Influencing Policy from Outside

I have spent my entire career trying to influence American foreign policy, both from inside the government and outside of it. Recently, reflecting on two particular episodes when I sought to influence from outside, at the two ends of my career, gave me the chance to ponder what I had learned.

By Gregory F. Treverton

Note: The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of SMA, Inc.

I have spent my entire career trying to influence American foreign policy, both from inside the government and outside of it. Recently, reflecting on two particular episodes when I sought to influence from outside, at the two ends of my career, gave me the chance to ponder what I had learned. The first came after I left government for the second time, in 1979, and was at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London; the second was three decades later, while I was at the RAND Corporation. The first episode was an issue that had seized me as a young staffer handling Europe on the Carter administration National Security Council (NSC) staff—the issue variously referred to as gray area nuclear weapons, intermediate nuclear forces (INF) or long-range theater nuclear weapons (LFTNF). The later book end was an opportunity to work with RAND graduate students to help South Sudan think about the issues involved in its 2011 vote on seceding from Sudan.

Intermediate Nuclear Forces

My first effort to influence policy from outside was what was then called the “gray area” nuclear issue. I had become convinced in my time handling Europe on the NSC staff that it was important, but as with so many nuclear issues, the substance bordered on theology. Now, out of government, I first had to persuade the editor of Foreign Affairs, Bill Bundy, of that importance. I finally managed to do so, and my article appeared in the Summer 1979 issue.[1]

At the fringes of public attention to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), the United States and its European allies were considering changes in NATO nuclear arrangements that bore on two decades of Alliance practice. The issue was what to do about the nuclear threat to Western Europe, and to NATO’s deterrent, posed by Soviet systems targeted on Western Europe—the SS‑20 mobile missile and other Soviet weapons in the “gray area” between strategic and tactical—hence the theology. Those weapons, along with strategic nuclear parity between the United States and the Soviet Union, had sharpened a long-standing European concern about the commitment of the American central nuclear deterrent to Europe’s defense. I thought then that this issue ranked behind only the dollar on the agenda of U.S. relations with Europe in the several years ahead.

There were—and still are—no once-and-for-all solutions to the gray area problem. So long as Europe ultimately depended on the American strategic deterrent, there would remain the paradox that NATO’s doctrine rested on an American response even when American soil was not attacked. All that could be done was to manage that paradox. In confronting the gray area question in the late 1970s, the United States and its allies faced interlocking choices of force posture and negotiation. The choices were simply stated: to adopt new political measures, to deploy new weapons capable of striking the Soviet Union, to seek negotiated constraints on Soviet systems, or some combination of all these.

As I saw the gray area issues at the time, a few issues seemed clear enough. First, NATO should deploy new Euromissiles of its own, no doubt some combination of ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs, pronounced “glick-ems”) and Pershing II ballistic missiles, a longer-range version of the Pershing IA already deployed in Europe. To reduce the pressure on West Germany, the deployments should be made in as many countries as possible. Second, those deployments would roil politics in western Europe, raising questions about whether the new missiles actually would be deployed. And third, in an effort to square the circle in European domestic politics, some arms control initiative would be required.

In end, in December 1979, NATO reached the so-called dual-track decision.[2] The Alliance would deploy 572 new nuclear missiles in Europe: 108 Pershing IIs, and 464 GLCMs. The cruise missiles were to be placed in England, West Germany, Italy (in Sicily), 48 the Netherlands, and Belgium. All the Pershing IIs would be emplaced in West Germany replacing the existing Pershing 1As. The deployments would begin in 1983. That was track one.

Track two was an offer to immediately open negotiations with the Soviet Union on the pledge to forego the NATO deployments if Moscow ended or limited its SS‑20 deployments. Predictably, Moscow’s reaction was prompt and negative. The NATO decision had destroyed all basis for arms control talks. Less than two weeks after the NATO decision, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and in reaction President Carter pulled out of the SALT II talks. The arms control track seemed dead on arrival, and attention turned to whether, with anti-nuclear protests rising in Europe, the Europeans could actually make good on their commitments to deploy the new missiles.

In the end, NATO was saved by the unlikely tandem of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1981, Reagan, the politician, proposed the “zero option”: NATO would not deploy the Pershings and GLCMs if the Soviet Union removed its SS-20s and other INF, For us arms control experts, that was a non-starter: why in the world would Mikhail Gorbachev agree to exchange his SS-20s that existed for GLCMs and Pershings that didn’t, and when, to boot, the process of trying to deploy them would put European NATO members through a political wringer? But he did. Zero was zero.

Dividing Divided States

A Silicon Valley foundation, Humanity United, had a wonderful young staffer, Dave Mozersky. He and the foundation had the prescience to notice that South Sudan, which had been battling the north since the 1950s, would vote in 2011 on whether to secede from Sudan. They also realized that in part because of the “thou shall not change African borders” dictum the international community was doing little to prepare for the vote and its aftermath. They realized that there was ample scope for Track II, or unofficial, diplomacy, and they had the wisdom, from my perspective, to come to RAND.

