“I’m not happy with what Putin is doing,” said Donald Trump last weekend. “He’s killing a lot of people, and I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin.” He subsequently added, “He’s gone absolutely CRAZY!” Over the last few days, Trump has continued in this vein, expressing an entirely justifiable exasperation at Putin’s insouciant disdain for his well-intended peace overtures, with his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, wondering publicly if Trump is suffering from some kind of emotional overload. (RELATED: Splitting Xi From Putin: A Comfortable Delusion)

Foreign policy commentators, understandably, have had a field day with this, with the usual suspects taking this as an occasion to deride Trump’s grasp of the situation. But even those inclined to support Trump, such as Senator Grassley of Iowa, have wondered aloud if the time has come for much harsher sanctions. Only this morning, American Spectator’s own Gary Anderson offered a thoughtful essay pondering what Trump has gotten wrong about Putin, and suggesting steps that might be taken to bring Putin to an attitude adjustment. Tellingly, Anderson observes that Putin lives in an “alternate reality” from Trump. (RELATED: It’s Time for Trump to Wield the Stick Against Putin)

Those of us who’ve closely followed the vagaries of our Ukraine war diplomacy and the oscillations of Trump’s relationship with Putin find little that’s surprising in this. My present purpose, however, isn’t to plunge once again into all this, particularly since it seems that change is in the offing — could Trump be on the verge of taking a harder line with Russia? Will he double down on “all we are saying, Vladimir, is give peace a chance”? We’ll know more in the coming days, and I’m content to wait and watch how this plays out.

Instead, I’d like to take this as a moment to reflect on how American policy makers get foreign policy wrong, and, in particular, how we are ill-served by those whose role it is to objectively and reliably inform foreign policy decision-making. Why is it that, more often than not, our foreign enemies — or even our friends — zig when we expected them to zag? Why, when we’re massively engaged around the world, do we understand the world so poorly?

The Ugly American

The bestselling 1958 novel, The Ugly American, became a massive best-seller not because it was particularly well-written or entertaining — it wasn’t — but instead because it spoke trenchantly to what had become a widespread concern. Why, with all our resources, were we losing the Cold War to the Russians? How, with all our wealth and cultural advantages, what later decades would call “soft power,” did we find ourselves unable to shape events in “Third World” countries to our advantage?

The message of the novel was that, while the Russians made a concerted effort to understand the countries that were becoming Cold War battlegrounds (the novel’s setting alludes to Vietnam), we consistently alienated potential allies through our cultural arrogance, particularly our unwillingness to learn the local languages and engage with local culture and customs. The novel enjoyed a huge impact, remaining on the bestseller list for over a year and selling over four million copies. More to the point, it prompted the Eisenhower administration to order a review of all our foreign aid programs, and it played an outsized role in the 1960 presidential election.

Along with the Sputnik crisis of 1957, it also contributed to the passage of the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and directly influenced Title VI of that legislation, which created graduate fellowships to support the study of critical foreign languages and also to support an emerging academic discipline called “area studies.” Proponents noted that, absent such support, the U.S. government, the military, and businesses would continue to lack the skills and knowledge essential to assure America’s place in the world. Title VI was meant to change all that.

To be sure, Title VI would soon come to play an important and enduring role in expanding language studies at universities across the U.S. Moreover, this certainly led to a greater understanding of local culture and customs, exactly as the authors of The Ugly American intended.

Although my graduate research field was German history, something that fell outside the purview of Title VI support, most of my fellow graduate students at the University of Florida in the 1970s were engaged in “Latin American Studies” in one form or another, and almost all of them benefited from Title VI funding. Having watched Cuba fall to communism, and still deeply engaged in the struggle for influence in Latin America, the appropriators of Title VI funding were notably generous in promoting these programs.

In the end, however, none of this worked out quite in the way intended, for predictable reasons. Years later, the term “cultural capture” would be coined to describe what occurred across these programs, but early on, the problem was evident, and, given the timing, perhaps inevitable. Three things came together in the early days of Title VI, each of them exerting a baleful and mutually reinforcing influence.

Good Intentions Gone Awry — Courtesy of Academia

First, there was the reaction to the Vietnam War. I believe that the academic critique of our Vietnam involvement was massively off the mark, but in the 60s and 70s, the American academy made Vietnam the measure of all that was wrong with U.S. national security policy (and, sadly, this has remained the default position among our so-called intellectuals). Second, and more generally, the “new” Marxism of Marcuse, Adorno, and the “Frankfurt School” was making its march through our academic institutions, accompanied by a heavy dose of the French “deconstructionists.” Our colleges and universities became breeding grounds for cultural anti-Americanism, and this, eventually, spread throughout our media and entertainment industries.

