December 23, 2008 5:10PM # More Power to State By [Benjamin H. Friedman](https://www.cato.org/people/benjamin-friedman) --- SHARE [](https://www.cato.org/2008/04/18/gao-plan-for-pakistan-better-planning/)*The New York Times* [reports](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/us/politics/23diplo.html?_r=1) on Hillary Clinton’s efforts to reassert the State Department’s power over US foreign policy. This is, in one sense, good news. A bloated budget and far flung combatant commanders have allowed the Pentagon to [trample](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/19/AR2008121902748.html) over Foggy Bottom in recent years. That is bad not because diplomats are inherently wiser than generals, but because the competition of relatively balanced bureaucratic powers is [generally](http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118918192/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0) conducive to wise policy. The trouble here is the [idea](http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2008/12/23/shift/), hinted at in the *Times* story, that increased State Department capacity will bring success in state-building missions. A peculiar hubris of Democratic foreign policy analysts is their confidence that they have discovered a science of nation-building by watching the Bush Administration screw up. They see [errors](http://www.amazon.com/Fiasco-American-Military-Adventure-Iraq/dp/B001E96KKK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230069242&sr=1-1) on the road to chaos during the occupation of Iraq and assume causality. They read a [little](http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Eat-Soup-Knife-Counterinsurgency/dp/0226567702/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230069198&sr=8-1) about counter-insurgency and the *Small Wars Journal* [blog](http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/). Avoid the errors, apply the best practices, and you are gold, they say. So: more troops, better plans, more interagency coordination, more reconstruction, and so on — and, presto, you can “[fix](http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/fixing_afghanistan/)” failed states that you occupy, like Afghanistan, or even states you don’t occupy, like [Pakistan](http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/04/fata.html). As I wrote [here](https://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9139) and said last [week](https://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=5609), this would-be science provides leaders with confidence they should not have to undertake dumb wars or to establish [excessive](https://www.cato.org/2008/11/01/state-building-vs-counterinsurgency/) goals for sensible wars. Hopefully, I will be proved wrong in Afghanistan, where we are about to test this kind of thinking. ##### Related Tags [Defense and Foreign Policy](https://www.cato.org/defense-foreign-policy) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).