Effects of foreign policy infighting in the U.S.

Morton Abramowitz, Former Assistant Secretary of State in Reagan administration, The Washington Post

Three features pervade the making of foreign policy in Washington today: Massive overload, internal warfare and the short term driving out the long term. These problems exist in every administration. They are worse in this one, which is facing some crucial decisions.

The U.S. foreign policy apparatus always has too much on its agenda, because American interests and influence are everywhere.

But the load has grown exponentially. The war against terrorism is all-consuming and involves our operating in areas that are certainly not our strong suit and managing a variety of difficult alliances. Our forces are fighting in one difficult place -- Afghanistan -- and American control of that country is unraveling.

Most important, a bigger war is on the agenda: The administration is preparing plans, seeking allies and beginning the effort to convince the American public and the world of the need to destroy the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.

We are helping contain continuing violence in numerous countries from Colombia to the Philippines. And in the Mideast and South Asia, we are engaged in urgent and difficult diplomatic efforts to prevent nations and friends from slaughtering one another.

All this entails determining how to spend huge and seemingly endless amounts of money for, among others, direct military requirements, homeland defense, keeping weak states afloat and restoring failed states. It also requires much time from senior officials and lots of brains -- not always abundant commodities in the best of circumstances.

The chief coordinator not only of foreign policy -- the president -- is also knee-deep in major economic problems, both foreign and domestic. He faces dangers of international financial contagion and, in the U.S., stagnation and renewed recession and of course major business scandal and plummeting stock markets.

He needs to confront all this with an economic and financial team that, rightly or wrongly, has little domestic and international respect. And in the war on terrorism, he has embarked on a huge overhaul of the government and bureaucracy promising uncertain benefits, while demanding significant attention to detail and turf battles, as well as continuing, consuming congressional consultations.

Running U.S. foreign policy is a challenge in any era. Running it with the additional problems generated by Sept. 11 is a feat. Running it while you are having serious internal as well as external wars raises the problem to major proportions.

And while the clash of views is healthy and often produces better policy, this foreign policy team is beset by internal wars. That is the way even insiders perceive it.

The fighting rivals that of the Reagan years and the incessant conflicts between George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger and William Casey. Casey, for example, even persisted in trying to get Shultz fired. As far as one can tell, this administration's foreign policy wars are more over ideology -- the way the world works, how to confront it and what specifically needs to be done -- than personality.

And the differences between the top team seem to stretch over major issues -- from Iraq to Afghanistan to China, from the Arab- Israeli issue to North Korea, from alliance management to public diplomacy. Our Middle East policy appears to be one recent notable casualty of internal warfare

But there is a worse aspect in today's wars. In the Reagan years, the animosities and the battles mostly stayed at the top. The lower high-level officials (with a few exceptions) including top bureaucrats did not want to carry on the wars.

They frequently tried to prevent the worst excesses of their bosses' tribulations and to keep the government moving, to make sure at least that many of the less-cosmic problems were dealt with. Now, the war is fought daily in the high-level bureaucratic trenches; ideology is very much in play. And that infighting has accentuated stasis or inconsistencies in both policies and rhetoric.

Finally, the long-term public interest. Any administration has to balance competing priorities, including the frequent conflicts between short- and long-term goals. That is difficult in any democratic government. Few politicians are willing to suffer short-term political costs for uncertain long-term benefits.

The war on terrorism has made the long-term goal much harder. The terrorist threat is here and now, and the abiding fear is its marriage to weapons of mass destruction.

Thus the priorities of democracy promotion, human rights, economic development and nation-building, has diminished. Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan and Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan are beneficiaries of this difficult dichotomy of time frames. So is Vladimir Putin in Chechnya.

Before Sept. 11 George W. Bush's foreign policy management would not have gotten a high grade. He significantly improved his standing with his clear and determined position in the war on terrorism and by eliminating the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. A year later he faces a much more complicated international situation.

He is not and does not aspire to be a conceptualist. But the problems are coming at him fast and furious, much is going unattended and his team is not in great shape. I hope he will return from his vacation determined to arrest drift and knock a few heads, high up or a little lower down.