The past five years have been a time of great unrest in Asia. During this tumultuous period, the American public has watched as the United States has tried to maintain its influence and promote stability in the region. But unlike 20 or 30 years ago, when the Department of State would have been tasked with solving Asia’s problems, Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush often have overlooked ambassadors and State Department officials. Instead, Washington has relied on the military as a primary tool of diplomacy.
 

Vying for position

The Pentagon has never been totally absent from foreign policy making; during the 1960s, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was as influential in determining American diplomatic policy toward Southeast Asia as he was in planning the Vietnam War. President Reagan’s secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, often fought with Secretary of State George Schultz to exert influence over the administration’s diplomatic strategy toward the Soviet Union. Under President George H.W. Bush, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney helped shape that administration’s response to the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the old Warsaw Pact.

But until the 1990s and early 2000s, the Pentagon’s policy-making role was relatively restricted. Memories of the Vietnam War, which was perceived by many Americans as a failure, led to public distrust of the military and, more generally, to a disavowal of force as a tool of policy. The Cold War, a struggle between two superpowers, was a conflict that could be managed by top diplomats and White House policy makers; because the Soviets and Americans never came to blows directly, the military’s role in the conflict necessarily remained limited.

Also, until the 1990s, the State Department, which had gained a reputation after World War II as a haven for bright young men and women, attracted the top minds in the policy world. To train these future diplomats, American universities focused on regional studies, and foreign service officers generally were considered more knowledgeable about discrete regions than military officers.

During the Clinton administration, however, all this changed. “Since the end of the Cold War, military force has become the center of [America’s] identity” and of policy making, says Andrew Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University. “On Clinton’s watch, the military slowly, without public scrutiny or debate, came to surpass its civilian leaders in resources and influence around the world,” writes Dana Priest in The Mission (W.W. Norton & Co., 2003), a study of the military’s policy-making role (reviewed in Military Officer, November 2003). Or as one U.S. diplomat told the Los Angeles Times this year, “I just wake up in the morning and tell myself, ‘There’s been a military coup,’ and then it all makes sense.”

Bacevich says early in his term Clinton developed a poor relationship with the military, partly because he had not served in Vietnam and partly because he focused on the gays-in-the-military issue. Realizing the military’s anger could hurt him politically, Bacevich says, Clinton essentially made a deal in which he wouldn’t ask the Pentagon to do anything military leaders didn’t want to do, effectively shifting power to the military leadership.

The changing nature of geopolitics also favored DoD over the State Department. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, civil wars, terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and other lower-intensity forms of conflict predominated. In this environment, the White House relied on the military more than it had during the Cold War.

Meanwhile, a series of reforms gave defense civilians and the uniformed military far greater resources than the State Department. Powerful Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) led a successful effort to slash the State Department’s budget. At the same time, military funding remained near Cold War levels, and by the early 2000s the United States spent more on its armed forces than all other industrialized nations combined. In 2001 the State Department requested a budget of $25 billion, which Congress cut to $20 billion; that year Congress gave the Pentagon nearly $311 billion, more than DoD actually had requested.

The Clinton White House also was lax in filling State Department posts. According to Andreas Oppenheimer, a syndicated reporter and Latin America expert, since spring 1998, the position of assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere has been filled by four interim officials. In addition, a series of reforms in the 1980s and 1990s siphoned off some of State’s former duties.

“The State Department over the past few decades has been seriously weakened. ... Foreign aid programs, as well as representational responsibilities, are now dispersed throughout the government,” reports the U.S. Commission on National Security, a leading nongovernmental panel. Retired Army Maj. Gen. Bill Nash, who served under Clinton, says during the 1990s, there was “a definite degradation of the reputation and capacity of the State Department.” Nash says State further hurt itself by not being unified on many issues, whereas DoD tends to present a more unified bureaucratic front. State’s influence also was weakened by the decline of regional studies programs in American universities that had served as feeder programs for the foreign service.

