WHAT'S WRONG WITH TRANSITIONS

by Lincoln P. Bloomfiel

For nearly 200 years the American system of government, combined with abundant good fortune, adequately served U.S. foreign-policy interests. For the last two decades, however, the system has been flashing danger signals. Increasingly, present American political institutions and decision-making structures seem to entrap all administrations-whatever their virtues or flaws-in a wasteful political life cycle that frustrates even the soundest foreignpolicy objectives.

The pattern of what might be termed presidential bureaurhythms is depressingly familiar. U.S. administrations confidently sail into office on a tide of extravagant campaign promises to rectify the failures of the preceding regime. But no matter how desirable these promises, the initial momentum soon falters in the face of criticism at home and abroad, the rediscovery of useful policies of the past, and the difficulty of achieving dramatic results. In addition, Congress, frustrated by its own inability to control events, moves with indecent speed from honeymoon to divorce. The first grace year is invariably followed by 2 years of retreat. After colliding with complexity and ambiguity, presidents are often forced into about-faces by what journalist Walter Lippmann called the suction of the center. By the end of the third year modest results are often achieved and the ship of state is fixed on a more or less steady course. At that point, however, the approaching presidential election triggers a new foreign-policy debate loaded with hyperbole and distortion, effectively undoing much hard-won progress.

The policy discontinuities and inconsistencies that result have prompted any number of

LINCOLN P. BLOOMFIELD, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, served in the State Department for 11 years and the National Security Council from 1979 to 1980. The Institute for the Study of World Politics helped make possible research for this article.

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provocative suggestions for remedying the situation. Indeed, Americans have not expressed such widespread interest in constitutional changes since Reconstruction. In considering ways of restoring stability to American foreign policy, however, it is important to acknowledge the system's virtues.

Fresh leadership sometimes can break new policy ground that has resisted traditional approaches. Examples include former President Richard Nixon's diplomatic openings to China and the Soviet Union and his achievement of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) treaty; former President Jimmy Carter's human rights policy and negotiation of the Panama Canal and SALT II treaties; and President Ronald Reagan's restrictions on the flow of sensitive technology and economic credits to those who arm against the West. Sometimes, new leaders even muster the courage-at least until the next election year-to tackle such taboo subjects as the Palestinian question.

There is also a healthy purgative quality to the quadrennial campaign promises to clean up the mess in Washington, correct foreignpolicy failures, and restore the respect for America allegedly frittered away by the last president. Prophetic summonses to be born again are enduring features of the U.S. political landscape, as is the deep popular suspicion of government that Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1830s. And who would trade an immigrant nation's unquenchable optimism for the immured, conformist permanence of the Soviet elite, or Nomenklatura, or even for the expert but tired cynicism of European foreign offices? Finally, one should beware the chronic American delusion that unsuccessful policies-especially failures arising from incorrigible intellectual or moral error-can be remedied by structural reform. At the same time, in certain important respects the policy machine is seriously malfunctioning and needs fixing.

Because of pressures arising from both the American political culture and the refractory nature of the external world, presidential candidates are often driven to discredit the mainstream position to which, if elected, they

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must inevitably retreat. As a result they enter office with many unworkable foreign-policy nostrums. In turn, disillusioned voters repeatedly reach for equally unrealistic panaceas for America's world problems. The result is a growing habit of chewing up and spitting out presidents at an alarming rate, with no president having served two full terms since Dwight Eisenhower, even if the current White House occupant seems better placed than many of his recent predecessors for the re-election effort.

Moreover, although presidents usually wind up having to replace overambitious plans with more practical ideas, the learning process wastes precious time. Former secretaries of state are reportedly in agreement that their first 6 to 9 months typically constituted a "wasteland period" for foreign policy, thanks to the belief of each incoming administration that "world affairs begin anew inauguration day." One of Great Britain's ablest senior diplomats recently observed in conversation that "U.S. administrations are not fully effective in foreign affairs for 25 per cent of the time and perhaps for a good deal more,” and asked, "Is this sensible? Is it tolerable ... if America is to be the leader?"