Finally, and above all, our foreign language and area studies programs became vehicles for romanticizing foreign cultures rather than understanding them. Our relationship to other countries differs markedly from how other nations interact.

One Christmas morning, many years ago, I sat at the breakfast table with Dutch friends in Leiden, surrounded by the members of their extended family. The conversation bounced between Dutch, French, German, and English in a manner I found almost head-spinning, but which simply reflected their daily reality. My host, a professor at the university, had taught in the U.S. and England, his brother-in-law worked in Aachen for a German multi-national, and a cousin was up for the holiday from Strasbourg, working for the EU.

Most Americans can live quite nicely within our native linguistic universe. Ours is a continental economy and society, and, even with the ever-increasing Spanish language presence, our involvement with other countries and cultures is usually more a matter of choice than necessity. Those Americans who make such a choice, particularly the graduate students who participated in Title VI language programs and immersed themselves in “area studies,” did so because they’d developed, for all manner of reasons, a fascination with a particular foreign culture.

And so “understanding” a foreign culture turns into something akin to “love,” and disappointment with one’s American homeland turns into disdain, or even outright hatred.

We’ve certainly seen this phenomenon play out in the current pro-Hamas demonstrations that have roiled our campuses since the October 7 pogrom. Not all of the demonstrators are foreign students, either. As I discussed in some detail in several previous articles, a goodly number are home-grown. In fairness, this shouldn’t be wholly blamed on Title VI, since the mechanisms of this hatred are far more complex. But the uncritical growth of “area studies,” just like the similar growth of “gender studies” and all the other “studies,” has surely contributed to the fomenting of hatred on our campuses.

Worse, the void created tends to be filled not by those who’ve grown up with Friday night football or Waylon and Willie, but by those who’ve come from elsewhere. Sometimes this works out well enough, although the great exemplar, Henry Kissinger, underwent a solid enough American acculturation as a U.S. Army enlisted man in WWII. At the other extreme, we rely all too often upon persons of transparently dual allegiance, who’ve come to the U.S., prospered because of their skills in a needed language, and pursued an agenda more in line with their country of origin. This has been a recurrent problem in our intelligence community, and not just there — sometimes such personages get elected to Congress.

But that is, necessarily, the subject for a separate and much longer essay.

A Needed Paradigm Shift

My point here is that, for the whole “area studies” initiative to work as originally intended back in 1958, it requires, first, students who love America, warts and all, and want their country to do well in the world. One can call this MAGA if one chooses, but regardless of labels, it has to be a love grounded in a deep appreciation for who we are as a people. Second, it involves a willingness to see the “area” being studied clearly, objectively, hard-headedly, devoid of romanticization. This can still be affectionate, but it can’t mistake “I love dancing the tango” for “I think General Galtieri was right to invade the Falklands.”

Finally, it can’t become the handmaiden of mindless globalism or the imposition of progressive values on countries adamantly opposed to them. Instead of “citizens of the world,” it means “citizens of the U.S. who understand the world.” These are two very different things.

The “Ugly American” of 1958 couldn’t be bothered to learn the local language and never ventured beyond the air-conditioned embassy grounds except in the comfort of an air-conditioned Cadillac limousine. In 2025, we seemingly have substituted a cadre of experts who despise their own fellow citizens, romanticize the countries they’ve chosen to study, and view themselves as above the ebb and flow of genuine cultural exchange. They’re more Davos than “down home,” regardless of whether the home is Kansas or Kazakhstan.

It’s no wonder, then, that we fail to understand why we’re steadily losing ground in Africa, or why Latin America, once again, seemingly hangs in the balance. It’s no wonder that we struggle to make sense of what Putin is really after, or Xi, or the Ayatollahs, or, for that matter, Netanyahu, or Merz, or Starmer, or Zelenskyy. We look at the world through the mirror of our own predispositions, and we allow the world to do likewise, and the programs that were meant to be our windows on the world have become mirrors as well.

It’s no wonder that President Trump has been recently confounded in his understanding of Putin. He’s not alone in a Washington where the experts are also looking in mirrors of their own making, rather than seeing things the way they actually are.

READ MORE from James H. McGee:

Splitting Xi From Putin: A Comfortable Delusion

Who Won World War II?

Are We on the Verge of World War III?

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A soon-to-be-published sequel, The Zebras from Minsk, finds the Reprisal team fighting against Chinese and Russian-backed terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges from West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.