Top U.S. Expert on North Korea Steps Down
I’d have to call that a net loss, and the idea of regional experts being forced out (if that’s what happened) because they are “out of sync with administration policy” is not a happy one.
One problem is that these experts serve a dual role. They are expected to provide the administration with information, analysis, and advice, and they are also supposed to implement administration policy as it comes back in the other direction. Ideally, they should be totally independent in the first role and totally subservient in the second, but in practice it rarely works out that way. It must be difficult for area experts, many of whom know a great deal about their fields of expertise, to see their input discarded and to have to implement policies that come from individuals who know very little about the subject. It must also be difficult for the administration to see policies that it believes, rightly or wrongly, to be right, challenged by functionaries that are supposed to hear and obey. It would be best for all if these differences could be resolved, but apparently that’s not possible, and they end result is that we go into negotiations without the services of one of our most experienced negotiators. I can’t say I completely agree with either side of that dispute, but the outcome is not a happy one.
I wouldn’t say that the area experts should write policy. They shouldn’t, and they shouldn’t try. But any administration that ignores them does so at its peril, and ours, especially if they do so for ideological reasons.
One of the things I like least about ideologues, of every stripe, is the notion that “compromise” is somehow a dirty word. |
