I have an article up at The National Interest asking those questions:
At the Cato Institute, we examined the terminal degrees of all cabinet-level foreign policy officials since 1945—secretaries of state and war/defense, CIA directors, national security advisors, UN ambassadors, secretaries of Homeland Security, and directors of national intelligence—and found that of these 157 individuals, fifty-five (or 35 percent) held a JD/LLB as their highest educational achievement, whereas just sixteen (or 10 percent) held history or political science PhDs.
Why do American politicians prefer having lawyers run foreign policy, rather than historians or political scientists? Should they? The answers aren’t obvious.
There are a lot of possible responses, but probably the one with the most explanatory power is endogeneity: as I write in the article, “law degrees are overrepresented among politicians, and politicians frequently wind up in cabinet national security positions… So, it may not be the case that each administration necessarily sets out to find lawyers to run foreign policy; there just happen to be an awful lot of lawyers scurrying around DC.”
Lawyers’ domination of American public life is, of course, nothing new. As de Tocqueville wrote, lawyers “form the political upper class… American aristocracy is found at the bar and on the bench.” And at least when it comes to Congress, there’s an obvious affinity between the study of the law and the creation of laws.
But what about foreign policy? Few would argue that international law is the prime consideration of US foreign policy. So what skills do lawyers learn that justify their outsized role in the commanding heights of international politics? The answer to that question isn’t clear to me at all.
As a partisan of political science, and to a lesser extent history, I think the social sciences have a lot to offer the practice of U.S. foreign policy. And there are some political scientists below the principals level: just in the Biden administration, one could name Colin Kahl, Mara Karlin, Rebecca Lissner, Mira Rapp-Hooper, and Ely Ratner. So perhaps it’s just a matter of time until folks like them make their way up to the Secretary level.
But to make real progress, it seems like we would need to shrink the role of lawyers in public life. One recent article suggests that is already happening. Nick Robinson describes a “slow, but steady decline” in the number of lawyers in public office:
In the mid-nineteenth century, almost 80% of members of Congress were lawyers. By the 1960s, this dropped to under 60%, and in the 114th Congress, the number of lawyer-members in the Congress was slightly under 40%.
Robinson suggests lawyers are being replaced by “an increasingly specialized political class” of political aides and other DC-adjacent civil society roles. (On first blush, this sounds like it could be even worse than lawyers.)
For their part, political scientists have opposed U.S. foreign policy frequently, arguing that NATO expansion was likely to cause trouble, the Iraq War was a mistake, the Afghanistan surge was a mistake, and U.S.-China relations were headed for trouble. At least three of those four points are now grudgingly conceded by the U.S. foreign policy establishment, after brutal failures. Our foreign policy might be better served by bringing in more social scientists.
