Robert Jervis speculates about the likely foreign policy that a Democratic administration will follow if its candidate wins in November. He argues that President Donald Trump will have left a difficult legacy and his successor will have to simultaneously rebuild trust and instructions while also utilizing the leverage that Trump has generated.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Elections, Political Science, and Donald Trump
Robert Jervis reviews Robert Gates's recently published memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War. The reviewer argues that the memoir is very revealing, but inadvertently so insofar as it shows for example Gates's failure to focus on the key issues involved in the decisions to send more troops to Afghanistan and his inability to bridge the gap between the perspectives of the generals and of the White House.
If perfect policies and complete foresight are beyond us, perhaps we can at least minimize mistakes and reduce uncertainty. These are the objectives of the two books under review. Of course this is not new, and the fact—if it is a fact—that things have not gotten much better might lead us to wonder if even these somewhat-modest objectives can be reached. General Carl Von Clausewitz's comment may still apply: “We know more, but this makes us more, not less uncertain.”
Policymakers say they need and want good intelligence. They do need it, but often they do not like it, and are prone to believe that when intelligence is not out to get them, it is incompetent. Richard Nixon was only the most vocal of presidents in wondering how "those clowns out at Langley" could misunderstand so much of the world and cause his administration so much trouble. Unfortunately, not only will even the best intelligence services often be wrong, but even (or especially) when they are right, they are likely to bring disturbing news, and this incurs a cost. As Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Richard Helms said shortly after he was let go in 1973, he was “the easiest man in Washington to fire. I have no political, military or industrial base." Although DCI James Woolsey's view was colored by his bad relations with President Bill Clinton, he was not far off the mark in saying that the best job description for his position was "not to be liked."
ROBERT JERVIS examines policy and politics in the United Kingdom and the United States. He offers a review and assessment of the recently published autobiography, A Journey: My Political Life by Tony Blair and Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars.
ROBERT JERVIS analyzes what the memoirs of George Tenet and Douglas Feith tell us about themselves and about the Bush administration's war on terror and war in Iraq. He argues that as accounts of failures, they have the difficult task of defending without seeming defensive, and in the end are as important for what they reveal inadvertently as for the information they mean to convey.