Taking the lead

While Defense was outstripping State’s budget, the funding and power of the military’s commanders on the ground only grew. By the late 1990s, Priest writes, the CINCs [now known as unified commanders] “were sending as many people as they could muster to foreign countries to open or cement alliances with foreign militaries and their governments. … In a decade when Congress significantly slashed money for diplomacy, the CINC’s headquarters had grown to more than twice their Cold War size.” “There aren’t regional State ambassadors like the CINCs out there on the ground with the money and resources,” agrees Marcus Corbin, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information, a think tank.

As a result, only DoD—and in particular, the CINCs—had the money and resources to transport people to foreign locales at a moment’s notice, convene large meetings with foreign dignitaries, or even develop a large-scale analysis of a particular policy. If State Department staff or ambassadors in the field wanted to fly to a meeting or transport relief supplies or other materials, they had to rely on CINC planes and logistics.

Military power in action

Examples of the Pentagon’s larger role in policy making abound. In the late 1990s, the CINCs often were chosen for top diplomatic assignments, rather than State Department officials. According to Priest, Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni, then the CINC responsible for the Middle East and Central Asia, helped negotiate the handover of terrorists from Jordan to the United States and made dozens of trips to Saudi Arabia, serving as the de facto American envoy to the kingdom.

Meanwhile, the CINC responsible for Latin America, Marine Corps Gen. Charles Wilhelm, helped plan counternarcotics policy, coordinated relief programs in Central America, and essentially single-handedly reestablished American relations with Nicaragua by offering emergency aid to Managua after a series of natural disasters. And as Priest notes, American special forces increasingly were used to cement relationships with armies in strategically vital countries like Uzbekistan, paving the way for closer U.S. ties with those nations. Foreign states that barely noticed American ambassadors welcomed these Pentagon envoys like kings: Priest writes that Zinni became so close to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah that Abdullah would hold his hand at meetings.

In the Bush administration, the military’s predominance in policy making has been even more clear. After he retired from the military, Zinni was named special envoy to Israel and the Palestinian territories, one of the highest-profile policy jobs. Rumsfeld has staked out American policy positions as often as Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell, USA-Ret., pushing Washington away from traditional Western European allies and from South Korea and traveling around the world as a de facto U.S. envoy.

And Rumsfeld and his neoconservative deputies had a major impact on the administration’s National Security Strategy, a summary of American foreign policy interests released in January 2003. Breaking from 50 years of U.S. policy, the new national security strategy authorized preemptive war fighting to stop threats such as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. After Sept. 11, the evidence became even more noticeable. The military’s budget topped $400 billion, and some members of Congress have begun debating whether to expand the size of the armed forces.

In many respects, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz became the administration’s chief policy spokespeople, constantly offering new ideas—teaming up with China to remove the leaders of North Korea, tightening sanctions on Syria—for changing American policy. Rumsfeld broached the possibility of issuing a directive to prompt American military forces abroad to launch covert operations designed to influence policy makers in foreign nations, the type of influence massaging that previously would have been handled by the State Department.

The Pentagon became closely involved with counterterrorism, formerly the province of the State Department and civilian law enforcement. Special forces were used to hunt terrorists abroad, and the Pentagon formed a new Northern Command to protect the United States, involving the military more in domestic policy making.

Then, in the run-up to the Iraq war, the Pentagon created its own parallel intelligence outfit, the Office of Special Plans (OSP), to rival the CIA and the State Department’s intelligence agency, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. OSP ultimately developed much of the information and rationale for going to war and helped ensure that DoD’s Iraqi allies, Ahmed Chalabi’s expatriate Iraqi National Congress, were at the forefront of the Iraq effort.

Indeed, says Peter Singer, a fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, without the approval of other parts of the government, the Pentagon even airlifted several hundred of Chalabi’s soldiers into Iraq during the war, giving Chalabi a leg up on potential political rivals.

At the same time, the Pentagon effectively pushed the State Department out of pre-Iraq planning, guaranteeing that the military not only would fight the war but also would be responsible for the post-war reconstruction. “[DoD] is running a foreign country. That should be stunning,” Corbin says. “While [the State Department] isn’t set up to run foreign countries ... they do have some of the economic and aid and management experience.”

