Foreign Policy is what happens when you’re making other plans

In mid-December, the Bush administration announced it would offer the Obama team insights into four scenarios that might occur in the near future. Presumably, this act of transitional generosity was intended to ensure that the new national security leadership would not be caught as flat-footed as Bush and his group were by 9/11. 

Of course, getting a gift of foresight from Bush is a little bit like getting marriage counseling from Bill Clinton. You know they have some experience in the general area, but it doesn’t necessarily recommend them as an ideal guide.

The four scenarios from the Bush team dealt with a nuclear explosion in North Korea, a cyber-attack, a terrorist strike on a U.S. target overseas and continued instability in the Middle East. All of these seem worthy of some consideration and that last seems particularly apposite, although predicting instability in the Middle East is a little bit like predicting one of my teenage daughters will be sighted in a mall sometime soon. And thinking through possible disasters before they strike is a worthy exercise. In fact, most national security teams come into office insisting they will beef up the planning capacity within the National Security Council. Virtually all, however, fail to do so as they fall victim to what former national security advisor Sandy Berger often calls Washington’s habit of letting the "urgent overtake the important."

Indeed, one of the lessons of the modern American presidency is that almost all presidents are defined neither by their campaign pledges nor by those events they had planned for  Rather, presidents are typically known for their responses to the unexpected. Bush was blindsided by the attacks on September 11, 2001. Clinton came into office with Somalia on the front burner, and the psychic wounds caused by the Black Hawk Down incident there not only made taking strong action against the Rwandan genocide less likely but also colored attitudes toward the use of force throughout his presidency. Bush 41 was defined by the unanticipated collapse of the USSR as well as military interventions from Kuwait to Panama. Reagan had to grapple with the catastrophe of the Beirut Marine barracks bombing. Carter had the Iran hostage crisis. Ford had the Mayaguez. And the list goes on-Nixon and Johnson were dogged by the unexpected in Vietnam, Kennedy by Cuba and so on. In many of these cases, foreign policy choices were constrained by non-foreign policy concerns that were unexpectedly influential, such as the oil shortages in the 70s, economic downturn in the early 80s, divided government in the early 90s and the economic crisis of today.

If the gods laugh at those who make plans, they must consider the foreign policy community their equivalent of the Borscht Belt. Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the fact that Obama made his campaign on the idea of getting out of Iraq, an idea that has utterly dominated U.S. national security policy thinking for the last half a decade and which today, while still pressing, seems almost secondary compared to looming threats elsewhere. Just consider the current crises elsewhere in the Middle East and South Asia, as well as the threat of nuclear proliferation, and the inevitable transition of the current global economic catastrophe into a series of political crises around the world. The Obama positions that defined the political race seem distant, remote and almost irrelevant to the bigger issues with which President Obama will have to grapple starting on January 21.

So what I’ll do in the next posting is take a look at some of the "black swans" — the high-impact events that will come from left field while we are looking right — out there on the horizon.