Grass-Roots Policymaking: Say Good-Bye To the ?Wise Men?

Michael Clough

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1994

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Summary:  The "Wise Men" are gone, and with them went the old style of foreign policy. A new America - with new domestic forces - will create a new foreign policy.

Michael Clough is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and Co-chairman of the Stanley Foundation?s New American Global Dialogue.

Many pundits blame President Clinton’s inexperience or indecision for the current crisis in American foreign policy. But the roots of the dilemma lie far deeper. They run to the collapse of America’s postwar policy making system--a collapse that not even the most sage and resolute leadership or the discovery of some new strategic formula could have averted. The problem, and the answer, is that the American people are in the process of reclaiming foreign policy from the "Wise Men" who have so assiduously guarded it for the past 50 years.

Over the last half–century America has undergone a technological and demographic transformation. Increased mobility has forged new centers of culture, fashion, wealth and power. A communications revolution has rewired the nation’s nerve system with computers, faxes and fiber–optic cables. Immigration approaches levels not seen since the turn of the century, and Americans travel and live abroad in numbers scarcely imaginable years ago. Such changes integrate Americans in new ways, with each other as well as with the rest of the world. But they also diversify and divide us as they slowly erode the lingering vestiges of our Mayflower roots.

This globalization of American society has made the idea of national interest more elusive. While America’s politics has always intruded on its foreign policy, today a fresh constellation of domestic forces creates its own global policy. Making sense of American foreign policy requires a fuller understanding of the new domestic politics that now shapes America’s relations abroad. Foremost among these pressures are the regionalization of global policy making, the impact of ethnicity on American foreign policy and the rise of powerful global issue groups

THE ESTABLISHMENT DECLINES

For nearly five decades the complexion and outlook of American foreign policy makers remained constant. In the view of the small, cohesive club of academics, diplomats, financiers, lawyers and politicians that ascended to power during World War II--men such as Dean Acheson, Clark Clifford, George Kennan, John McCloy and Paul Nitze--this was as it should be. National security and the national interest, they argued, must transcend the special interests and passions of the people who make up America. They believed that domestic politics should stop at the water’s edge and that foreign policy should be guided by bipartisan consensus. This separation of policy into foreign and domestic spheres rationalized and legitimized the emergence of the close community of experts that shepherded American foreign policy throughout the Cold War years.

After 1941 the Northeast played a dominant role in shaping foreign policy. But this was not always the case. For most of our nation’s history the influence of the more industrial and Anglophile Northeast was counterbalanced by other regions. In the controversy surrounding the French revolution, for example, opposition to the antirevolutionary views of Eastern opinion leaders such as John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris came from Thomas Jefferson and the South’s other agrarian populists. Likewise, in the great debates over war and neutrality in the first half of this century, opposition ...

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