The Harvest of Chaos

Part of the responsibility for the sweeping global chaos we are witnessing today lies in the transfer of diplomatic and political decision-making from the hands of experts and professional bureaucrats into the hands of relatives and friends. The group responsible for foreign policy in the world’s most powerful country needs to possess a deep understanding of the political crises confronting today’s world and driving it into frightening disorder.

This is why failures have accumulated—from Gaza Strip and Lebanon to the stalled American–Iranian negotiations. This profound lack of expertise has led to a significant decline in America’s standing among nations. The clearest illustration of this was the summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing, where the Chinese president appeared to be the true star of the meeting.

Moreover, scarcely had Trump departed China when the imperial court hosted Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Improvised diplomacy suffered two shocks within days: the indirect Chinese blow and the nerve-racking Iranian stalling tactics in the political “bazaar.”

This phase in world history requires figures like George F. Kennan, the architect of the containment doctrine.

Instead, some of the world’s most complex issues have been entrusted to businessmen with no political background whatsoever. Trump found himself at odds with nearly all of America’s traditional allies, including the NATO alliance, while simultaneously maintaining a close partnership with Benjamin Netanyahu in confronting multiple actors across the globe.

Any long-established institution, such as the State Department, would have offered the president a very different kind of advice. Those institutions—or what is now commonly referred to as the “deep state”—would have protected the White House from the pitfalls of improvisation.

Those same institutions enabled former actor Ronald Reagan to prevail in the Cold War against Russia. Across two successful presidential terms, Reagan’s greatest weapon was his ability to transform his mistakes and slips into jokes. Anyone revisiting the Reagan era today would see a man remarkable for his diligence and effort, and one who compensated for gaps in his own knowledge by relying on the expertise of others.

Originally published in Asharq Al-Awsat