https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/democracy-and-foreign-policy-bruce-thornton/
On Tuesday August 30, the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan on the last plane, a few days after the terrorist murder of nearly two hundred people, including 13 U.S. military personnel. The fate of untold numbers of Americans who have been left behind remains uncertain. This bloody and shameful ending of 20 years of U.S. engagement in that country has confirmed the feckless incompetence and rookie mistakes of the Biden foreign policy team. Biden and his advisors both civilian and military should be held accountable for this disaster, the consequence of partisan politics, careerist mediocrity, and stale foreign policy paradigms.
Yet we also need to acknowledge the responsibility that we the voting people have in shaping foreign policy decisions, a role sanctioned by our rights to deliberate on policy, choose our leaders, and hold them accountable. In other words, the very institutions and rights that create political freedom paradoxically can also endanger that freedom by compromising our national security.
From Thucydides to Winston Churchill, this weakness of democracies in conducting foreign policy has been a constant theme in the history of war. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville had observed about foreign affairs, “A democracy can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy or await their consequences with patience.” Similarly, in his 1946 The Gathering Storm, Churchill highlighted “the structure and habits of democratic states,” which “lack those elements of persistence and conviction” necessary for national security, and in which “even in matters of self-preservation, no policy is pursued for even ten or fifteen years.”
“Structures” like regularly scheduled elections, for example––which voters can use to punish leaders for unpopular policies, and reward those who promise to gratify the voters’ preference for “butter” over “guns”–– ensure that every two years any policy is hostage to the self-interested or sometimes irrational vox populi. In matters of foreign policy, civilian control of the military through a president, who is also commander-in-chief, creates accountability that often for elected policy-makers an exorbitant political risk that can inhibit necessary policies out of fear of electoral retribution.
Equally important, the President and Congress can propose policies that also carry risks that aren’t always made apparent, or aren’t adequately explained to the voters, many of whom pay no attention to foreign affairs anyway. Dubious ideals and assumptions about what complexly diverse foreign cultures believe or value can lead to policies and aims doomed to fail.
