Resisting America's Unstoppable Urge to 'Do Something'

Aaron David Miller, Richard Sokolsky

Politics, Americas

Can the next secretary of state resist the urge?

Congratulations, Rex Tillerson, on your nomination as secretary of state.

Condolences may also be in order. You will have your hands full explaining President Trump’s tweets to the rest of the world, putting our fires, managing relations with allies, friends and frenemies, and implementing the president’s foreign-policy agenda in an increasingly complex and dangerous world.

But your biggest challenge may not be abroad but much closer to home. The foreign-policy bureaucracy over which you will preside—and the Washington elites of liberal interventionists and neoconservatives—cling tenaciously to an interventionist philosophy which appears to be out of step with your boss’s predilections for a less active U.S. role abroad.

Will you become the master or captive of this bureaucracy and the foreign-policy establishment?

For all his rhetoric and bravado, the president-elect has urged the United States to adopt a less activist posture abroad, especially in the Middle East. These instincts, which according to numerous polls are very much in tune with the sentiments of most Americans, are reflected in his stated opposition to America’s role as the world’s policeman, nation building abroad, interference in the internal affairs of other countries, the promotion of democracy and human rights, and fighting costly wars in the Middle East when American vital interests are not at stake. He has also urged America’s allies to do more to defend themselves, so that the United States can do less.

But if you walk the corridors of the State Department on a typical day, as the two of us did for decades, there are dozens of meetings that bring together exceptionally bright, talented and capable diplomats to discuss how the United States can proactively take the lead in solving the world’s problems or defusing the latest crisis du jour. They may not always agree, in State Department lingo, on a “way forward.” There is invariably agreement, however, that America must always “do something.”

The impulse for America to solve every problem, anywhere in the world, is noble and inspiring, and it has often been a force for good. But more often than not in the last twenty-five years, America’s misguided hyper-activism has produced disaster, especially in the Middle East. Indeed, the Constitution talks about creating a more perfect union; it doesn’t commit America inexorably and always to creating a more perfect world.