Dramatic midcourse corrections have become a hallmark of the modern U.S. presidency. An idea of the price paid and the opportunities lost because of these policy somersaults can be gleaned from reviewing the records of recent administrations, starting with the present one.

The 180-degree Turns

Reagan entered office with an unusually pronounced pro-Israeli tilt, even by election. year standards, and with a commitment to create an anti-Soviet "strategic consensus" in the Middle East embracing Israel, Egypt, and several moderate Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan. But on a spring 1981 tour of the region, then Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Jr., was bluntly told what everyone else already knew, that the Arab states were

'Miller Center Report 4 (Fall 1983):1.

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preoccupied not with the Soviet Union but with the fast-disappearing chance to negotiate the creation of a Palestinian homeland.

In March 1984 Reagan threatened to veto any congressionally mandated move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. In 1982 Reagan sent the U.S. Marines into Lebanon as peace keepers, only to watch their mission dissolve in the country's bloody religious strife and to confess before ordering U.S. withdrawal, "I don't think we were prepared for, or believed there would be an outright civil war.”

Before his election, Reagan shared the American Right's view of Taiwan as a symbol of conservative fidelity to anticommunism and of American loyalty to its friends. Candidate Reagan even promised to re-establish official relations with Taiwan. Further preinaugural hints suggesting that Reagan would follow a two-China policy led Beijing to declare inoperative the anti-Soviet front it had nurtured during the three preceding administrations and to castigate both superpowers as equally imperialistic-hardly a plus for the administration's anti-Soviet strategy. Eventually the administration recanted, declaring that the Beijing government "is the sole legal government of China," swallowing its earlier plan to sell high-performance jet fighters to Taiwan, and striking a deal favorable to China on textile imports. The president's April 1984 trip to Beijing was the climax of a series of visits by senior administration officials that have greatly accelerated both U.S. high-technology exports to China and plans for expanded Sino-American military cooperation.2

Originally, Reagan officials disparaged the U.N. system as run by muddle-headed world order fanatics and sentimental idealists who favored socialistic giveaways to solve international economic problems. By Reagan's third year in office U.S. bankers' panic over their profligate international lending policies stimulated administration support of a modestly expanded U.S. contribution to International Monetary Fund reserves and put pressure on

Robert Manning, "China: Reagan's Chance Hit," FOREIGN POLICY 54 (Spring 1984).

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Congress for an expanded foreign economic aid program.

The 1980 Republican party platform pledged to exchange "military ... superiority over the Soviet Union" for the position of strategic inferiority to which Reagan's predecessors had allegedly brought the United States. Having condemned the SALT treaties throughout the 1970s for leaving American land-based missiles theoretically vulnerable to Moscow's heavy, increasingly accurate intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMS), Reagan filled first his campaign advisory staff and then his administration's top national security slots with leading opponents of the agreements. In its first year, the Reagan team not only condemned the SALT II treaty as "fatally flawed,” it also determinedly kept the Threshold Test Ban, Comprehensive Test Ban, and Peaceful Nuclear Explosions treaties on the shelf, even though Moscow had finally agreed to on-site inspection provisions for the last.

The outsider's glib assumption that career civil servants will be disloyal to a new administration is an unwarranted calumny based on ignorance.

But the president and his aides have, at least on the public record, retreated from most of these positions. In December 1982 Henry Rowen, then chairman of the President's National Intelligence Council, testified before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that Moscow did not enjoy strategic superiority. In 1983 the President's Commission on Nuclear Forces, informally known as the Scowcroft Commission, politely denied the idea that the capabilities of Soviet ICBMS had created a window of vulnerability for the U.S. strategic deterrent. Indeed, in 1983 and 1984 the Pentagon reported to Congress that the superpowers were roughly equal in ICBM technology. And in February 1983 Reagan conceded that while he continued to believe that the United States "had become a dubious deterrent to aggression," he did not consider

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this situation "the exclusive fault of any one [American] leader or party."

