Without foreign policy intellectuals, Donald Trump is flying blind
(Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)
The death aged 95 of Brent Scowcroft (above, second from left), National Security Adviser to Presidents Gerald Ford and George Bush Snr., leaves Henry Kissinger, now 97, as the last surviving member of a group of foreign policy intellectuals who dominated the second half of the last century. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that these shadowy eminences grises created the world in which we now live, for better or worse. They guided successive American presidents through the Cold War and beyond, creating the political and diplomatic architecture that has so far withstood innumerable shocks.
The guiding principle of most practitioners of the art of diplomacy has always been what Bismarck called Realpolitik, giving priority to the calculus of power regardless of moral considerations. Yet the United States has always been a partial exception to the rule, a “shining city on a hill”, as both John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, citing the Sermon on the Mount, referred to it. America is the “last best hope of earth”, in Lincoln’s words. The guardians of the Republic cannot be seen, at home or abroad, to be motivated purely by considerations of national, let alone personal, self-interest. Hence their advisers have a difficult, perhaps impossible, task: to preserve a balance between means, moral or amoral, and ends, noble or ignoble. Such an equilibrium is fragile even in peace and barely discernible in the fog of war. But America has always been judged by others, and has judged itself, by higher standards than other nations. That is the “manifest destiny” from which no president — including the present one — dare resile.
Hence the peculiarities of the US foreign policy establishment are less eccentric than would they might seem elsewhere. No other country’s elite has held the very existence of humanity in its hands for so long as to become a way of life. George Kennan, the postwar thinker who articulated the concept of “containment”, posed the problem with characteristic elegance: “A political society does not live to conduct foreign policy; it would be more correct to say that it conducts foreign policy in order to live.”
The intellectuals who conduct foreign policy on behalf of the non-intellectuals who typically occupy the White House naturally seek to adapt the principles of policy to the pragmatism of politics. Henry Kissinger adapted Bismarck’s adage “Politics is the art of the possible” to read: “Policy is the art of the possible, the science of the relative.” Brent Scowcroft, who emerged under Nixon as Kissinger’s deputy, would have concurred. That was why he supported the first Iraq war but opposed the second.
Scowcroft was neither hawk nor a dove, but a ruthless marksman who would shoot both kinds of birds as necessary. He had been invalided out of the US Air Force after breaking his back in a flying accident. His academic and administrative achievements were always a substitute for the battle honours denied him. But he adapted to the demoralising impact of the Vietnam War, which meant that intervention abroad was for many years no longer an option. He became a leading foreign policy “realist”, who no longer saw the Cold War as a moral crusade but as a Machiavellian power game.
Though a Republican, Scowcroft had more in common with Zbigniew Bzrezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, than with the neoconservatives who came to prominence under Reagan and then resurfaced under George W. Bush. Indeed, he was glad to serve as an arms control expert under Carter and provided much of the “loyal opposition” among Republicans to the foreign policy of the younger Bush. For this he was unbraided by the latter’s National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who had once been his protégée. Yet he was enough of a realist to criticise Obama for precipitately withdrawing from Iraq. With US prestige at stake, Scowcroft knew that to scuttle would damage the national interest and embolden enemies.
George H.W. Bush, his favourite boss, called Scowcroft an “honest broker”. The role of the foreign policy intellectuals was always to set aside partisan considerations and tell the President the unvarnished truth. Donald Trump has never tolerated such honest brokers for long enough to learn from them. John Bolton, the outstanding foreign policy intellectual of the Trump Administration, was ignored, sidelined and treated so badly that he walked out. He wrote a memoir, The Room Where It Happened, which cruelly exposes not merely the limitations of President Trump, but the decline in the calibre of expertise in his entourage.
The tradition of foreign policy intellectuals seems to have come to an abrupt end. There are, it would appear, no Kissingers, no Scowcrofts, no Bzrezinskis, no Kirkpatricks, no Rumsfelds, no Rices, no Cheneys, no Boltons left. The White House seems bereft of the sage advice that kept US foreign policy on an even keel throughout the 75 years since VJ Day, which we will mark next week. Having dropped his pilot, the President is sailing through uncharted waters. Or, to adapt a metaphor that an airman such as Brent Scowcroft might have preferred, Donald Trump is flying blind.
