Why are we so awful at foreign policy?

In his New York Times column, “Stumbling Around the World”, Nicholas Kristof begs an answer to the question: Why are we so awful at foreign policy? Before I attempt to answer this question, I would like to cite two examples provided by Mr. Kristof:

Iraq is the example of the moment. We invaded, thinking that we would get a pro-American bulwark, cheap oil, long-term military bases and the gratitude of liberated Iraqis. Instead, we fought Iraq, and Iran won.

Speaking of which, look at Iran. In 1953, we helped overthrow the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, to achieve a more pro-Western government. That created tensions that led to the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the rise of mullahs with nuclear dreams. If it weren’t for our own policies, Iran might well now have a pro-American government.

Not surprisingly, since World War II, a linkage can be established between America’s preemptive wars/wars of choice and their desired outcomes: they have invariably failed and set back U.S. foreign policy for decades. In fact, if the target country had just two of its three defining national characteristics – language, religion, and form of government – differ widely from that of the western world, then invariably U.S. political objectives in a lengthy preemptive war (i.e. a war of choice) were never met.

In fact, even the short, CIA-supported, 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba failed to overthrow Fidel Castro and helped further solidify Cuba's relationship with the Soviet Union. Forty five years later Castro is still around and Cuba remains standing as one of the last vestiges of the communist dominoes.

Over fifty years after the Korean Armistice and thirty odd years after our ignominious withdrawal from Saigon – North Korea and Vietnam remain as the other glaring examples of communist dominoes that our failed foreign policy ventures have left standing.

President Bush is now trying hard to prevent yet another U.S. foreign policy domino theory – the Bush Doctrine, which calls for pre-emptive action against states that pursue WMD programs and/or support terrorism in the name of religion – from failing in Iraq and spreading undesirable outcomes throughout the Middle East. If we fail in Iraq, the Bush Administration is concerned that Iran and Syria will be the next dominoes to fall – in that, they will acquire WMD and more overtly support terrorist acts against western interests around the world.

My answer to Mr. Kristof’s question can be found in a letter of mine that was published in The Wall Street Journal on October 6, 2006:

We continue to talk about the "root cause of terrorism," but there seems to be a basic disconnect between the Judeo-Christian and Muslim worlds' reasoning on this issue. Muslim dictators use their convenient line that "Palestine is the core issue," while Western leaders seem to have coalesced on "freedom and democracy" as being their core issue in the post-9/11 era.
The U.S. could make serious progress with this reasoning if it showed some consistency in the application of its core values to its foreign policy. This would necessarily imply that we make no exceptions of convenience even in the short-term: Musharraf, Mubarak, Nazarbayev, Abdallah, et al. We insult the intelligence of the common Muslim populace with these exceptions of convenience -- this is the core issue, it seems to me.

The bottom line is that we are so awful at foreign policy because it is not consistent, it does not reflect our core values, and we make too many exceptions of convenience.