These shifting viewpoints have wrought changes in the administration's arms control proposals as well. At the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START), which replaced SALT, the president has repeatedly modified his proposals, moving steadily away from an emphasis on reducing throw-weight, to the current build-down-centered proposal, which stresses limits on warheads rather than on launchers and does not concentrate so pointedly on Moscow's chosen strategic priorities. In October 1983 the president even reportedly told a group from Congress that he approved the original START proposals without realizing how dependent the Soviet arsenal is on heavy, land-based missiles.

All recent presidencies have followed a comparable pattern. Carter initially failed to conclude the SALT agreement negotiated by two previous presidents and, like Reagan, claimed that he had a better way to reduce strategic arsenals.

The Carter administration also came into office determined to reverse what it viewed as the obsessive preoccupation with global power politics of the Nixon and Ford administrations. Carter and most of his advisers argued that a single-minded anticommunism had perversely identified the United States with noncommunist dictators who abused their citizens. Instead, Washington's favor should be contingent upon respect for human rights. The Carter team also supported expanded ties with China and the Third World, greater use of the United Nations to build world order, plus a stricter line toward South Africa's apartheid regime. Plans included negotiations for an Indian Ocean zone of peace, a cap on transfers of both conventional arms and proliferation-prone nuclear technology, and the withdrawal of 40,000 U.S. combat troops stationed in South Korea.

Violent turns of events elsewhere, however, persuaded Carter to embrace some policies he had earlier decisively rejected. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan not only finished off SALT II but also ended the already threadbare evenhanded policy toward Moscow and Bei

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jing; prompted a 3.3 per cent real increase in proposed military spending-which in fact foreshadowed the Reagan build-up-along with the development of a Rapid Deployment Force and the acquisition of basing facilities in Egypt, Kenya, Oman, and Somalia; and forced modification of both nonproliferation and human rights policies regarding Pakistan and Argentina. Further, attempts to keep Argentina from subverting the new grain embargo brought a visible shift in the human rights policy, which despite pragmatic modifications was still basically in place.

Nearly two decades earlier President John Kennedy, according to some reports, acknowledged error regarding his policies toward Vietnam, Cuba, the missile gap, civil defense, and China. His posture evolved from the ringing combativeness of his inaugural address to the sober re-evaluation of U.S.-Soviet relations he urged in a speech at American University in 1963. After a lifetime of antiSoviet rhetoric, President Richard Nixon pursued détente with the two communist giants.

Creating confusion in the Kremlinwhether by the acrobatics of Carter and Reagan or by Nixon's calculated unpredictability is not necessarily a bad idea. It could conceivably shake the Soviets loose from some rigidly fixed positions. But it is disturbing when a sympathetic foreign journal such as the Economist observes "a disconcerting pattern to recent American presidencies." Citing the twistings, turnings, and outright somersaults of U.S. policies, the editors asserted in the January 29, 1983, issue: "This pattern is troubling not just for the President and his party but for anyone with an interest in seeing the United States with an effective form of government."

The Advisory System

It would be wrong, however, to blame U.S. policy gyrations solely on the leader in the Oval Office. The intellectual demands placed on modern presidents verge on the unachievable. With the exception of studious boys like young Harry Truman, who read history while others played ball, and compulsive practitioners of continuing education like Jimmy Carter,

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modern presidents and their lieutenants by and large live on the intellectual resources they bring with them to Washington. Thus the quality of their advisers is crucial. Chief executives cannot and should not rely too heavily on expertise at the expense of durable principles and old-fashioned horse sense. But to wade skillfully through problems and processes extraordinarily different from those encountered in a state house, law office, or board room, leaders must make intelligent use of expert opinion. Regrettably, however, the advisory function is a weak point in a flawed

system.

The most disturbing aspect of recent presidents' performance in this sense has been their steadily decreasing reliance on professional bureaucracies and on the indispensable know!edge career experts can supply about history, politics, economics, culture, psychology, technology, and the track records of other players in the international game. The problem arises in part from the recent tendency of presidents to entrust crucial foreign-policy issues to their White House staffs rather than to the State Department. But even the cabinet departments with formal national security responsibilities are increasingly staffed down to the middle levels with political appointees chosen not because they are qualified but because they are owed political favors or seem ideologically compatible.

