How the Trump administration makes foreign policy decisions

The Technocratic versus Factional Processes

The Trump administration has made a lot of surprising foreign policy decisions in its first month in office. It has, among its many, many policy initiatives, eviscerated U.S. foreign assistance, advanced a policy of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, launched a peace process with Russia, and renamed the Gulf of Mexico. The speed, breadth, and idiosyncratic nature of these decisions naturally raises the question of how exactly the Trump administration decides on its foreign policy.

Of course, as always, the President is the ultimate decider. But in an organism as large and complex as the US government, the President cannot make all the decisions or even understand all the issues involved. He must seek advice, he must establish some sort of policy process, however ad hoc, and he must rely on others to carry out his decisions.

So, as is so often said, personnel is policy and the process through which policy is decided matters for the outcome. Recognizing this, many governments of U.S. allies and partners put enormous efforts during the election and transition periods into understanding who might be influential in a potential Trump administration. They often made many good contacts in TrumpWorld and even succeeded at predicting who some of the key appointments might be.

But in the first month of the administration, they have found those contacts have not been very helpful in predicting or even understanding what the Trump administration will do. Anecdotally, they describe situations in which even contacts in key positions often end up misleading them about what Trump administration policy is.

Allied ambassadors express shock that even senior administration officials didn’t know, for example, that President Trump was about to propose that the US take over Greenland. They are confused when Mike Waltz, Trump’s National Security Advisor, suggests that Trump doesn’t really mean it when he proposed the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, only to have him double down the next week and propose that the US annex the territory.

If even the National Security Advisor cannot be counted on to know what is happening, how are decisions made in the administration?

It is not the case that President is simply acting on impulse without any advice whatsoever (though it does often appear that way). Many of these ideas do not seem to originate with Trump. The idea for Greenland, for example, supposedly came from a business associate. Even those ideas that do come from Trump himself, such as the idea to annex Gaza were run through multiple advisors, even if none of them were Waltz. Some policy initiatives, for example the plan to dismantle USAID, seem reasonably sophisticated in conception and execution. There is, in other words a policy process of some sort in the Trump administration. But what is it?

The proposition in this post is that Trump has shifted the US government from a technocratic policy process to a factional policy process. Both decision processes seek to harness the wisdom of the many to make better decisions than one person could make alone, while also preserving innovation and the leader’s room for decision. But they take radically different approaches to that goal. The difference also explains why it is harder to identify the key players on any given policy. Here I will explain both approaches and then offer some suggestions for coping with Trump’s factional approach.

The Technocratic Policy Process

A technocratic process starts from the premise that different parts of the government have different skills, equities, and viewpoints. It seeks through the so-called Interagency Process, to bring together all these viewpoints into an orderly process that can consider them all and offer viable options to the President. An idea either begins from the top or bubbles up from below, but in either case it is inserted into this process so that all the relevant actors can express their concerns and institutional interests and be aware that the idea is under consideration.

This process is often very competitive. Arguments are constant and often intense. Bureaucratic interests dominate the conversations and the idea of “where you sit determines where you stand” is the best guide to understanding disputes. But the process has a certain orderliness to it that allows disputes to be settled or at least contained within the interagency process.

In foreign policy, the process is overseen by the National Security Council (NSC, which has a mandate both to represent the will of the President and to serve as an honest broker amongst the agencies. It convenes and runs frequent interagency meetings on all levels. The NSC is thus usually the single best source of information about what is going on in US foreign policy.

From the point of view of the President, the process is meant to ensure that all relevant actors have their say, that the key options are evaluated and elevated to him for decision, and that the broader government knows what is going on. From the outside, the process means that if your government contact has a place in the process, you can expect that he or she will at least understand what is happening.

Of course, this is an ideal type. In any administration, the process does not always work. Disappointed actors leak internal disputes to the press, those with special access to higher leaders work around the process, and some issues are simply too sensitive to risk exposing to so many eyes. The NSC staff often has its own views and manipulates that the process to its advantage. But the very existence of the process creates a norm within the government to follow it. Violations of the norm require justification and empower others to cry foul and re-open the issue.

The Factional Policy Process

A factional process is quite different. The idea in a factional process is to more explicitly pit parts of the government against each other in a competition to find the best answer for the President. In the view of many leaders, a technocratic process promotes collusion among the lower levels of the government and facilities conspiracies within the deep state to hide or deny options to the top.

To avoid this, the President states a broad goal – “bring me peace in Ukraine” – and tasks multiple individuals or bureaucracies with the goal of figuring out how to implement it in a fashion that appears redundant or at least confusing to outsiders. Multiple envoys or agencies all attack the problem separately. They see themselves as competing for the President’s attention and approval and so seek to provide a solution to the President with as little as interaction with other actors as possible. They will also seek out all sorts of informal channels to get their ideas in front of the President. Ideally, the President can then select among the solutions offered or simply impose one of his own on a divided bureaucracy.

In a factional policy process, there is basically no interagency process and NSC is only one of the factions. It has no special role in the process, except that it might be able to use its proximity to the President as an asset in factional competition. Interagency meetings, especially at lower levels, are few and far between.

In the end, a factional process has the advantage of providing the President with options he might not see in a technocratic process. But those options will often be less mature and less vetted against the multiple equities within the executive branch. A factional process also implies that people across the government will have less insight into what is going on and so may mislead outsiders. Officials may believe that the solution being worked up in their agency is the intended solution when in fact it is only part of a competition. Or they may hope to use outsiders in their internal factional competition and so purposefully mislead them.

Factional policy processes are much more common in authoritarian systems in which the leader will often be nervous about a deep state conspiracy or even a coup. Pitting the factions against each other has the advantage of ensuring that they do not unite against him. A technocratic process, by contrast, provides a convenient forum for exactly such conspiracies.

President Trump with his deep distrust of the deep state and his sense from his first term that even his political appointees often conspired against would similarly see some obvious advantages in a more factional process. In foreign policy, the existence of multiple, overlapping envoys, confused statements from the NSC, and contradictory plans leaking from different agencies all imply that Trump is de facto using a factional process.

Coping with the Factional Process

We could have an interesting theoretical discussion about which policy process creates better outcomes. But regardless Trump, for the reasons that probably have little to do with policy outcomes, has clearly chosen a factional process. So, the question for the moment for those outside the administration is how should this change how we understand and interact with the US government?

First and foremost, don’t believe in the formal processes or assume that even fairly high-level officials are looped into the actual policy discussion. In the Trump administration, you cannot read a person’s influence off an organigram or even assume that people have the information that their jobs would ordinarily require. Informal mechanisms will predominate, and everything will be subsumed by factional competition.

Second, in trying to influence a factional process, outsiders need to move beyond the policy value of their position, and present their ideas in ways that reflect an understanding of the factional competition that defines the policy process. It doesn’t matter whether your plan for peace in Ukraine is better for America or the world. It matters how it impacts the factional competition. For any given debate, an outsider needs to ask which specific policymaker can benefit from his assistance, perhaps by using the outside authority as a weapon in the internal struggles over government policy. For example, a Department of Defense policymaker armed in recent weeks with surveys showing that Ukraine’s mineral wealth was illusory might have been able to use that to resist the effort to de facto create US defense obligations through a deal ceding much of Ukraine’s mineral wealth to the United States.

In the end, it is much harder to influence or even understand a factional policy process. It is by design opaque, redundant, and contradictory. But elections have consequences, and this is one of them.