Walter Russell Mead: belief

Transcript context

…Does the State Department or the CIA understand the Middle East better? There, I think you have to talk about individuals. In both institutions, there are some of the smartest minds in the country, and people who’ve studied the region deeply and think hard about it. One of the interesting consequences for me of the WikiLeaks cables was you see, actually, just how good a lot of the State Department observers are. The cables they’re sending home are really quite perceptive. But institutionally, to some degree, I think both institutions are troubled by a problem that goes far beyond them, the problem of the bureaucratization of knowledge. If you compare the world of American foreign policy today with what it was like, say, before World War II, in those days you had really quite small institutions where an individual genius or someone like George Kennan could really have an influence. With the ballooning of the national security bureaucracies in the Cold War and then even beyond, we now have these ossified institutions. There’s always the question, how many analysts of China do you need? The answer is one — if you can find the right one. Bureaucratic groupthink, I think, tends to dominate the products of both the State Department and the CIA in ways that often obscure the best of the thinking that’s being done inside them. Why didn’t America take in more European Jews during World War II and before?…

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