Sixty-Three Years, Nothing Has Changed

A look back at how US foreign policy went awry.

Exactly 63 years ago, on a summer afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Kennedy White House adviser, Arthur Schlesinger, returned to Harvard where he had, until recently, been a professor of history.

Schlesinger had come at the invitation of another Harvard professor, Dr. Henry Kissinger, who in those years directed the Harvard International Seminar, which brought together the "best and the brightest" from here and abroad to lecture, compare notes—and perhaps most importantly to Kissinger, to network.

What Schlesinger said that day is worth recalling in some detail because it bears directly on our present situation.

Schlesinger told the assembled that, “As the functions of the national government have multiplied, a bureaucracy developed dominated by vested interests of its own—vested interests in ideas, in procedures, in institutions.”

“The American government,” said Schlesinger, “has today four, not three, coordinate branches—the legislative, the judiciary, the executive and the presidency; and an active President would encounter as much resistance within the executive branch as he would from Congress or the Supreme Court. The increase in the size of the bureaucracy created a split between the “political government” and the “permanent government”; and many members of the bureaucracy exuded the feeling that Presidents come and go, but they go on forever.”

The problem of moving forward—said Schlesinger— was in great part “the problem of making the permanent government responsive to the policies of the political government.”

Schlesinger warned that the “permanent government” has within its power the “capacity to dilute, delay, obstruct, resist and sabotage presidential purposes.”

At the heart of this was a general misunderstanding: Most assumed that as the US had grown more powerful, so too did the office of the Presidency. But Schlesinger said that was not the case. In some respects, “the President today is less free to act on his own” than was “the President fifty or a hundred years ago.”

By the end of the 1960s it was becoming apparent that the President was in many respects the most-prized prisoner of the permanent government.

A government which he was elected to oversee.

In a 1971 essay titled “The National Security Managers and the National Interest,” Richard Barnet, a founder of the Institute for Policy Studies, observed that, “National Security Managers exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and by interpreting the outside world for him.”

Picking up on Barnet’s theme, the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed that, the President, who is “allegedly the most powerful man in the most powerful country, is the only person in this country whose range of choices can be predetermined.”

Indeed, by the end of 1960s it had become clear that the national security state aggregated to itself the right to oppose—and if necessary thwart through a variety of means—the foreign policy initiatives of a duly-elected President.

To Arendt, the turning point was the assassination of President Kennedy. “No matter how you explain it and no matter what you know or don’t know about it,” said Arendt, “it was quite clear that now, really for the first time in a very long time in American history, a direct crime had interfered with the political process. And this somehow changed the political process.”

In this context, another philosopher, Paul Grenier, has observed that, “Nothing provides a more vigorous basis for action and control than fear.”

This being so, every future administration has understood the unspoken prerogative of accommodating itself to the agenda of the permanent state.

By the end of the 1960s the permanent state emerged as the supreme arbiter of policy—who would dare contradict it?

After the Kennedy assassination came Vietnam; and Vietnam was predicated on certain Cold War myths, namely, the Domino Theory and the evergreen Munich Analogy. Most of the men Kennedy brought with him into high office knew the public rationale for the war were nonsense; this became clear with the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

Now let me return to Arendt. In a review of the Pentagon Papers for the New York Review of Books, she observed that “the policy of lying “ - that is lying by the government - “was hardly ever aimed at the enemy but was destined chiefly, if not exclusively, for domestic consumption, for propaganda at home, and socially for the purpose of deceiving Congress.”

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In the late 1970s, there came a further innovation courtesy of President Jimmy Carter and his national security adviser, Zbiginew Brzezinski.

During a commencement address at the University of Notre Dame in May of 1977, Carter declared that US foreign policy must be “based on fundamental values.” Prefiguring the current mania within Democratic foreign policy circles over what is said to be a division of the world between democracies and autocracies, Carter claimed that, “Because we know that democracy works, we can reject the arguments of those rulers who deny human rights to their people…we can no longer separate the traditional issues of war and peace from the new global questions of justice, equity, and human rights.”

Brzezinski sought to make this rather too broad conception of American foreign policy even more encompassing, advising Carter to see human rights as “much more than political liberty, the right to vote, and protection against arbitrary governmental action.”

No: It should encompass almost every aspect of a country’s political, economic and social life. It was the opposite of the foreign policy recommended by the diplomat-historian George F. Kennan, who had written that the “moral obligations of governments are not the same as those of the individual.” For Kennan, the “primary obligation” of government “is to the interests of the national society it represents, not to the moral impulses that society may experience.”

Kennan condemned what he saw as “the histrionics of moralism” by which he meant “the projection of attitudes, poses, and rhetoric that cause us to appear noble and altruistic in the mirror of our own vanity but lack substance when related to the realities of international life.”

What made Carter’s fusing of human rights to foreign policy so seductive was that it dovetailed nicely with the long preoccupation with the so-called “Lessons of Munich”—namely, that had Chamberlain not “appeased” Hitler in 1938 and instead fought a preemptive war right then and there, things would have turned out much differently—for Hitler and, especially, for the Jews of Europe. This had been a Democratic and Republican talking point for decades: Truman invoked its lessons in justifying Korea, as did Johnson in Vietnam—later both Bushes invoked it as justification for their respective wars in Iraq.

While it seems unlikely that it was Carter's intention to do so, a foreign policy that prioritized human rights provided future administrations with a high-minded, ready-to-hand rationale that they could dust off and use when it suited them. Human rights widened the scope for American intervention— and it drove the Munich mindset into overdrive.

A quicker study than Carter, Brzezinski seemed to grasp the implications of this line of thinking almost immediately. As the State Department historian Louise Woodroofe has noted, Brzezinski understood “that underlying forces such as grassroots movements, nationalism, technology and the role of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOS), and even climate change would continue to factor into understanding the state of the world.”

In this respect, Brzezinski’s crystal ball was better than most—in later decades the permanent state, under the guise of human rights, harnessed the power of NGOS and grassroots organizations (invariably funded by US and NATO-allied governments) to influence the political life of other nations, particularly in the post-Soviet space.

This way of approaching foreign policy resulted in our misguided, indeed - in the case of Ukraine - disastrous enthusiasm for color revolutions.

And, as we have seen, these wars by stealth, empowered certain of our agencies, while disempowering others. The agencies best able to carry operations in the name of human rights and democracy were not the traditional centers of diplomatic engagement or even those reservoirs of hard power like the Army and Navy.

No, this way of conducting foreign policy empowered the intelligence apparatus, special ops, and “soft power” agencies like USAID— as well as government-funded NGOS that could provide the president and the executive branch with plausible deniability.

What Trump plans to do to address this state of affairs remains, at best, a mystery.

James W. Carden is the editor of TRR.