America’s Worst Foreign Policy Decisions
By 
A few weeks ago, I wrote up the grave post of William Johnson, an early Supreme Court justice. In it, I referenced the Embargo Act, Jefferson’s idiotic decision to deal with the pressure from the Napoleonic Wars by refusing to trade with Britain or France, blowing up the American economy for no gain, a decision decried by all and ignored by as many as possible. I call it the stupidest foreign policy decision in American history. There’s a lot of those, to be fair. For me, what makes something especially stupid is not that it is evil or that it doesn’t work, but that is a wildly unforced error that most other political figures of the time would not do. Thus, the Vietnam War isn’t on this list for me. It was a disaster, yes, but it was a disaster than any major figure in the American political universe would have bumbled down, given the context of the times. You can come up with your own criteria to evaluate this, of course.
Well, in the comments, CliosFanBoy, who in his real life is a well-respected historian, pointed me to this Council on Foreign Relations survey of foreign policy historians on the best and worst decisions in American foreign policy. It’s super interesting. I am on board with the best. The Marshall Plan was genius and the creation of the UN was pretty well a huge success. The only one in the top 20 I’d really disagree with is the management of the Soviet collapse, which given that we helped create the current situation by exporting an extremist version of free market capitalism that created the oligarchs and resentment and laid the groundwork for Putin and all of that, isn’t so great. But even there, the nukes stayed under control, the outer republics became their own nations peacefully (at least for awhile), and besides, there’s a lot of other issues in what created modern Russia than American capitalist ideology.
What I object to more is the list of worst foreign policy decisions. That’s largely because this seems driven by moral factors than whether they worked. In other words, a lot of them are about American treatment of the Tribes. And while, given the domestic dependent nation status conferred on them by John Marshall, I don’t have a problem thinking of this in a foreign policy context, it’s also very hard for me to argue that running roughshod over the treaties and committing genocide did not actually work for the United States. I mean, it pretty well bloody worked, extra emphasis on bloody. It’s evil, but evil and bad are not always exactly the same thing.
Looking at the bottom 10–I agree that the bombing of Nagasaki was entirely evil and unnecessary at that moment. Gulf of Tonkin–pretty bad, but again, hard to argue that anyone across the spectrum wouldn’t have gone there in one form or another and got us all fucked up in Vietnam. I like putting the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement there, though even that wasn’t really going to do anything to stop climate change, not without real restrictions on consumption. Yeah, I’d say the CIA overthrowing Mossadegh in Iran and putting in the Shah and creating the conditions for the Islamic Revolution was pretty fucking bad. So was not ratifying Versailles, that has a legit claim to the top.
The Embargo Act actually didn’t make the top 10. I really disagree with that. I suspect the reason is that the stakes seem relatively low from a modern perspective because the US was just so weak and isolated then. None of this erases the fact that Jefferson was in a very tough spot, but he really wasn’t a good president when you look at his actual choices made and this is at the top. That said, the worst decision on the list is the Iraq War and it’s hard to argue against that since that was a war entirely the making of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, based on lies and for spurious and stupid reasons that didn’t work at all.
Speaking of stupid foreign policies made by idiots for no reason at all and that make no sense at the time, we might have a new #1 Worst Foreign Policy Decision and it beats out the Embargo Act, even for me.