Trump's Foreign-Policy 'Adhocracy'
Richard
Haass, one of the few foreign-policy experts the president says he
respects, had some harsh words for the administration's early stumbles.
The
Trump administration’s lack of structure or experience is hobbling its
ability to conduct an effective foreign policy, argues Richard Haass,
president of the Council of Foreign Relations. “I think it is a recipe
for disaster to have multiple centers of authority, to have informal
lines of authority,” he said. “I think this administration is doing
itself a disservice.
“It’s a decentralized, improvisational administration,” Haass said; he dubbed it an “adhocracy.”
Haass,
who served as a high-ranking State Department official in the
administration of President George W. Bush, was sharply critical of the
results of that organizational incoherence. “It’s very hard for the
administration to have a single doctrine or policy,” he said, citing
rival factions within the administration and widespread vacancies in its
senior ranks.
Haass was speaking Monday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. His remarks amounted to a striking rebuke from a leading foreign-policy analyst, who was reportedlyconsidered
for the job of deputy secretary of state by the Trump transition team.
“I respect Richard Haass, who’s on your show a lot,” Trump said on Morning Joe last year. “And I like him a lot. I have a few people that I really like and respect.”
Haass
noted that the Trump administration could have built a disciplined
process to compensate for its relative lack of experience. Trump instead
modeled his administration on his decades of success in business, where
he relied on a similarly improvisational style, Haass said. The result
has been adhocracy.
“Virtually
no one in the administration has any interagency experience,” he
pointed out. “Some of them have never been in government before,
including the president and the secretary of state. … If you know that
going in, this ought to be the most tightly structured administration in
history to compensate for it. Instead, it’s the most loosely structured
I’ve seen.” He added that, to judge by its moves, the administration
has not yet acknowledged the problems it faces. Indeed, hours after
Haass spoke, the White House released a terse statement alleging Syrian
preparations for another chemical-weapons attack. The New York Times reported that “several military officials were caught off guard” by the late-night announcement, though the White House said Tuesday morning it had coordinated with the relevant agencies.
That’s
left America’s allies, as well as its rivals, unsettled. “It’s the
number one, two, and three question I get around the world,” said Haass.
World leaders, he said, are trying to figure out whether Trump
represents a permanent shift in American policy, or a temporary
aberration. “They are trying to get a fix on us.” The combination of
inexperienced personnel and an incoherent structure makes that
difficult.
And
don’t look to well-established bureaucracies to compensate. For all the
talk about an international community, domestic institutions, and
established norms, Haass argued, the reality is that individual
presidents still exercise tremendous discretion. That means that what
Trump decides to do—or declines to pursue—remains enormously
consequential. “There’s almost nothing that’s inevitable,” he said,
citing the first President Bush’s resolute response to Iraq’s invasion
of Kuwait.
“A
couple of days before at the Cabinet meeting, that wasn’t obvious that
that was going to be the outcome,” he recalled. He pointed to the
magnitude of the military effort involved, and the widespread press
predictions of thousands of American casualties. “If someone else had
been president, it’s not axiomatic … that we were going to do what we
did.”
And
Trump’s decisions are having a similar impact today. In its early
months, the Trump administration has been aggressive in remaking its
foreign policy around interests, and not principles, reversing decades
of U.S. positions in multiple realms.
“I’m a card-carrying realist,” Haass said, “but I think we’ve taken that way too far. We ought to stand up for things we believe.”