At The National Interest I believe that Ted Galen Carpenter correctly identifies three of the basic problems with U. S. foreign policy:
- Threats are exaggerated
- We can’t establish priorities
- Our ability to do cost-benefit or risk-reward analysis is out of whack
The first of those should come as no surprise. I believe it’s a result of the nature of our political system. The penalty for understating a threat is higher than for overstating it so our politicians are predisposed to overstating threats. That’s what caused us to make so many wrong decisions with respect to the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Abetted by bad information from the Central Intelligence Agency, the actual threat posed by the Soviet Union was systematically overstated until by the end of the 1950s, it actually was a threat.
I’m glad to see that he mentioned the last of those. One of the things I noticed and pointed out during the George W. Bush administration was that I couldn’t relate at all to GWB’s notions of risk and reward. He failed to notice risks that I thought were obvious and saw rewards that I thought were illusory.
Where I think that Mr. Carpenter is wrong is that I don’t believe that Donald Trump can do anything about them for two reasons. First, they are clearly products of our political system and, second, Donald Trump’s highly transactional and impulsive approach leaves no room for the sort of dispassionate analysis that would lead to ordering priorities appropriately or doing a solid analysis of cost-benefit.
Not directly related to foreign policy specifically, but there is the human tendency to place much more importance on expected risk rather than potential risk. The result is the we will often take very risky actions to avoid something that is not nearly as serious a concern. This dynamic plays out in foreign policy quite often.
In the late 1940’s we were the risk. It seems Mr. Truman had rather a habit of threatening Stalin with nuclear devastation during the time when the USSR lacked nukes. There was very serious pressure to launch an obliterating nuclear first strike before the Soviets could go nuclear. Then the Soviets got the bomb and things rapidly advanced to hair-trigger status.
Global thermonuclear war is a 10 on a 10 point OMFG scale. I don’t know of a way to quantify it, but our 911 panic seems a wee bit disproportional. 911 was justifiably disturbing, and I supported and still do Mr. Bush’s attack on Afghanistan. (The rest of the bungling not so much.) But if global thermonuclear war is a ten, 911 was maybe a 3 or 4.
Per @Andy’s remark, climate change may be the potential 8 or 9 we are ignoring, indeed, denying.
Has the north pole melted yet? Only about a week left on that prediction. I’m pretty close to the beach these days. No apparent need for stilts yet.
Fingers crossed.