How concerned should we be about the possibility that the next president could have little or no foreign policy experience before taking the job? Dan Drezner points out that none of the potential GOP presidents have done much in foreign affairs, but is that really a problem? Maybe, maybe not. But here's what Dan says:
The more one looks at the possible 2016 GOP field, the more one realizes that, as deep as the field might be, pretty much none of them have any significant "foreign policy experience." A lot of the GOP bench are governors, which means that they do have executive experience but did not bother with foreign policy matters (no matter what David Frum likes to claim). Indeed, as near as I can tell, no one in the 2016 field served at State/Defense/Treasury/intelligence, as did George H.W. Bush. None of them have served in the military, as did John McCain. None of them even have significant international business experience, like Mitt Romney.
He notes that Rick Santorum, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul have all served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But should that even count as "experience"?
Before I answer, one quick note about McCain. I can remember his military service being mentioned back in 2008 as counting in some way as foreign policy experience, which was ridiculous, not only because it ended almost four decades before he was the GOP nominee for president, but also because as awful as it surely was for him to spend five years being tortured in a North Vietnamese prison camp, it's hard to see how that would give him particular insight into, say, the potential for hostilities breaking out between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.
But when it comes to serving on a relevant committee, despite the fact that we usually count it as experience, in truth it consists mostly of reading things and sometimes talking to the people who are actually doing things. If you're on the budget committee you have to make budgeting decisions, but on Foreign Affairs what you do is provide "oversight"-which can range from calling in administration officials to browbeat them over something or other, all the way down to nothing. A senator who is deeply interested in foreign policy can involve him or herself in plenty of issues, but if it's the fourth-most important of the four committees you serve on, you can get away with not being involved much at all. In most cases, serving on the Foreign Affairs committee is to making and executing foreign policy as getting an MBA is to running a corporation. They're in the same area, but they aren't the same thing.
There are basically two ways experience is supposed to help a president on any subject: knowledge and judgement. It's possible (if not easy) to obtain either without actually having been in a position to make decisions-for instance, a hypothetical candidate could be an economist with a deep understanding of fiscal and monetary policy who would make wise decisions on the economy, even if she never actually made policy at Treasury or the Fed.
But we assume that there are some things you're only going to learn by doing them, and a president without foreign policy experience won't appreciate the subtle nuances of international relations unless he's been involved in decision-making during crises and tested his impressions against future events. Remember when George W. Bush met Vladimir Putin? Afterward, Bush said: "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul." Yeah.
The problem is that in foreign policy more than domestic policy, it can be awfully hard to predict, whether they're experienced or not, what kind of president a candidate would make because foreign policy doesn't lend itself to a specific agenda and set of promises that can be easily evaluated. Hillary Clinton would arrive in the Oval Office with more foreign policy experience than any president in a long time-the last former secretary of state to win the presidency was James Buchanan, who got elected in 1856-but do you have a good sense of what her foreign policy would actually look like? Me neither. So we may have to resign ourselves to the fact that experience in foreign policy, or lack thereof, isn't going to be much of a help in choosing the next president.
