Does U.S. foreign policy suffer from an ideas deficit?

Greg Djerejian at Belgravia Dispatch seems to think the answer is yes: To be sure, there is an ideas deficit right now amidst policy and academic elites. There is no Kennan-like X telegram. No Huntingtonian or Fukuyamaean take on the post 9/11 world. There is, to be sure, lots of partisan rancor and hyperbolic rhetoric ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Greg Djerejian at Belgravia Dispatch seems to think the answer is yes:

Greg Djerejian at Belgravia Dispatch seems to think the answer is yes:

To be sure, there is an ideas deficit right now amidst policy and academic elites. There is no Kennan-like X telegram. No Huntingtonian or Fukuyamaean take on the post 9/11 world. There is, to be sure, lots of partisan rancor and hyperbolic rhetoric (Kerry simply as a noxious hybrid of hyper-liberal Kennedy and feckless Clinton; Bush as militaristic cowboy rueful that he couldn’t march into Damascus and Teheran because the going in Iraq got a tad rough…) Sadly, too, many think-tanks are split along pretty rigid party lines. When is the last time someone at Heritage dared to suggest that John Kerry had a decent idea that might not imperil the Republic’s future? Or someone at Brookings talked up Bush’s (quite multilateral) handling of counter-proliferation efforts? With policymakers a tad busy; think-tanks politicized; academics squabbling over methodology and such–we do face somewhat of an ideas deficit. And we need fresh thinking desparately, don’t we? Readers are invited to suggest who might pick up the slack.

In the past three years, there have actually been a fair number of big-think books from very disparate points of view out there on grand strategy — John Mearsheimer, Michael Mandelbaum, Charles Kupchan, Fareed Zakaria, Robert Kagan, Joseph Nye, John Lewis Gaddis, countless others. My readers are invited to suggest which article/book they think most closely approximates the Kennan mantle.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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