"The world has entered a period of high crisis. Wars rage in Europe and the Middle East, and the threat of war looms in East Asia. In Russia, China, and North Korea, the United States faces three hostile states with nuclear weapons and, in Iran, another on the verge of acquiring them. Beyond the headlines, states are failing in Africa, Latin America, and Southwest Asia, and enormous migrations are in motion. Having just weathered a pandemic that was the costliest crisis since 1945, the United States must now contend with other urgent transnational challenges, such as managing energy transition amid a deteriorating climate, the rapid development of artificial intelligence, and a global capitalist system under more pressure than it has been for decades. Unpacked, each one of these issues has its own set of complex problems that few understand. And on almost every issue, whether they like the Americans or resent them, people in the world look to the U.S. government for help, if only in organizing the work.

The Americans cannot meet this demand. Their supply of effective policies is limited. The United States does not have the breadth and depth of competence—capabilities and know-how—in its contemporary government. The problem has existed for decades, as has been depressingly evident from time to time. What is new is the context. The current period of crisis challenges the United States and the other countries of the free world more than anything has in at least 60 years. They will have to cultivate new qualities of practical leadership.

Saying what to do is the easy part. Designing how to do it is the hard part.. “Ideas are not policies,” Dean Rusk observed while serving as U.S. secretary of state. “Besides, ideas have a high infant-mortality rate.” An even more experienced statesman, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, commented that “hope flies on wings, and international conferences plod afterwards along dusty roads.”

The “how” is the “craft” in statecraft. Most of what the U.S. government does is distribute money and set rules. Relatively few parts of it mount policy operations, especially diplomatic ones. Doing so requires complex teamwork. Officials must master international choreographies, intricacies of law and practice, and a bewildering variety of instruments, cultures, and institutions spanning societies. The ability to do all that is a fading art in the United States and the rest of the free world. As it fades, handwringing and platitudes take its place. Officials paper over the gaps with meetings and pronouncements.
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Competence is a function of capabilities and know-how. When it comes to doing things in the world, Americans’ supply of both is constrained by two deep structural conditions. The first has been with the country, in varying degrees, since its founding: a sense of detachment. America is usually detached from foreign problems, often by a great distance, and Americans feel detached, too. Fortunate in its geology and continental breadth, the United States has never depended all that much on foreign commerce or foreign commodities. Public interest in foreign engagement—political, military, or economic—is limited. More than half of all Americans do not own a passport. Only one-third of them can find Taiwan on a map.

The second factor limiting the United States’ global engagement is newer: its now limited repertoire of what it can do abroad. The repertoire dramatically expanded, as so much did, during World War II and the Cold War.. By the middle of the twentieth century, U.S. officials were famous across the world for their know-how, esteemed as enterprising, imaginative problem solvers who could do almost anything in war or peace. The United States had helped organize D-Day, built the first atomic bomb, fed millions of people amid the ruins of Europe and Asia, rescued Western Europe with the Marshall Plan, and overcome a Soviet blockade with the Berlin airlift. Washington even helped eradicate smallpox.

These and other awe-inspiring deeds drew on the exceptional and decentralized problem-solving culture of American business and civic planning that emerged in the twentieth century. The paradigmatic discipline of American business at the time was engineering. This can-do culture improved the way policy was designed and managed and encouraged strong habits of written staff work. It had emerged from vast and stressful trial and error, with plenty of rivalry and confusion."

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/atrophy-american-statecraft-zelikow