American foreign policy is not made by any single institution. It is the residual output of the institutional competition between the State Department, the Pentagon, the NSC, and the intelligence community.
The Competitive Production of Foreign Policy
American foreign policy is produced through an institutional competition whose outcome is shaped more by the relative bureaucratic power of the competing institutions than by the coherent strategic judgment of any single decision-maker. The State Department claims primary authority for diplomatic relations and foreign policy formulation. The Department of Defence claims primary authority for military operations and security assistance. The National Security Council claims the authority to coordinate both, under the direction of the President. The intelligence community claims the authority to define the threat environment within which all foreign policy decisions are made. These overlapping claims are not resolved by any formal hierarchy — they are contested in every significant foreign policy decision through the interagency process that is the arena in which bureaucratic power is exercised and foreign policy is made.
The interagency process — the system of deputies committees, principals committees, and National Security Council meetings through which foreign policy decisions are coordinated across agencies — is simultaneously the mechanism through which competing institutional perspectives are integrated and the mechanism through which institutional interests shape the options that reach the President. The options that the interagency process produces reflect the compromises that were necessary to achieve interagency consensus, the information that each agency chose to share and to withhold, and the institutional interests that shaped each agency's position. The President who receives interagency options is receiving the output of this process, not the full range of the available choices.
Foreign policy is the residual output of institutional competition. The coherent strategic vision that the policy's advocates describe is the narrative that winners of the institutional competition construct after the fact. Understanding American foreign policy requires understanding who won the bureaucratic competition that produced each decision — and why.
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