policy planning

[I]s the sacrifice of 58,000 Americans worth a bad Yankee team?

The answer is obviously yes.

This is a question that could tear apart the nation... Red Sox Nation, that is. 

More here.  I really don't think this is anything more than a coincidence, and I certainly don't agree with the blogger's estimation of Lyndon Johnson. 

Still, if one wanted to develop a completely unsubstantiated hypothesis, however, one could posit that the explanation for this correlation is that under a GOP president, the mercurial owner of the Yankees faced fewer contraints to royally f**k up interfere in the management of the team, resulting in some spectacular flame-outs on the diamond. 

It's not true, of course, but it's a more entertaining urban myth than Obama's citizenship status or Bush's role in the 9/11 attacks. 

 

 

Matt Yglesias linked to this months-old Emily Stokes profile of Rory Stewart in the Financial Times.  Yglesias highlights one of the funnier metaphors I've seen about the trouble with advising policymakers:   

“It’s like they’re coming in and saying to you, ‘I’m going to drive my car off a cliff. Should I or should I not wear a seatbelt?’ And you say, ‘I don’t think you should drive your car off the cliff.’ And they say, ‘No, no, that bit’s already been decided – the question is whether to wear a seatbelt.’ And you say, ‘Well, you might as well wear a seatbelt.’ And then they say, ‘We’ve consulted with policy expert Rory Stewart and he says ...’"

OK, that's really funny, and I think it's true a fair amount of the time. 

On the other hand, I'm not sure that metaphor holds up all of the time.  Consider another possibility.  From the policymaker's perspective, getting outside advice is like trying to figure out which railroad track to take if you're driving a train.  There are three options ahead, and for myriad reasons each of the possibilities carries some risk.  So you go place an emergency phone call to the head of Harvard's Department of Railroad Studies to get a recommendation.  His advice?  "Why don't you go off-track?"  

To revisit a recurring theme on this blog, sometimes the outside advisor is right to make policymakers question core assumptions.  At the same time, however, sometimes a policymaker has neither the time nor the political capital to go back to first principles.  Sometimes they just need to know what is the least bad policy option.  And I guarantee you that having an academic tell them, "they're all bad policy options" is of no use whatsoever in that moment.   

I suspect that knowing which metaphor applies is more art than science, but I'm curious to hear from commenters on both sides of the policymaking divide. 

Just as TNR's precise transcription of Denis McDonough's talking points long disquisition about the Obama administration's policy planning process comes out, Roger Cohen unfurls his long-form essay in the New York Times Magazine about the administration's thinking on Iran, the Middle East, and U.S. foreign policy.

Here's the bigthink of Cohen's essay: 

Just how far Obama is ready to go in engagement’s name has become clearer in Iran. At the time of that Thursday demonstration, almost a week after the election, the toughest thing he had found to say about the turmoil was that the suppression of peaceful dissent “is of concern to me and it’s of concern to the American people.” He had also equated Ahmadinejad with Moussavi, from the U.S. national-security standpoint, because both support the nuclear program, even as people died for the greater openness that Moussavi espoused.

A sobered America is back in the realpolitik game. A favored phrase in the Iran team goes, “It is what it is.” Now the question is whether such an approach can yield results. Can Ross honor his own precept to match objectives with “available means”? To the nuclear clock has been added a democracy clock, complicating every diplomatic equation. An Iran of mullahs and nukes has morphed, for many Americans, into the Iran of beautiful, young Neda Agha-Soltan, cut down with a single shot while leaving a June 20 demonstration, a murder caught on video that went viral. Whatever Obama’s realism — and it’s as potent as his instinct for the middle ground — a president on whom so much youthful idealism has been projected can scarcely ignore the Neda effect.

All well and good, but there's a nugget buried in Cohen's tale that wories me juuust a bit.  As fans of Laura Rozen are aware (and if you're not a fan, you should be), Barack Obama had a disappointing meeting with Saudi King Abdullah last month: 

[T]wo sources, one a former U.S. official who recently traveled there and one a current official speaking anonymously, say the meeting did not go well from Obama's perspective. What's more, the former official says that Dennis Ross has told associates that part of what prompted Obama to bring him on as his special assistant and NSC senior director for the "Central Region" last month was the president's feeling that the preparation for the trip was insufficient.

Ok, except that after reading Cohen's story, I can't help but wonder whether Ross was part of the problem rather than part of the solution.  Here is Cohen's description of Ross' meetng with the Saudi King -- which occured six weeks before Obama's: 

On April 29, in Dammam, in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, Ross sat down with King Abdullah. He talked to a skeptical monarch about the Obama administration’s engagement policy with Iran — and talked and talked and talked. When the king finally got to speak, according to one U.S. official fully briefed on the exchange, he began by telling Ross: “I am a man of action. Unlike you, I prefer not to talk a lot.” Then he posed several pointed questions about U.S. policy toward Iran: What is your goal? What will you do if this does not work? What will you do if the Chinese and the Russians are not with you? How will you deal with Iran's nuclear program if there is not a united response? Ross, a little flustered, tried to explain that policy was still being fleshed out.

When the Saudis are accusing you of being all hat and no cattle, you know you have a problem.

