Yet more evidence of the increasing irrelevance of the US State Department in the making of American foreign policy, as the modern equivalent of the Gunboat, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, or drones) become the cutting edge of of a Defense department led US diplomacy.

Strategic Planning Gap in U.S. Foreign Policy

Jordan Michael Smith | 25 May 2009
World Politics Review

It would be nice to think that, when President Barack Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, the U.S. leader had a long-term strategy for peacemaking: one that had emerged from months of careful analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by the government’s best minds.

But though that thought would be nice, it would probably be wrong. There is, in fact, very little long-term strategic planning being performed at the highest levels of U.S. foreign policymaking. The office best known for strategic thinking — the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff — has plummeted in influence and prestige since its heyday in the late 1940s. And since S/P, as it is called in Foggy Bottom, is unlikely to ever regain the stature it once had, U.S. foreign policy will probably remain free of long-term strategic planning for the foreseeable future.

S/P was once among the most influential offices in the U.S. government. It was created out of necessity at the outset of the Cold War, when Secretary of State George C. Marshall returned from a Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in Moscow in April 1947, shaken by the dire plight of Western Europe. Economic catastrophe on the old continent seemed imminent, leaving Europe vulnerable to Soviet Communism. “Europe was in a mess. Something would have to be done,” the diplomat George F. Kennan wrote in his Memoirs. That something was S/P. The day after the Moscow meeting, Marshall instructed Kennan to immediately establish an office to develop long-term foreign policy ideas.

Those first years of S/P were the Golden Age of U.S. policymaking. The Marshall Plan, the policy of “containment” to defeat the Soviet Union, the re-establishment of official relations with anti-Soviet governments in Yugoslavia and Spain: All of these policies had their genesis and/or consolidation in that first incarnation of S/P. Marshall relied heavily on Kennan, and made him the only State Department official to have free access to the Secretary’s office. The result was a great success.

Marshall and Kennan left their posts in 1949 and 1950, replaced by Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze, respectively. Together from 1950 to 1953, Acheson and Nitze planned the U.S. response to North Korea’s aggression against South Korea, designed the creation of NATO, and articulated the U.S. nuclear posture. True, Nitze militarized containment beyond what Kennan had envisioned, but overall he and Acheson formulated far-reaching strategy, and then applied it to implement policy.

But S/P subsequently lost its influence under President Dwight Eisenhower, who formulated strategy out of the White House, and the office has never been utilized properly since. The government has not forsaken the idea of strategy, of course. Planning offices have since sprung up in the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the Treasury Department and the National Intelligence Council. But as the political scientist Daniel Drezner argues in his terrific new book, “Avoiding Trivia: The Role of Strategic Planning in American Foreign Policy,” those planning units have had a more precarious existence than S/P. None of them have been as important or as effective, because the State Department has an unrivalled prestige and historical role in U.S. foreign policy-making.

Significantly, when strategic planning has been prioritized, the conduct of U.S. foreign policy has been more effective. The post-WWII administrations considered best in foreign policy — Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon and Bush I — were those with the most influential planning staffs. Most government officials are far too busy with day-to-day crises to deal with long-term problems. The result is that most foreign policy decisions are divorced from long-term strategic thinking, dominated instead by short-term considerations and crisis management.

Unfortunately, S/P is unlikely to regain its influence anytime soon. The State Department, in general, has lost influence in policymaking, outstripped by the Defense Department and the Treasury Department in resources and credibility with both Congress and the White House. Furthermore, today’s challenges no longer fit as neatly into either a “domestic” or a “foreign” box, as they did during the Cold War. Threats like terrorist attacks, natural disasters and pandemics are the responsibility of multiple departments and hence require interdepartmental planning. An office operating exclusively out of Foggy Bottom naturally has trouble meeting that challenge.

But S/P has yet to be replaced by such an interagency shop. It still exists today, and is currently led by the able Anne-Marie Slaughter, former dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. But the office she heads is not what it used to be. And that means that the world’s greatest power will be continue to suffer from a lack of coordinated, long-term strategic planning in the 21st century.

Jordan Michael Smith is press officer at the Project on National Security Reform. His views are not necessarily representative of PNSR’s.