It has been a bad decade for America’s foreign-policy and intelligence establishment. We’ve seen a devastating terrorist attack in America’s largest city, followed by two protracted wars fraught with strategic missteps. Meanwhile, in the face of threats to our security, the country’s intelligence-gathering methods have been the subject sharp political and moral disagreement.
If there is any hope of fixing America’s national-security apparatus, there’s a good chance that hope lies within a large, but discreet, brick townhouse in downtown Washington, D.C. From the street, the Institute of World Politics (IWP) may not look like much — and in fact, IWP tries to keep a relatively low profile — but the 18-year-old graduate school is fast becoming an influential force in the world of international affairs.
IWP takes an integrated approach to teaching all aspects of foreign policy — even relatively obscure subjects. “The culture here is guns and rockets and boxes of cash and the diplomacy concerning those matters,” explains John Lenczowski, IWP’s president and founder. “There are all of these other non-military arts that have been neglected.”
And there’s ample evidence that our current unsophisticated approach to foreign policy isn’t helping. “We heard Secretary of State Colin Powell talk about using all of the instruments of power, and yet for all of that talk, they were not used,” Lenczowski observes. “Even by the last year of the Bush administration, the president was saying we’re in a war of ideas. Tell me, Mr. President, which agency of yours hires warriors of ideas? Which one cultivates them in a career track? The answer is none of them.”
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Lenczowski isn’t just an academic observer. He worked on national-security issues in Congress, at the State Department, and eventually at the National Security Council in the Reagan White House. Along the way, he taught at the University of Maryland and spent 15 years at Georgetown. Sitting in his office on the top floor of IWP, Lenczowski says the school’s unique curriculum was born of his frustration with the foreign-policy establishment.
“I was interested in the related question of public diplomacy, which is relations with foreign societies and not just governments. I worked on these things during the Reagan administration, and I found that the foreign-policy establishment had a tin ear towards them,” says Lenczowski. While the establishment may not have listened when Reagan called the USSR an “evil empire” and challenged Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” the people of the Communist bloc heard him loud and clear.
“I would argue — as we’ve seen how history has played out — that public diplomacy played the decisive role in putting the most important straws on the Soviet camel’s back, when it came to the collapse of the Soviet empire, which the materialistic foreign-policy culture cannot and does not to date understand.”
But public diplomacy was just one of many things America’s international-affairs community did not understand. Lenczowski found that the academic establishment was also unwilling to acknowledge the shortcomings of its approach to foreign policy when, at Georgetown, his attempts to change the curriculum provoked academic turf wars.
So he did something that would have been unthinkable to most persons in his position — he started his own graduate university. The school’s first-year budget was $83,000, and it offered credit through an affiliation with Boston University. Early on, most of its students were careerists in the intelligence and foreign-policy establishment. The school finally became accredited in 2006 — no small achievement — and currently has 129 students. The curriculum, which requires 52 credits for a graduate degree, is about as tough as they come.
After 18 years of trying to create a curriculum that addresses America’s considerable foreign-policy failings, Lenczowski’s metaphors are finely honed. “I consider [neglected non-military arts] to be instruments in the orchestra that is the symphony of our foreign policy. We try and conduct this foreign policy without entire sectors of the orchestra, or the conductors are unaware of the certain sections of the orchestra, or the trumpets blare loudly when it’s the time of the symphony to listen to the harp,” he says. “What you have is a lack of strategic thinking on behalf of everyone, both the conductors and some of the main musicians,” he says.
Lenczowski boasts that IWP is conducting its own symphony.
“We have been preaching here all the instruments of national power for the last 18 years. We teach military strategy, we teach intelligence — we’re the only school that teaches counterintelligence. We arguably have the strongest intelligence program in the country,” he says. “We’re the only school, by the way, that teaches political warfare. And there are some people who say, ‘Political warfare — that’s something dirty and un-American.’ Well, the people who say that would rather kill somebody than persuade them.”
