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Ours is no longer a young country. If you start Western history with the Greeks, a quarter millennium is in the ballpark of 10 percent of it—not an insignificant chapter. And a century of that as a great power is nothing to sneeze at, either. Huzzah, hooray, and cheers for the United States of America.

So why can’t we formulate and pursue a mature foreign policy? It’s no great secret that this administration has been all over the place. For those in the booster club who might need reminding, a small sample of our hairpin turns in the past eight months: The U.S. has gone from cajoling, none too gently, Israel into a ceasefire with Hamas to suggesting that, actually, maybe a cleared Gaza Strip would be ripe for luxury real estate development to worrying about famine conditions in the war zone. The U.S. went from intense, reportedly productive negotiations with Iran to bombing them in the space of a week; now we’re supposedly headed back to the negotiating table, even though our lead technical negotiator is headed for the door. The U.S. has gone from diplomatic engagement with Venezuela to menacing the country with warships. And so on.

We live in fast-paced, dizzying times, to be sure, and policy must keep up. A foolish consistency can be deadly. (Unless, of course, it’s our unconditional, open-ended support for junior partners in dangerous parts of the world like Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel, in which case American credibility is at stake.) But this smacks more than a little of mere indecision and fecklessness—a failure to settle on real strategic goals and pursue them by the means available. And, in justice to this administration, it is not unique in this regard—people with memories that stretch back longer than 15 minutes will remember Obama’s farcical Egypt policy, for example. Again: Why can’t America formulate and pursue a mature foreign policy?

America has had the luxury of flourishing on a continent without serious rivals for power, which has left us unencumbered with the enmities of the Old World and free to devote our capital and energies to things beside doing down the fellows on the other side of the mountain. It would be ungrateful to regard this as anything but a blessing. The regrettable hatreds and wars of the Old World did, however, nourish up a long tradition of real life-or-death diplomacy—an ability to identify and prioritize concrete national interests, a distaste for idealism, the recognition that a bad peace may be a lesser evil than a good war, all the tactics of sometimes cooperating, sometimes coercing, sometimes deceiving your neighbors. The U.S. still had the diplomatic establishment and traditions of a very secure middle power when it was thrust suddenly into great-power status; we have never really caught up.

A specific difficulty is that we have never developed a balance between diplomatic professionalism and the forms of republican government. Foreign policy is a discipline that is naturally suited to technocratic structures; the achievement of even modest goals takes patient development that is not characteristic of four-year presidential politics or the two-year legislative cycle. Russian foreign policy has been remarkably consistent in its goals for over a century, and it must be conceded that this is in large part due to the fact that Russian foreign policy has never been seriously threatened by popular control. Russian aims (and even foreign policy personnel) in the First World War remained undisturbed by the February Revolution, and only German sponsorship of the Bolsheviks really put the kibosh on them. Those same Bolsheviks had reverted to the same war aims within 20 years; they are in large part substantially the same as the aims of the current war in Ukraine. This is geographic determinism, yes, but geographic determinism married to a policy developed and pursued largely without interruption by democratic hurly-burly. 

Such technocratic elements are, at best, an uncomfortable fit for our own constitutional order and notions of popular political sovereignty. And indeed, one of the complaints of the American right is that technocratic elements, including in the State Department, tend to pursue their own interests without reference to the tides of politics. It is not clear in my mind how to resolve the problem; while the tensions between clarity in foreign policy and political government may be uniquely acute in the United States, it is not without parallel in other democracies. (For example, the profoundly muddled British foreign policy in the prelude to the First World War was in part the product of changing political tides at home.)

None of this is fresh criticism; George Kennan was already articulating it in the ’50s. (Interestingly, Kennan suggests that perhaps our diplomatic structures are insufficiently democratically responsive, causing strange tensions between popular will and policy, and that the parliamentary system of confidence votes may be preferable in this respect. I have my doubts.) The fundamental problem may in fact be insoluble—republican government may just be incompatible with first-rate foreign policy, which is one reason to reduce a republic’s involvement in the affairs of other nations. That does not mean the problem cannot be ameliorated.

My good friend Philip Linderman wrote, with Marcus Thornton, a proposal for changing Foreign Service hiring so that it draws from a wider pool of talent and encourages a more politically responsible, national interest-based outlook among our professional diplomats. A professional formation more strongly oriented toward American national interest would in time allow the relaxation of certain obstacles to real diplomatic competence. For example, the Foreign Service rotates officers on a regular basis ultimately to prevent client capture, that is to say, to keep the officers from becoming representatives of the countries where they work to the U.S. rather than representatives of the U.S. to those countries. This does seem to work reasonably well for its stated goal, but it also tends to prevent FSOs from developing any real local expertise or clout. If we were less worried about client capture and diplomatic freelancing, we could allow FSOs to become better at their jobs.

This would not change the difficulty inherent in the seasonal changes of democratic politics (although a professional diplomatic corps whose advice political leaders felt they could take seriously and with less suspicion would, I think, temper certain excesses). That difficulty can be tempered only by a change in political culture—an electorate less inclined to believe our own national propaganda, and politicians less inclined to spout it. In this, President Donald Trump has been an unequivocally salutary influence; his justifications for policy refer back to the national interest without exception. They are not always very good justifications, or justifications that line up with the actions under consideration, which may in fact reflect the persistence of ideological goals. But at least this rhetoric brings policy out of the rarefied air of ideals into the realm of honest, pragmatic deliberation. 

This approach assumes that Americans are adults who can be reasoned with, rather than children to be dazzled or menaced with bedtime stories—that is to say, that they are something like citizens in a democratic republic. We are no longer a young country. The only way for our foreign policy to grow up is for us to grow up, too.