Drezner's Dilemma

Dan Drezner frames his choice in a Mallaby-ish way:

Reading the interview [with Rand Beers], I was disappointed to see zero, zip, nada on democracy promotion. In fact, what was striking about the interview was the general lack of bigthink. On the other hand, there was a great deal of explication about the Kerry team's policy process -- pretty impressive for a campaign.

This leads to an disturbing question. Which is better: a foreign policy with a clearly articulated grand strategy but a f#$%ed-up policy process, or a foreign policy with no articulated grand strategy but a superior policy process?

For the sake of argument, let's accept the premise. It seems to me that this isn't even close to being a hard question. For whatever reason, intellectuals have a tendency to grossly underrate the value the sound execution. When you think about it, though, it doesn't matter at all how good someone's "grand strategy" is if they have a history of unsound execution. Nor does it matter, in fact, how bad their grand strategy is. Unless you can clear the hurdle of "given a strategy, will it actually be implemented" the content of the strategy is simply irrelevant. Several years in office make it clear that the results of a Bush foreign policy initiative will have a purely contingent relationship to the goals of the initiative. A fucked-up policy process is a very bad thing indeed.

It's not, however, necessary as bad as a well-executed by extraordinarily wrong-headed grand strategy. If we could expect Kerry, Beers, and Holbrooke to do a really good job of implementing their "provoke a war with China" strategy, then that would be a serious problem. But the complaint against Kerry is that his strategy is (allegedly) vague, shapeless, and possibly nonexistent. Insofar as that's true, it's not a good thing, but it leaves open the possibility that a good strategy will be formulated, or, perhaps more likely, that drift will be well-managed. I wouldn't call that a really strong case for Kerry, but compared to the alternative of guaranteed failure, it seems clearly preferable. The thing to do would be to get Kerry in office and then immediately start working on putting together a more coherent GOP alternative that would either pressure Kerry to get his act together or else could replace president Kerry in 2009. As I've said before, though, before dissilusioned Iraq Hawks get too eager to slam Kerry's lack of enthusiasm for democracy-promotion they ought to consider the fact that it's people like them who are responsible for the fact that the idea is discredited. Just as it's the responsibility of free traders (such as myself) to rebuild the political viability of a pro-trade agenda, and not just bitch and moan about politicians' failure to do what we want, if democracy-promoters want to see their agenda taken up, they need to rebuild their public credibility, offer some viable-sounding policy ideas, and explain why taking their advice won't just lead us into further fiascos.