Who Actually Runs U.S. Foreign Policy?

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Entanglements

But right now, even President Biden’s closest colleagues concede that he’s not the man he once was. When he left the presidential race this summer, it was largely because he couldn’t convince his fellow Democrats that he was up to it cognitively. But while he’s no longer running for president, he is still the president. Meaning Biden, who failed to reassure his own party that he could run a successful political campaign, is handling America’s engagement in two wars—either of which might escalate suddenly and calamitously.

Biden’s national security team has tried to push back on such concerns. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he believes “the president of the United States is doing a very good job.” And National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said, “I am damn glad we have that guy sitting at the head of the table in the Situation Room.” But Blinken seems the public face of U.S. strategy in the Middle East; and Sullivan appears to be running major aspects of American strategy, more so than many previous National Security Advisors—not least, for America’s Ukraine operations. According to one former U.S. official, Sullivan is “the quartermaster of the war—and everything else.”

So who’s in charge of U.S. foreign policy?

Daniel Bessner is an associate professor of American foreign policy at the University of Washington and the author of Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual. By law, Bessner says, the president has near-total control over U.S. foreign policy’s vision and strategy; but in practice, that vision and strategy is shaped by the institutions charged with carrying it out—and since World War II, those institutions have been set up intentionally to insulate the American government from the American public …

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• “The U.S. Congress has very limited control over foreign policy. In America, only Congress can officially declare war; but it hasn’t done that since June 1942—against Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Essentially, the U.S. Congress has ceded its authority to the executive branch—and I don’t mean to the State Department but specifically to the White House. Congress has had a very limited ability to shape foreign policy since the Second World War. There was a brief moment in the mid-1970s, in connection to the Vietnam War, when the congressional Church Committee investigated organizations like the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency—and Congress passed the 1973 War Powers Act, requiring the president to get its consent before sending American troops into combat. But after that moment in the ‘70s, American foreign policy returned to postwar normality—that is, to the White House.”
• “Since World War II, American elites have intentionally insulated foreign policy from the American public. That’s evident in the creation of an institutional bureaucracy that includes the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and other organizations with next-to-no democratic accountability. American foreign policy hasn’t been meaningfully democratic for a very long time. More broadly, I’d say, the United States is best understood as a procedural democracy, where democracy is pretty much limited to voting. That’s not to say the U.S. isn’t a democracy; it is. It has free and fair elections, so the public can decide which elite is going to govern them. That is not true in non-democracies. But in a U.S.-style procedural democracy, the public has little control over an area of concern like foreign policy.”
• “Defense contractors shape U.S. foreign policy in a few ways. Partly that’s through lobbying. But it’s largely through social relationships. It’s by hanging out at the same bars. It’s by generals retiring to serve on the boards of weapons manufacturers, then connecting with people in government. A government official living in D.C. or Northern Virginia might have an ex-mentor who is on the board of Lockheed Martin. They might have kids at the same school or have lunch at the same restaurant. All the normal ways in which human beings wield influence. People who go into foreign policy or defense contracting, meanwhile, often start with certain common ideological presumptions about what the international role of the United States should be. In particular, they tend to believe the U.S. should remain a superpower—across essentially every region of the world.”

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Night in Tunisia

Back in 2019, Saied was elected in free and fair elections, but in 2021 he dissolved Parliament and has ruled by decree since, turning Tunisia squarely into an autocracy—using his powers to undermine the country’s institutions, replacing judges and all regional governors with people loyal to him.

Notably, Tunisia is where the anti-regime Arab Spring began in late 2010, after a fruit vendor in a small town immolated himself to protest his treatment by local officials. The revolution there ignited uprisings across the Arab world, eventually toppling dictators in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen—and sparking a civil war in Syria that continues today. Longtime tyrants later fell in Sudan and Algeria. But all these countries have variously gone back to autocratic rule. Why couldn’t democracy take root in the Arab Middle East and North Africa?

In September 2021, shortly after Saied disbanded Parliament and declared an indefinite state of emergency, Michele Dunne explored the problems Arab countries faced after their dictators fell.

For Dunne, two key factors thwarted their hopes for transitions to democracy: Regional powers like Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. quickly moved to undermine them, while the United States and other Western democracies largely stood by without giving them much help.

—Michael Bluhm

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