Policymakers are open-minded, diverse, and pragmatic. Professionalism in American foreign policy is good---Trump proves the alternative is worse.

American foreign policy, they contend, has been controlled by a privileged cabal bent on serving its own interests rather than those of the nation at large; one that protects its turf by shutting out alternative ideas and excluding dissenting voices. The result has been three decades of dismal failure, with the United States squandering its post–Cold War advantages and careening from catastrophe to catastrophe. The key to getting things back on track, these critics charge, is to break the grip of the Blob. The only problem with this argument is that every component of it is wrong. The foreign policy establishment is not a closed cabal, American statecraft has not been a giant failure, and scrapping professionalism for amateurism would be a disaster. In truth, the foreign policy establishment is an American strength rather than weakness. It is more open-minded and accountable than its critics allow. It acts as a storehouse of accumulated professional wisdom, providing intellectual ballast to the ship of state. On balance, the establishment’s practical track record has been impressive, with some well-known fiascos outweighed by many quiet successes. And the current administration’s foreign policy blunders—including in its response to the current pandemic—demonstrate what happens when the establishment’s experience and expertise are rejected. In short, the Blob is not the problem. It is the solution. A CONTENTIOUS CLUB Blob theorists view the establishment as a club of like-minded elite insiders who control everything, take care of one another, and brush off challenges to conventional wisdom. In reality, the United States actually has a healthy marketplace of foreign policy ideas. Discussion over American foreign policy is loud, contentious, diverse, and generally pragmatic—and as a result, the nation gets the opportunity to learn from its mistakes, build on its successes, and improve its performance over time. In both absolute and relative terms, the expert community dealing with foreign policy and national security in the United States is remarkably large and heterogeneous. Inside government, cadres of professionals make vast amounts of technocratic knowledge and institutional memory available to policymakers. Every department and agency with an international role has distinctive regional or functional expertise it can bring to bear. This in-house knowledge is complemented by an even larger and more diverse network of experts in the many hundreds of think tanks and contract research institutions that surround the government and offer views ranging from right to left, hawk to dove, free trader to protectionist, technocratic to ideological. Pick any policy issue and you can put together a lively debate with ease. Should the United States engage with China or contain it? Negotiate with Iran or squeeze it? Withdraw from the Middle East or redouble its efforts? Reasoned arguments on all sides are widely available, in any form you want—all supplied from within the supposedly monolithic establishment. Moreover, unlike such communities in other leading powers, the American foreign policy establishment is connected to society rather than cut off from it, because the top several layers of U.S. national security bureaucracies are staffed by political appointees rather than civil servants. The Blob comprises government officials, outside experts, and many people who go back and forth between the two. Insiders know how government works and what is practical. Outsiders think independently. And in-and-outers bridge the gaps. Other countries simply do not have comparably large, diverse, permeable, expert communities that encourage vigorous debate over national policy—which is why, say, the caliber of U.S. debate about nuclear policy is more nuanced and better informed than in other nuclear powers, and which is why other countries would love to have such a Blob of their own. The American foreign policy establishment, finally, is generally more pragmatic than ideological. It values prudence and security over novelty and creativity. It knows that thinking outside the box may be useful in testing policy assumptions, but the box is usually there for a reason, and so reflexively embracing the far-out option is dangerous. Its members have made many mistakes, individually and collectively, but several features of the system enforce accountability over time. Foreign policy failures, for example, are politically toxic and often spur positive change. The monumental intelligence failures that allowed the September 11 attacks to happen were followed by policy and institutional reforms that have helped prevent other mass-casualty terrorist attacks on U.S. targets for almost two decades. Early misjudgments in the Iraq war led to the adoption of a new counterinsurgency strategy that restored stability, at least for a while. The international economic imbalances and financial procedures that led to the 2008 global financial crisis were addressed by policies that contributed to a decade-long recovery.