Political reformers have fought patronage since the present-day party system began taking shape in the early 19th century. In 1883 they finally pushed through Congress the Pendleton Act, the first of a series of laws to create a professional civil service. The cause of meritocracy received an additional boost after World War II with America's commitment to a permanent world role. In 1949 the Truman administration set a major precedent when it named a senior career diplomat to the subcabinet position known today as undersecretary of state for political affairs. This practice, which is intended to provide stability in a key diplomatic position, was inspired by the British system of permanent cabinet undersecretaries. Subsequent administrations tried to develop the concept of a senior executive

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service to support further professionalism. In addition, periodic legislative reform has upgraded U.S. career services to the point where today the skills and expertise found in America's foreign-policy and national security bureaucracies equal those of any other country. But the ideal so far has been difficult to realize.

Most new presidents have come into the White House harboring deep suspicions about their inherited experts precisely because the latter had dutifully served the previous administration. In the Eisenhower administration Secretary of State John Foster Dulles brought to the department a security chief who administered crude political loyalty tests that intimidated nonpartisan clerks and career officials alike. The Kennedy team in turn openly scorned Eisenhower holdovers. Nixon's longstanding antipathy toward the bureaucracy became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Carter's entourage viewed career officials with, as one member put it, “respect and suspicion," while the Reagan team scarcely conceals its contempt for anyone who makes a career of public service. According to Dean Rusk, who served for 8 years as secretary of state, new administrations are slow to "recognize what a tremendous asset they have in the abilities of this professional service."

By the 100th anniversary of the Pendleton Act, the Reagan administration was regularly putting loyalists in working-level positions once filled by career officials, including deputy assistant secretaries, deputy chiefs of mission, and even consuls general. A study in mid-1981 of approximately 150 middle-level appointments revealed that nearly 60 per cent of the officials selected had no prior service in the executive branch.' Political appointees make up 40 per cent of the ambassadors and assistant secretaries of state appointed by the Reagan administration, up from 26 per cent during the Carter administration.

A president's cabinet-level lieutenants and some of the White House apparat should of course reflect a president's particular style and

New York Times, March 20, 1983, sec. 4, p. 1.

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policy preferences. Yet while time-serving, unimaginative bureaucrats are as much a burden in Washington as they are in local government, private businesses, academe, or other walks of life, the outsider's glib assumption that career civil servants will be disloyal to a new administration is an unwarranted calumny based on ignorance.

The drawbacks of a transient and amateurfilled advisory pool have become apparent even to some of the president's senior advisers. At a June 1982 Heritage Foundation conference, in the middle of an extraordinary public indictment of "U.S. ineptitude in international relations," Reagan's chief U.N. envoy Jeane Kirkpatrick complained about "too rapid turnover," illustrated by the fact that "the two principal policymaking offices of our international organization operation are involved in musical chairs-not staying long enough to really get to know the job well." But the president himself saw nothing wrong with this situation, rhetorically asking at a May 17, 1983, news conference: "Well, isn't almost anyone that you appoint to a position in government someone that you either know or you know through someone?"

Usually, however, even the most resolute White House outsider eventually discovers the need for impartial experts who are capable both of loyalty and of making sense of Shiite Islam, teaching some crucial history about Central America or the Soviet Union, and even challenging the president's favorite policy premises. In his third year in office, for example, Reagan took a big step toward professionalizing the National Security Council (NSC) by naming Robert McFarlane, a retired Marine Corps colonel, to replace William Clark as national security adviser. Clark, a trusted aide during Reagan's gubernatorial days, readily admitted to having "no formal training in foreign policy" and told one interviewer that he had "never felt inhibited by a lack of background.... We have too many facts."4

When considering reforms in the foreignSteven R. Weisman, "The Influence of William Clark," New York Times Magazine, August 14, 1983, p. 18.

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