For good or bad?

As DoD’s policy influence has grown dramatically, scholars have bitterly fought about whether this change is for the better. Some, like the members of the U.S. Commission on National Security, think the State Department has become so bureaucratized and atomized that it is largely unable to generate new ideas and respond quickly to crises.

Others, such as powerful former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who has attacked the State Department in a series of speeches and articles, charge the department has come to focus so much on conveying foreign countries’ policies to the White House that it effectively has started favoring those nations’ interests, undermining American foreign policy.

For example, critics of the State Department’s Middle East policy say the department has been too willing to accept Syrian excuses for Damascus’ behavior, which reportedly includes allowing Syrians to enter Iraq to fight American forces during the war, and that the department has been too willing to accept the bizarre and often dangerous behavior of Pyongyang’s regime in North Korea.

Given the State Department’s failings, these scholars argue, the more unified, hawkish DoD, which less often confuses foreign nations’ needs with American interests, is better positioned to serve the White House abroad and to think outside of the box. “[DoD’s] flexibility, its resources, and its ability to focus effort regionally ... allow for a very powerful policy capability that often outdistances the State Department,” argues Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution.

But some officials and scholars outside the government worry that DoD’s usurpation of the State Department’s traditional role is leading to more squabbling within the U.S. government, making it harder to produce coherent policy. During the past two years, mid-level State Department and DoD officials have used leaks to the press to scuttle the other department’s plans. As Steven Weisman noted in The New York Times, “the chasm between [Rumsfeld and Powell] is often so wide that to outsiders it can appear they are conducting two entirely different foreign policies.”

This bifurcation can confuse other countries. Germany might be confused by the mixed statements it receives from Washington—while Rumsfeld talks about moving U.S. troops from Germany to Eastern Europe, Powell and other State Department officials reassure the Germans and deny reports that the American forces will be moving.

And some Pentagon critics argue that, while the State Department might be too kind to foreign nations, the Pentagon unnecessarily angers key allies while coddling brutal foreign militaries: The aggressive, proactive Rumsfeld has insulted not only France and Germany, who broke with Washington over the war in Iraq, but also stauncher friends such as Britain. “We’re digging ourselves in such a hole by angering friend after friend,” warns Nash. Meanwhile, Priest argues, after building close relationships with the Pakistani military, the unified commanders have been unwilling to censure Pakistani president Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s dictatorial tactics.

Some policy experts think the Pentagon cannot manage long-term nonmilitary programs like the reconstruction of Iraq. “The thought that you could do post-war Iraq with only a skeleton of a civilian infrastructure based in the Pentagon—it’s a failing plan,” says Singer, who suggests that because the Pentagon has handled Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States does not have enough people on the ground trained in the types of nonmilitary jobs—building infrastructure, governance, et al—needed for reconstruction. And, says Corbin, though its power has been diminished, the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other civilian agencies have more of these experts than DoD. “The mindset, decision making, and training of infantry soldiers rarely mixes well with the disorder inherent in civil society,” Priest argues.

Some policy analysts have suggested ways to rebalance policy making. Singer recommends the United States restrengthen the State Department by spending more money on the public affairs component of American embassies abroad, making longer-term investments in diplomacy, and boosting funding for USAID. For its part, the U.S. Commission on National Security advocates reorganizing the State Department around five undersecretaries who each would be assigned a region of the world, similar to the unified commanders.

Still, in the long run DoD’s influence over policy making shows no sign of diminishing. “Barring an administration coming into power and having one of its priorities the reform and revitalization of the State Department, to reestablish its primacy,” the Pentagon will remain in charge, Bacevich says. And, he says, given that the public mood backs the Pentagon, it is unlikely any administration in the near future would attempt such reform. Only a catastrophe that shows the Pentagon’s weaknesses in policy making might cause such as change, Singer says. Then again, if it continues to stumble, the post-war reconstruction of Iraq could be that catastrophe.