dozens of problems around the world, which invariably leads Washington to take on more responsibilities than it can handle. An overstuffed agenda makes it harder to set priorities and impossible to give every problem the attention it deserves. The inevitable result is that many things get done badly or not at all.

To make matters worse, presidents value loyalty more than they value competence, and the foreign-policy establishment is averse to holding error-prone members accountable. The results are experts who fail upward and purveyors of bankrupt ideas who can always find some think tank or media outlet willing to recycle their discredited nostrums. Senior officials rarely resign on principle (although mid-level officials sometimes do), because doing so makes it less likely that they’ll get a plum appointment in some future administration. After all, what leader wants a senior aide who might embarrass them by standing up for what they think is right? There’s also the massive turnover that occurs every time the White House changes hands, bringing in a flock of new appointees who must first await Senate confirmation and then try to figure out what to do. This situation is akin to Apple or GM haphazardly replacing its senior management team every four years and expecting the company to work smoothly. This might not be a problem if the United States had a modest set of foreign-policy goals, but instead Washington is trying to manage the whole world with an ever-changing apparatus of short-timers, not to mention any number of unqualified amateurs.

I know: I’m not being fair to the thousands of dedicated government employees who show up every day and do their best for the country—those who fill official “dissent channels” with complaints when their superiors go off the rails. Entrenched bureaucratic interests can create problems of their own, but in this case the fish is rotting mostly from the head. All of which leaves the United States with a foreign-policy apparatus that is better at proclaiming lofty ideals than at setting realistic goals, let alone achieving them.

But if you think reelecting Donald Trump is going to solve this problem, think again. Trump’s first term was an endless parade of foreign-policy missteps that didn’t make the United States more secure or prosperous but did manage to squander the respect and good will that his predecessor had enjoyed in much of the world. His poorly implemented trade wars cost the United States hundreds of thousands of jobs and failed to achieve its stated purpose (reducing the U.S. trade deficit). Trump tore up agreements that he never understood and burned through four national security advisors, two secretaries of defense, two secretaries of state, and an unprecedented number of White House staffers in a single term. Revealingly, some of his former senior aides are among his most prominent critics today.

And let’s not forget that this is the president whose business career was riddled with fraud, endless litigation, and repeated bankruptcies; who thought sunlight and bleach might cure COVID; who rewarded North Korea’s Kim Jong Un with a one-on-one summit meeting and got bupkis for it; and who inadvertently leaked classified information during a White House visit with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Trump’s views on foreign policy may have been a refreshing break from inside-the-Beltway orthodoxy, but his most consequential actions—leaving the Paris climate accord, tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, and withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership—did immediate and lasting damage to important U.S. interests. And, oh yes, he also tried to overturn the 2020 election and has spoken of terminating parts of the Constitution if he gets a second chance in the Oval Office. Anyone who thinks a second Trump term will produce a more successful U.S. foreign policy either hasn’t been paying attention or has simply forgotten what an incompetent leader Trump was.

Fixing America’s error-prone foreign-policy machinery will take a long time, and I sometimes wonder if it is even possible. That’s one reason why I favor a more restrained foreign policy, one that keeps the United States engaged in the world but reduces the number of issues, problems, and commitments that Washington feels obligated to solve. If the United States tried to do fewer things, our foreign-policy apparatus might be up to the task. The failure rate would be lower than it is today, and we’d have more resources to devote to problems here at home. I suspect some key countries around the world would be delighted if the United States had a less ambitious but more competent foreign policy, which would make our remaining commitments more credible. Sounds like a win-win to me.