Yes, it's the Marshall Plan. Inevitably and undoubtedly, President Truman's 1945 Marshall Plan was the best foreign policy decision the United States ever made. The Council on Foreign Relations briefed members yesterday on the outcome of its partnership with the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) to identify the Top 10 Best and Worst U.S. foreign policy decisions.
The worst? Well, there's no shortage of deserving candidates that SHAFR members analyzed and voted on. The spectacular American failure in Vietnam - both the decision to go to war and the manner in which we fought it - registered two places in the ignominious Top Ten: President Johnson's 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as well as his massive troop deployments in 1965, which earned the second worst designation. Still, Johnson and later President Nixon's deadly foolishness and duplicity in Vietnam could not compete with President Bush Jr.'s astonishingly stupid 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The SHARF historians also listed among the five best U.S. decisions the creation of the United Nations in 1945, Treaty of Alliance with France in 1778, Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and Lend-Lease Act of 1941. I might not rate the United Nations creation that high, and I would move higher on the list President Kennedy's nimble handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The historians placed that event at #10.
The other three worst decisions among their top five were the heinous Indian Removal Act of 1830, President Eisenhower's overthrow of Iran's democratically elected Mossadegh in 1957 led by the Dulles brothers at State and CIA, and the 1919 Senate rejection of the Treaty of Versailles. The U.S. excels at overthrowing national leaders, generally in violation of U.S. and international law, so Guatemala's Guzmán in 1954 and Chile's Allende in 1973 would not be too far down the list. We'll see what now happens in the aftermath of Maduro's ouster in Venezuela this month. No matter how many times we invoke Santayana's 1905 injunction, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," we keep repeating it.
My favorite Kennedy School course many decades ago was "Uses of History in Decision-Making" taught by an amazing quad of luminaries: the late Richard Neustadt and former SHARF President Ernie May as well as Greg Treverton and Bob Blackwill. The Kennedy School Dean at the time was Graham Allison and his #2 was Al Carnesale. Treverton (USC), Blackwill (Council on Foreign Relations), Allison (Kennedy School), and Carnesale (UCLA) were all on the Zoom yesterday. That itself was rather historic.