I worked with RAND graduate students to prepare papers on a series of cases to draw lessons from other states that divided about how to handle the range of issues from citizenship, refugees and security, to oil and water, to national assets and currency, to pastoralists who traditionally moved easily across what were soon to become international borders.[3] They would do the papers, and I would do summaries to either brief or send to leaders in South Sudan. A trip to the region was visible testament to how different the north and south were: South Sudan looked and felt like sub-Saharan Africa, while the north, Khartoum, seemed very much a part of the Middle East.

Lessons Learned

What I learned from the two episodes can be summed up along two dimensions, timing and leadership.

Timing. My timing was not bad for INF, for I was onto the issue early. I’ve come to think that influence, especially from the outside, is most likely early on, when decision-makers have not yet decided whether the issue before them is important, and don’t know its shape: is it an apple or an orange? What my work on INF—and that of others—did was to suggest that the issue was important, and begin to put some shape to it as requiring NATO to both pledge to deploy new missiles, and actually deploy them if need be, as well as venturesome arms control proposals as, at worst, some political cover for the deployments. We couldn’t imagine that Reagan would propose the “zero option,” let alone that Gorbachev would accept it. Perhaps those developments go in the category of “preparation improves your luck.”

In my experience, once political leaders have decided their position, analysis from inside or outside hardly ever induces them to change their minds. I visualize policymaking, especially in Washington, as quite independence swirls of problems and policy proposals: problems are looking for solutions, but solutions are also looking for problems. It is the coming together of a proposal and problem of roughly the same shape that makes for progress. Otherwise, the swirls just churn, with politicians unhappy with the proposals they are offered and policy entrepreneurs disappointed that they can’t get in the door.

In contrast, RAND’s good work on Sudan’s secession was probably way too late. It might have made more of difference right after the so-call Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005, or even before. After all, the north and south had been fighting in one form or another since 1955, even before independence from Britain. By 2009, nothing we could have written or said was likely to persuade politicians in the South that an independent South Sudan would be lucky if it continued to get what it was then receiving, half the revenue from the oil it produced. Becoming a sovereign state wasn’t going to change the fact of its dependence on export lines that went through the North.

Leadership. Both episodes, and especially Sudan, highlighted a familiar issue, one hardly confined to efforts to influence from the outside, and that is the importance of leadership. The special challenge of influencing from the outside is having access to people who matter. Being on the inside sometimes provides the opportunity to make a difference by simply acting. Influencing from the outside requires persuading someone else to act. At the time of the CPA, both parts of Sudan, and particularly the South, had leaders who both were prepared to take some risk and were able to carry their constituents with them. By the time we RANDites began working with them, some of the leaders were impressive but even they were less able to bring their people along, and more constrained by past words and events.

I was also never sure whether our good papers got to and were digested by the senior leaders in South Sudan. It isn’t hard to imagine how chaotic the atmosphere was, with foreign governments interested but cautious about acting and a scuffle of non-profit organizations, including ours, trying to make some difference. It reminded me of a lesson I had learned long before at RAND. RAND is a contract research house, so when the government asks it to do a project for it, the government pays for the work, which should make for a certain attention to what we produced. Yet, still, I concluded that if, for example, the project was for a military organization, I needed a three-star to make something happen but a lieutenant colonel to be my day-to-day contact in getting the project to a point where something could happen.

Leadership was visible behind the scenes in the INF case. Surely, Reagan’s proposal was leadership of the kind that none of us technocrats would have produced. And while Washington sometimes saw German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt as a pain, he was both prepared to have Germany accept the new missiles if need be and to keep the Alliance focused on the second of the “dual track”—arms control. Social scientists, whether historians or specialists in international relations, often try to identify great global trends or watershed moments in world history. But from the inside it seems apparent that leaders don’t just ride those great historical currents. They sometimes shape them.

Gregory F. Treverton stepped down as Chair of the US National Intelligence Council in 2017. He is now Professor of the Practice at Dornsife College, University of Southern California, Chair of the Global TechnoPolitics Forum, and an SMA Executive Advisor.

[1] What follows is excerpted and edited from that article. ‘Europe and America: Nuclear Weapons and the ‘Gray Area,’” Foreign Affairs, 57, 5 (Summer 1979).

[2] Sarkar Jayita, “Whither Pax Atomica?—The EUROMISSILES Crisis and the Peace Movement of the Early 1980s,” Wilson Center, available at https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/whither-pax-atomica-the-euromissiles-crisis-and-the-peace-movement-the-early-1980s.

[3] Those cases and commentaries are collected in Gregory F. Treverton, Dividing Divided States, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014