CLASSIC POST FROM JUNE

Friday, June 23, 2017

RE WOODY COURT OF ST JAMES KENNAN TOCQUEVILLE JACKSONIAN SPOILS SYSTEM

Like inviting Mary Poppins to be Ambassador to Britain.
Shirley Temple had been a precursor...

Appointments have most often been bones thrown to important presidential campaign contributors. That is not what even someone like David Brooks would call, in a sober moment, a meritocratic system.

 

"...ambassador to Moscow. The assignment has nothing to do with Soviet - American relations. The present ambassador, it seems, is leaving.  It is the election year of 1952. For purely domestic political reasons, the administration is afraid to leave the post vacant.  Foreign policy -- policy toward the Soviet Union -- plays no part in the decision.  It never occurs to people in the administration that the position of American ambassador to Moscow has anything to do with policy.  They don't really know, to tell the truth, what an ambassador is for...."  Kennan,  'FLASHBACKS'

Here's an old post on the subject:

Thursday, May 1, 2014

 

re DK current topic

"...He belongs to the diplomatic tradition of John F. Kennedy, George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon and my own father, all of whom believed (yes, including Nixon) that diplomats were supposed to solve problems among nations.  (Hillary Clinton showed no sign of grasping this in her four years as Secretary of State.)..."  

I know Professor Kaiser is also a fan of Kennan. He introduced me to Kennan's work.  

Here is Kennan, re our Ambassadors, and also, I think, our diplomats, in general, here:

'FLASHBACKS'

"...ambassador to Moscow. The assignment has nothing to do with Soviet - American relations. The present ambassador, it seems, is leaving.  It is the election year of 1952. For purely domestic political reasons, the administration is afraid to leave the post vacant.  Foreign policy -- policy toward the Soviet Union -- plays no part in the decision.  It never occurs to people in the administration that the position of American ambassador to Moscow has anything to do with policy.  They don't really know, to tell the truth, what an ambassador is for...."  

"They don't really know, to tell the truth, what an ambassador is for." 

Without getting into the current Hillary matter, about which I know nothing, Kennan actually explained, in several works, echoing eg Tocqueville and others, at different places, why, structurally, the American political system does not do either diplomacy or foreign policy well at all.

The objections are, in some ways, similar to, and as valid as, those made by European emperors and their ministers to the European republics, especially Republican France, after 1815.  
He quotes Tocqueville in Russia and the West

 

Under Lenin and Stalin,  "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."