Lately I’ve found myself beginning speeches about the foreign policy challenges facing the next president this way: “I want to speak today to all the parents in the room: Mom, Dad, if your son or daughter comes home from college and says, ‘I want to be the U.S. secretary of state someday,’ tell them: ‘Honey, whatever you want to be is fine, but please, please, don’t be secretary of state. It is the worst job in the world. Secretary of education, secretary of agriculture, secretary of commerce — no problem. But promise us that you won’t become secretary of state.’”
The reason: The job of running U.S. foreign policy is far, far harder than most Americans have ever spent time considering. It’s a near-impossibility in an age when you have to manage superpowers, super-corporations, super-empowered individuals and networks, superstorms, super-failing states and super-intelligence — all intermingling with one another, creating an incredibly complex web of problems to untangle to get anything done.
In the Cold War, heroic diplomacy was always within reach. Think of Henry Kissinger. He needed just three dimes, an airplane and a few months of shuttle diplomacy to put together the historic post-1973 October war disengagement agreements between Israel, Egypt and Syria. He used one dime to call President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, one dime to call Prime Minister Golda Meir of Israel and one dime to call President Hafez al-Assad of Syria. Presto: tic-tac-toe — Egypt, Syria and Israel in their first peace accords since the 1949 armistice agreements.
Kissinger was dealing with countries. Antony Blinken was not so lucky when he became the 71st secretary of state in 2021. Blinken — along with the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and the C.I.A. director, Bill Burns — have played a difficult hand well, but just compare the Middle East they have had to deal with to Kissinger’s. The region has been transformed — from a region of solid nation-states to one increasingly made of failed states, zombie states and super-empowered angry men armed with precision rockets.
I am talking about Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, the Houthis in Yemen and Shiite militias in Iraq. Virtually everywhere Blinken, Sullivan and Burns looked when they mounted their shuttle diplomacy after Oct. 7, 2023, they saw double — the official Lebanese government and Hezbollah’s network, the official Yemeni government and the Houthi network, and the official Iraqi government and the Iranian-directed Shiite militia networks.
In Syria, you have a Syrian government in charge in Damascus, and the rest of the country is a patchwork of zones controlled by Russia, Iran, Turkey, Hezbollah, and U.S. and Kurdish forces. The Hamas network in Gaza could be reached only via Qatari and Egyptian mediators. And even Hamas had a military wing inside Gaza and a political wing outside Gaza.
