Breaking Beijing was founded as a result of my profound dissatisfaction with the quality of policy analysis and thought in DC. How many times could institutions regurgitate the same talking points over and over and promote the same class of empty shell briefcase carriers? It’s no secret that I despise the theoretical frameworks of International Relations in academia, either. Nor do I have much love for the decaying quality of the foreign policy class that dominated in the years after the end of the Cold War until this year. I’ve seen no shortage of supposed icons and thought leaders develop brain worms, sell out, or just plain quit. In early 2024, I wrote “There are No Adults Left” as a warning that we risked destruction if we did not adapt and reform ourselves. There is no protectorate of logically sound and ideologically-inspired American foreign affairs. America’s foreign policy maneuvers and the academies which train us have run on nothing more than inertia for years. From where I sit we are on the verge of finally succumbing to our heat death. We can choose to inject new life into our field or we can pick out our gravestone. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not dying a quitter.
If we want to revive the foreign policy establishment then we have to overcome biases against the inconvenient, reform academia, and build and care for a new cadre of staffers and experts. Let’s begin.
“War is icky” has become the shorthand of a few foreign policy bloggers for the problem within the Democratic party and academia concerning the dearth of military history and operational knowledge. (I can’t remember if I came up with it first or someone else did). It’s not that all Dems are anti-war (far from it) but more that it’s basically uncool to Know Things about it. Knowing the engagement range of a DF-17 is fascist-coded, or something. Well, ignorance is bliss until the other side decides ignorance is a family value. Being a responsible, capable foreign policy analyst and leader means understand all the various realms of foreign policy, even the ones we don’t particularly like. There’s a difference between understanding war and warfare and being a bloodthirsty heathen.
Fixing the “war is icky” perspective requires starting at the academy level. Undergraduate IR students at most programs are flooded with various competing ideas and thematic areas, but very rarely are students introduced to anything that resembles sensible military history. Georgetown SSP’s graduate program actually offers a weekend course to introduce students to military terminology and ideas (this is a Good Thing and more programs should do it.) You can teach military history without blind patriotism, but so is the legacy of Vietnam-era academia that they cannot. It’s a false moral high ground and those who fail to know history are doomed to repeat it.
At the other end of the spectrum, the quality of existing military history programs has been rather sad. There’s only a few big name programs, mostly in the history (not IR) departments, and historians have noted how bad this is for us. Anyone with an eye for critical thinking who’s had to suffer through an ROTC Military History program knows that there are some things worse than ignorance. And it goes without saying that those policy staffers who get their military history from memes, TikTok, or the History Channel are a danger to us all. Reintegrating military history, specifically quality lecture and textual analysis, to the undergraduate and graduate programs of international relations at scale is the only way to remove the “war is icky” perception that plagues the foreign policy field.
The Pipeline
Dropping the war “ick” is only one component of the necessary to the IR training pipeline.
I’m gonna make this clear (and most certainly get hate mail): no one who actually works in foreign policy thinks about IR theory. If you want to talk IR theory, leave it for the PhD track where none of us care what you do. And when I say IR theory, I do not mean things like Schelling’s Arms and Influence or Von Clausewitz’s On War or even the classical texts, I am referring to the overarching schools of thought that have done more to inspire bad policy than good. I dunno how many times people in the field have to say it but literally no one thinks about Realism or Liberalism in Foggy Bottom, the Pentagon, or Capitol Hill. People do talk about centers of gravity, deterrence theory, and the like (even if they are often wrong about them). Perhaps more time spent actually studying and debating the underlying concepts of the foreign policy practice would serve us better. Spending entire semesters on these schools of thought as required courses and trying to drive it into undergrads and graduate students is not only useless but counterproductive to preparing them for the world they’re entering. All of this is to say that reforming the IR field and better preparing students for the burning hellscape of foreign policy requires focusing more on what actually happens in the field and the relevant theoretical texts, not concepts that never leave the ivory tower. When so many of the proponents of these fields lost their minds or sold out to the bad guys, this should be an easy shift.
This brings me to another matter: stop worshipping Kissinger. He was not a grand strategist nor an icon for western liberalism. He bombed innocent Cambodians to hell, sent Latin America into bloody chaos, got rolled by Mao and the CCP, and then spent his later years taking money cash over fist from bad guys all around the world as a consultant while being treated like royalty by the establishment. This isn’t about cancel culture or anything like that, it’s about correcting the record and actually championing people good at their jobs. Kissinger did a lot of harm to American foreign policy in and out of office and it is a stain upon the field to name chairs and centers after him. It’s like handing out first place trophies to sixth place runners up. If the future of American foreign policy when this is all over is fighting authoritarianism wherever it rests its head (as I argue in Why We Fight), then you can’t wear the Kissinger bumper sticker or that of those like him.
Leaving academia, our foreign policy pipeline is plagued by nepotism, classism, and a culture of yes men and women. If you want to promote, shut the fuck up. Never mind the damage to the country or the people. If you want a good internship, hope your dad is at the right country club or that you can afford to work 40 hours unpaid in a new city with a dozen other roommates. In the Army there’s two types of suffering: purposeful and “well that’s the way we always did it.” Making the intern do the grunt work is purposeful, ensuring they remain in poverty for a dozen years after because this unpaid internship got them a 40k a year think tank job with another 50k in loans is the “well that’s how we always did it” with a side of classism if they can pay for it all.
Unsurprisingly, conservative orgs usually pay their interns better and have for years now. It might seem ridiculous but when you’re young and need money and a chance, the office that you don’t like but pays seems like a better option to a lot of people than the one that doesn’t pay at all. Pay your interns and your staff a decent wage and you’ll attract a lot of impressionable young talent that you can mold for years. Let them speak their minds, teach them the difference between critical thinking and contrarianism, show them how to be persuasive and work from the facts. For years Dems and IR academics (rightfully) decried the risk of groupthink and yes men as the driver of the Iraq War, and yet that exact same culture became a tool of promotion inside the foreign policy wing of the party at the end of the GWOT and the start of the Second Cold War. Of course, if it wasn’t uncool to know things about war and warfare, maybe leadership could’ve seen the difference between good and bad policy and more eloquently argued for doing the right thing. Maybe we wouldn’t be at risk of losing our global advantage in scientific research or at risk of losing in the Pacific or abandoning Ukraine. The problem with American foreign policy isn’t some bullshit about masculinity or lethality, it’s about not knowing what the hell we’re doing.
There’s probably a dozen other things I could rant about here, but I think the above encapsulates the basic issues with democratic foreign policy thinking. And to be sure, there are people up and down the chain of liberal schools of thought that do know their stuff. They are just too few to fight the good fight themselves and no singular administration will fix that. The foreign policy class faces an identity crisis and it feels like some are just waiting around for a grand strategy that will justify it all like the second coming of a Messiah. But there is no one else, there is no secret backroom of geniuses waiting for their chance. Grand strategy is bullshit. A strategy is grand when it works and misguided when it doesn’t. The only way you make a strategy work, the only way you manage the massive foreign policy arm of the United States, the only way we win…is by building a cadre of capable, critical thinkers and doers from the ground up. And if you’re just starting out and reading this, don’t give up. Victory starts with you.
So let’s get to work, it’s only the end of the world as we know it.
If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict, the failures of US foreign policy, or what happens next, check out my novel, EX SUPRA. It’s all about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! Don’t forget to share and subscribe!