- Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan
Derek Leebaert’s study resembles the picture he presents of U.S. foreign policy since World War II: exuberant, overconfident, often superficial, falling into traps, but getting some things right.
The title, at first puzzling, accurately describes the book’s thesis. U.S. foreign policy is characterized by delusions and magical thinking, and this recurrent pattern has led the country to seek impossibly grandiose goals and to fight unnecessary wars. All problems have their solutions, and the United States can find and implement them, Americans believe. Although this can-do spirit has led to amazing achievements at home and some successes abroad, more often it has produced mayhem as the United States has overreached from Korea to Afghanistan. In the former case, the refusal to be content with repelling the North Korean invasion and instead striking north toward the Yalu led to disaster; in the latter, as in many other cases, the belief that the United States could modernize, democratize, and transform other societies has brought endless pain to all concerned.
All too often, Americans indulge in “magical thinking” rather than carefully weighing means and ends. Although other countries sometimes fall into this trap, the United States is particularly prone to do so because its history and political culture encourage blind faith in management and shallow understanding of history, ills that are compounded by a form of government that places less power in the hands of permanent civil servants and more into those of political appointees. As many other commentators have noted, this makes the U.S. system particularly permeable to outside ideas and perhaps to fads. What Leebaert stresses is that this also leads to a large role for what he calls “emergency men.” Because they serve only a few years, political appointees are in a great hurry to make their mark, and to get appointed in the first place they have to call attention to themselves by their sweeping ideas. The result is that the U.S. government is populated by people who are full of plans and energy. They are prone to see situations as emergencies and quick to reach for dramatic instruments where restraint and patience would serve the country and the world better.
This diagnosis is non-ideological. Although much of what Leebaert says resonates with the left, the scorn he heaps on the American faith in transforming societies fits with traditional conservatism. He also argues that liberals underestimated Soviet strength and hostility, and he includes détente in his list of illusions. He also sees Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan as unusual for their ability to resist the fears and projects being peddled by emergency men.
This argument has quite a bit of appeal, especially in light of the apparent failures of the Bush and Obama administrations. The U.S. foreign policy establishment has produced and promoted a fair number of zealots, U.S. political culture is saturated [End Page 222] with optimism and the belief that renewal and transformation are possible, and the political system is ill-designed for patience and long-run endeavors. But Leebaert’s position is not developed as well as it might be, and the evidence is thin. He alludes to why the problems are greater with foreign than domestic policy and are more pronounced in the United States than in other countries, but does not probe these questions as deeply as would be needed to make his claims more convincing. Similarly, he too casually puts aside foreign policy successes. By starting his chronology with the Korean War, he can skip the transformation of German and Japanese societies, policies whose success was by no means guaranteed. His coverage of relevant Cold War history is skimpy and one-sided. Readers may agree with his judgment if they are so inclined, but they are unlikely to be persuaded if they started the book with different views. He also never clearly explains why the emergency men who arrive at a particular...