The Foreign Service Journal, September 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2021 41 Sometimes policy does need to change. Getting this right is definitely hindered by an intellectual arrogance that designs foreign policy with no regard for foreigners. The result is a policy that cannot be executed successfully. Two examples across time illustrate the point. The first is from Vietnam, where one U.S. policy decision after another failed because of the inability to understand the local conditions. Speaking of one set of recom- mendations to Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, William Colby, a CIA official who spent 15 years involved with Vietnam, wrote: “We defined the necessary psychological shock in terms totally counter to Diem’s personality and the realities of the Vietnamese power structure and society.” As Colby ruefully noted: “The conviction [was] widespread among the Americans that the failures of the various American formulas for success in Vietnam could be due only to the unwill- ingness or inability of the Vietnamese to perceive their validity— indeed, their brilliance—and then apply them as indicated.” Intellectual Arrogance Fifty years later, a similar disregard for understanding a foreign leader was evident in one element of President Barack Obama’s decision for how America would manage the Afghan war. One of the goals of the military surge decided on in 2009 was to stabilize important areas of Afghanistan. Washington’s combination of arrogance and ignorance jumped out at me from the strategy memo, attributed to President Obama him- All too often, our reaction to failure is to throw out the policy without studying whether the problem lies there, or in implementation.