noted in a statement that became the indelible brand of their campaign, “the economy, stupid,”—and quickly set about slashing America’s civilian presence around the world. When Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 and Jesse Helms—he of the jowls and the racism and the fevered isolationism—became chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the nosedive accelerated. Clinton’s first secretary of state, the late Warren Christopher, championed what he called a “tough budget for tough times.” Christopher’s successor, Madeleine Albright, defended Clinton’s personal commitment to international engagement, but conceded that, in the wake of the Cold War, “there really was a sense that we needed to pay attention to domestic issues.”
Over the course of the 1990s, the United States’ international affairs budget tumbled by 30 percent, on a par with the cuts requested years later by the Trump administration. Here’s what happened then: the State Department pulled the plug on twenty-six consulates and fifty missions of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The timing could hardly have been worse. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the United States needed a slew of new outposts to stabilize the region and gain footholds of American influence in spaces vacated by the Soviets. While some were indeed created, by the mid-1990s, the United States had fewer embassies and consulates than it did at the height of the Cold War. Even remaining outposts felt the shift—Christopher sheepishly told a congressional committee that the embassy in Beijing reeked of sewer gas, while in Sarajevo, diplomats desperate to receive news had to jerry-rig a satellite dish to the roof using a barbecue grill.
In 1999, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the United States Information Agency were both shuttered and their respective mandates folded into a shrinking and overstretched State Department. The Cold War was over, the logic went. When would the United States possibly need to worry about rising nuclear powers, or information warfare against an ideological enemy’s insidious propaganda machine? Two decades later, Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear aspirations and the Islamic State’s global recruitment are among the United States’ most pressing international challenges. But by then, the specialized, trained workforces devoted to those challenges had been wiped out. Thomas Friedman raced to the scene with a visual metaphor, lamenting that the United States was “turning its back on the past and the future of U.S. foreign policy for the sake of the present.” (The point was certainly valid, though one wondered where the nation’s back was now facing. Maybe we were spinning? Let’s say we were spinning.)
So it was that on September 11, 2001, the State Department was 20 percent short of staff, and those who remained were undertrained and under-resourced. The United States needed diplomacy more than ever, and it was nowhere to be found.
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION SCRAMBLED to reinvest. “We resourced the Department like never before,” then–secretary of state Colin Powell recalled. But it was growth born of a new, militarized form of foreign policy. Funding that made it to State was increasingly drawn from “Overseas Contingency Operations”—earmarked specifically for advancing the Global War on Terrorism. Promoting democracy, supporting economic development, helping migrants—all of these missions were repackaged under a new counterterrorism mantle. “Soft” categories of the State Department’s budget—that is, anything not directly related to the immediate goals of combatting terrorism—flatlined, in many cases permanently. Defense spending, on the other hand, skyrocketed to historic extremes, far outpacing the modest growth at State. “The State Department has ceded a lot of authority to the Defense Department since 2001,” Albright reflected.
Diplomats slipped to the periphery of the policy process. Especially during the early days of the Iraq War, Bush concentrated power at the White House; specifically, under Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney built a close rapport with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, but had little time for Powell. “The VP had very, very strong views and he communicated them directly to the president,” recalled Powell. The Bush White House had “two NSCs during that period. One led by Condi [Rice, then the national security advisor] and one led by the VP. Anything going to the president after it left the NSC went to the VP’s NSC and the problem I’d have from time to time is that … access is everything in politics and he was over there all the time.” It was a challenge former secretaries of state invariably recalled facing, to one extent or another. “There is the interesting psychological fact that the secretary of state’s office is ten minutes’ car ride from the White House and the security advisor is right down the hall,” said Henry Kissinger, recalling his time in both roles under presidents Nixon and Ford. “The temptations of propinquity are very great.”
During the Bush administration, those dynamics cut the State Department out of even explicitly diplomatic decisions. Powell learned of Bush’s plan to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change only after it had been decided, and pleaded with Rice for more time to warn America’s allies of the radical move. He raced to the White House to press the case. Rice informed him that it was too late.
But State’s exclusion was most profound in the Global War on Terrorism, which an ascendant Pentagon seized as its exclusive domain. That the invasion of Iraq and the period immediately after were dominated by the Pentagon was inevitable. But, later, Bush handed over reconstruction and democracy-building activities, which had historically been the domain of the State Department and USAID, to uniformed officers with the Coalition Provisional Authority, reporting to the secretary of defense. Powell and his officials at State counseled caution, but were unable to penetrate the policymaking process, which had become entirely preoccupied with tactics—in Powell’s view, at the expense of strategy. “Mr. Rumsfeld felt that he had a strategy that did not reflect Powell thinking,” he recalled. “And he could do it on the low end and on small. My concern was probably, yeah, he beat the crap out of this army ten years ago, I have no doubt about them getting to Baghdad, but we didn’t take over the country to run a country.” Powell never used the phrase “the Pottery Barn rule,” as a journalist later dubbed his thinking, but he did tell the president, “If you break it, you own it.” It was, he later told me with a heavy sigh, “a massive strategic failure both politically and militarily.”
More specifically, it was a string of successive strategic failures. The Pentagon disbanded the Iraqi security forces, turning loose hundreds of thousands of armed and unemployed Iraqi young men and laying the foundations for a deadly insurgency. Taxpayer dollars from the massive $4-billion Commander’s Emergency Response Program, which essentially gave military brass the authority to undertake USAID-style development projects, was later found to be flowing directly to those insurgents. The State Department’s legal adviser is typically consulted on questions of law regarding the treatment of enemy combatants, but Powell’s Department was not involved in conversations about the administration’s expanding use of military commissions—aspects of which were later found to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
As the disasters of Iraq deepened, a bruised Bush administration did attempt to shift additional resources into diplomacy and development. The White House pledged to double the size of USAID’s Foreign Service, and began to speak of rebalancing civilian and military roles and empowering the US ambassador in Iraq. The supposed rebalancing was more pantomime