Seriously, let's think about this from Abdullah's perspective for a second.  A new envoy comes to chat filled with new plans and ideas on Iran.  Except it turns out that these new plans and ideas haven't been filled out exactly -- key contingecies haven't been thought through, etc.  For a leader who had to deal with eight years of George W. Bush, this had to sound a lot like U.S. foreign policy déjà vu.  Why should he have been more forthcoming with Obama. 

So, just to be clear, Obama found that meeting unsatisfactory -- and as a result he brings in the guy who might have laid the groundwork for the unproductive meeting? 

Look, Ross is a smart guy, and he might have ust had a bad day when he met with Abdullah.  But there are times when the Obama administration, for all the talk about embtracing realpolitik,* doesn't sound terribly realist at all. 

*Granted, there are other points in the essay where the administration sounds positively Waltzian. 

Denis McDonough is the director of strategic communications for the National Security Council.  I mention this because whatever McDonough has done in the first six months at the NSC, getting Michael Crowley to write this glowing essay about Obama and the NSC in The New Republic was the cherry on top. 

Here are the key paragraphs: 

Whether he is shaping the White House's message on Iran, or personally cajoling Asian leaders to crack down on North Korea, or brokering power deals among NATO allies, Obama has, in effect, been his own national security advisor and secretary of state. Unlike Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, who had world events thrust upon them, Obama seems to be more in the mold of Richard Nixon or George H.W. Bush--a president involved in foreign policy because of, not in spite of, his priorities and personal interest. "He's very engaged, very hands-on," says his longtime foreign policy adviser, Mark Lippert, now chief of staff at the National Security Council (NSC)....

To this administration, process is not simply the poor cousin of strategy. Process is what allows harmony and progress amid multiple challenges and viewpoints. Senior Obama aides call it "regular order"--a system that gives the president a diversity of views with minimal infighting and back-channel maneuvering, little leaking to the press, and no public airing of dirty laundry. "Regular order is your friend," says Denis McDonough, director of strategic communications for the NSC. "The system only works if you have adult behavior."

Thus far, the system has confounded skeptics who predicted melees among big-name advisers and conservatives who warned that Obama lacked the experience to govern in such dangerous times. "The level of harmony is just striking," says James Goldgeier, a national security aide in the Clinton White House and a political scientist at George Washington University. There are signs, however, that the administration's approach to foreign policy, however well-intentioned and well-executed, is vulnerable to unexpected challenges--the very kind that are likely to multiply the longer the president is in office.

Read the whole thing. My take is that, while based in reality, Crowley's essay has the whiff of someone who talked to a lot of White House officials (including the NSC staff) but not a lot of other foreign policy figures. Goldgeier's quote is the only outside evaluation.* No one outside the White House is quoted by name. The evidence for foreign policy harmony and NSC control over the policy process comes from... NSC officials. 

Just to be clear, I don't think Crowley is telling tall tales.  The occasional gaffe aside, Obama's first six months on the foreign policy job have been pretty decent --- especially compared to the first six months of George W. Bush or Bill Clinton.  But it is odd that in an essay on Obama's foreign policy process, there's very little about Hillary Clinton, Bob Gates, or Timothy Geithner in this essay. There's no discussion of reports about Clinton chafing -- and trust me, there are reports about this stuff. There's very little about their reaction to Obama's decision-making process.

On the whole, I hope that Crowley is correct. The best way to ensure a high quality of American foreign policy is to have a president actively engaged in the process, and this piece suggests that to be the case. Still, the only thing I was sure about after reading this essay is that Denis McDonough is very, very, very good at his job.

Well, there's one other thing I'm sure about -- I would have loved to have listened in on this phone conversation: 

[I]n at least one instance earlier this year, Holbrooke received an angry phone call from White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel after the diplomat was perceived to have stepped on Obama's public message about the war effort.  

Sounds like a job for the Undersecretary of Go F**K Yourself.

*Oh, and given that Goldgeier was a foreign policy advisor to Obama during the 2008 campaign, I'm not sure I'd call him impartial, either. 

The implicit message in Steve Walt's ten commandments for foreign policy wonks is that if you dare to violate any of these commandments, the Council on Foreign Relations Henry Kissinger God will strike you down with a mark and brand you for life as unworthy of wonkdom. 

Some of Walt's commandments hold, and some of them don't (who's getting pilloried on Cuba nowadays?), but there's an important corollary to these commandments that needs to be highlighted: 

If thou hast deviated from the consensus of the foreign policy community, thou shalt go to the tallest mountain, and rend one's clothing, and scream from the top of thine lungs like Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes/Soylent Green, and declare that the mark of transgression itself is proof that thou must be right. 

 

Henry Kissinger, "Team of Heavyweights," Washington Post, December 5, 2008: 

The maxim that the national security adviser should act as a traffic cop, not a participant in the policy process, is more theoretical than practical.

Really, Henry?  Whatever do you base this on?  In all fairness, it's not a bad op-ed, and includes this insightful point:  "Geopolitical and strategic considerations have no organic constituency. Though a Policy Planning Council exists, its activities are often shunted off into non-operational, semi-academic sideshows or, most frequently, into speechwriting."  I'll have more to say about that in the coming year.  UPDATE:  Swampland's Karen Tumulty offers some further context with regard to Kissinger and Obama.