In Defense of Foreign Policy Ignorance

How much should our foreign policy leaders know about the countries with which they interact? Some ignorance is inevitable. There's essentially no limit to how much you can learn about a particular foreign country -- nobody will know everything. Worse, there are many countries, and a major international power like the United States must interact with almost all of them. Nobody can know enough about each one. Worse still, the foreign policy buck stops at the desk of someone responsible for a lot more than just foreign policy: the president. There can be no Expert in Chief; there are state dinners to attend, judges to appoint, websites to launch and ninety-minute phone calls with Putin to be made. And many of the president's immediate subordinates have broad portfolios of their own. John Kerry and Ben Rhodes don't have time to read the Kyiv Post, People's Daily and the Tehran Times every morning, or to dig deeply into the history and culture of every country that they deal with. If expertise must play a central role in policy-making, the wise move would be to delegate as many decisions as possible pertaining to U.S. policy toward particular countries to the best experts on those countries. Yet that's not what we do -- thank goodness.