US foreign policy is unintelligible because 1) it's irrational, and 2) we're using the wrong intellectual tools to understand it. Richard Hanania sets out a better framework in Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy: How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy. Here's a blog post in which he introduces the book. Here's the basic idea:
Ever since I started studying IR [international relations], I had a gnawing feeling that something about the whole enterprise was off. As I read more history, and also in other fields like economics, anthropology and psychology, I came to the conclusion that the ways in which we talk about international relations and foreign policy are simply wrong. The whole reason that IR is its own subfield in political science is because of the “unitary actor model,” or the assumption that you can talk about a nation like you talk about an individual, with motivations, goals, and strategies. No one believes this in a literal sense, but it’s considered “close enough” for the sake of trying to understand the world. And although many IR scholars do look at things like psychology and state-specific factors to explain foreign policy, they generally don’t take the critique of the unitary actor model far enough. The more I studied the specifics of American foreign policy the more it looked irrational on a system-wide level and unconnected to any reasonable goals, which further made me skeptical of the assumptions of the field.
That’s pretty abstract, so let’s make it concrete. Think about the most consequential foreign policy decision of the last half century. Why did America invade Iraq in 2003? People say things like it was for oil, or Israel, or neo-conservative ideology. Some still take the original WMDs justification seriously (here’s me arguing with Garett Jones). As I explain in the book, my theory is more like “Bush felt angry, had an instinct that expanding the war on terror was good politics, and had appointed people like Feith and Wolfowitz who already had a target in mind and told him it was going to be easy. So they just invaded and didn’t care about the consequences, because it’s not like any of them had to live in Iraq or anything. Plus they all got nice jobs afterwards anyway.” For more context, see my previous article on neo-cons as willing dupes of Ahmed Chalabi.
For both the major post-9/11 wars – Afghanistan and Iraq – it is clear from the historical record that the Bush administration had no idea what would come after regime change. The neo-con faction wanted to install Chalabi in Iraq, but Bush sort of dithered and then rejected that view, and ended up just letting State Department types get to work writing a constitution with gender quotas and building something called “civil society.” The political system selects for people who think in terms of short-term political goals, not long-term grand strategy. When the war started going badly and there weren’t even WMDs, it was too embarrassing to admit how dumb the whole thing was and the 2004 election was coming up soon so they all started talking about how American freedom depended on democratizing Muslim countries. It’s often thought that putting yourself in the shoes of others helps build empathy, but when I studied the Bush administration in particular, my experience was pretty much the opposite, and I remain taken aback by the extent to which they didn’t seem to feel any moral responsibility to think too much about the consequences of their actions, at least for anything besides electoral politics.
He summarizes the book's conclusion (in Ch. 7) this way:
In the arguments put forth in this book, dominant American ideas about foreign policy are mostly downstream of the interests of concentrated groups. Therefore, I suggest that those who want to change US behavior abroad should seek to shape the incentive structures that politicians and government officials face, rather than simply focusing on ideas.
There's more at the link.
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