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Watching the testimony yesterday of the inimitable Fiona Hill, together with David Holmes, I was struck with an answer to a question that has been vexing me for years.
(A tangential thread on the impeachment hearings) /1
(A tangential thread on the impeachment hearings) /1
Because of the work I do, I get a lot of opportunities to talk to people like Hill and Holmes, like Yovanovich and Vindland. America (and the world) got to see what I have been privileged to learn over the years: these are formidable people.
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The analysts, diplomats, officers and other public servants I have had the opportunity to meet at the State Department and the Pentagon, at the UK Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence, at NATO and the EU External Action Service are virtually without exception excellent.
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They are careful, diligent and thorough. They are fast learners, well versed in their fields but keenly aware of what they don’t know. They appreciate nuance and complexity. They seek complex answers to difficult questions, not easy cliches and false simplicity.
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And yet, I have been continually and consistently frustrated by the fact that the output of these institutions is almost always less than the sum of the parts - the human beings - that make them up. The policies that emerge are often daft and trite, or else cynical. Why?
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I had always chalked this up to the nature of bureaucracies. I assumed that there was something about these elephantine organizations that suppressed the wisdom and knowledge of the people they employed, transforming excellence into mediocrity.
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But the impeachment hearings suggest a different answer: the problem is the politicians.
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No matter how excellent your civil servants are, they’re not the ones making the policy decisions - and that’s as it should be. Politicians are elected and thus accountable in a way career civil servants cannot be. The professionals are aware of this, and they rightly defer.
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But the politicians - the Pompeos and the Sondlands, the Boltons and the Giulianis - have learned to abuse this deference. Their own analytical faculties are too often given over to the “big stuff” of “political errands”.
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This is not a new problem and not a peculiarly American one. The same is true throughout Europe and has been for years. No amount of ministerial excellence can overcome the fact that the minister is not interested.
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The solution is deceptively simple: publics need to hold politicians to account on foreign policy. They need to demand detail and nuance in debates, rather than stereotypes.
I’m not holding my breath.
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I’m not holding my breath.
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In the meantime, it’s useful to remember that the failures of our foreign policy have not fundamentally been failures not of analysis, but of politics, of ambition and of purpose. They are owned not by our civil servants, but by our politicians - and thus by voters.
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