“Whatever It Takes”: Danger,Necessity,and Realism in American Public Policy

Two Mentalities of Rule

The chain of crises that have confronted the United States over the last 20 years have changed public attitudes about the proper role of government. These years of crisis have also affected the way that leaders think about the work of governing—what is sometimes called the “mentality of rule” (Dean, 2010, pp. 24–25; Foucault, 2008; Miller & Rose, 1990, p. 2). The idealism of the late 1990s has given way to a new age of realism, in which American leaders are often ready to “do whatever it takes” to protect the country’s vital interests.

Among specialists in foreign policy, the distinction between idealist and realist mentalities is familiar (Bull, 2002, pp. 23–26; Carr, 1946, pp. 1–21). An idealist thinks that statecraft can and should be guided by a set of clearly stated and morally defensible principles, and balks at compromising those principles to win short-term victories. A realist is skeptical that any set of principles can provide clear guidance on how to exercise power in a complicated and dangerous world, and believes that bending principles is not only justifiable but unavoidable. Realists pride themselves for their pragmatism and dismiss idealists as dreamers. Idealists pride themselves for their integrity and dismiss realists as schemers.

President Woodrow Wilson is often identified as the prototypical idealist in foreign affairs: a man of high principle who refused to cut corners in international negotiations (Cook, 2011). By contrast, President Richard Nixon is remembered as the prototypical realist, ready to dispense with principles to protect vital interests (Gewen, 2020, Chapter 1; Kissinger, 1994, Chapter 2). This distinction can be applied to domestic as well as foreign affairs. Some remember President Barack Obama for his “rhetoric of hope . . . [and] vaulting idealism,” while President Lyndon Johnson is remembered as a realist who was ready to make cynical deals when necessary (Caro, 2002, pp. 456 and 909; Ferrara, 2013, p. 16).

We should think of idealism and realism as tendencies rather than separate categories. No realist can survive the electoral process without articulating some principles. And every idealist bends at some point. Thomas Jefferson expressed high-flown notions about human dignity and constitutionalism, but relaxed these principles to appease slave states and purchase the Louisiana territory. “On great occasions,” Jefferson conceded, “every good officer must be ready to risk himself in going beyond the strict line of the law, when the public preservation requires it” (White, 1951, p. 6). Abraham Lincoln extolled “a government of laws” but refused to comply with a Supreme Court decision on habeas corpus during the Civil War, because “Government itself [would] go to pieces” otherwise (Holland, 1866, p. 316). Woodrow Wilson preached about the self-determination of peoples but, fearing to alienate southern Democrats, “turned a stone face and deaf ear to the struggles and tribulations of African Americans” (Cooper, 2009, p. 10).

Some circumstances make it easier to be an idealist. In periods of calm, when there is no serious threat to internal order and national security, it is easier for leaders to stick to principles. In periods of turbulence and uncertainty, when vital interests are endangered, leaders are more likely to think like realists.

The 1990s were years of relative calm. The Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War ended, and the United States seemed to emerge as a hyperpower, capable of shaping the global order as it liked (Brands, 2018, p. 29; Chua, 2007, pp. xix–xxi). At home, the economy boomed while crime rates declined. “The state of our union is the strongest it has ever been,” President Bill Clinton (2000) boasted at the end of that decade. “Never before has our nation enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crises and so few external threats.”

Under such circumstances, it was easier for American leaders to lean toward idealism. It has been observed that the views of key Clinton advisors were permeated with a “strong strain of Wilsonian idealism” (Rubinstein et al., 2000, p. 5). The “moral vision” of the Clinton administration included an emphasis on limited government, free-market economics, democracy, transparency, the rule of law, and human rights (Nye, 2020, p. 141). National security advisor Anthony Lake said these values were “both American and universal” (Lake, 1993). Clinton (1993) himself described this bundle of principles as the only sure path to peace and prosperity for all countries.

The Clinton White House was not alone in emphasizing these ideals. “History leads us in one way or another to liberal democracy,” the conservative writer Francis Fukuyama suggested in 1992 (Fukuyama, 1992, p. 287). Another scholarly commentator, Michael Mandelbaum (2002), declared that the ideas of free-market economics and democracy had conquered the world (p. 1). In 2002, President George W. Bush said that these ideals constituted the “single sustainable model” for good government (Executive Office of the President, 2002, p. iv).

The apparent triumph of this “single model” meant that leaders had less to do by way of statecraft. Big questions about regime design had been resolved. Moreover, the design itself constrained executive discretion. It did this in two ways. In any liberal-constitutional order, power is limited by basic laws that protect individual liberties. The 1990s model was also influenced by an school of thought known as ordoliberalism, which emphasized the dangers of political meddling in economic policy (Gerber, 1994). Leaders were expected to delegate economic powers to independent central banks, autonomous regulators, and private enterprise (Roberts, 2010). Economic powers that remained in the hands of politicians would be further checked by balanced-budget laws and international trade agreements. Meanwhile, citizens were expected to take “personal responsibility” for their circumstances rather than relying on government assistance (Harvey, 2005, pp. 23 and 76). In sum, the ordoliberal formula shrank the space in which it was necessary for leaders to engage in statecraft.

9/11 and the Return of Realism

The idealist mentality of the late 1990s was tested by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and fears of further attacks that dominated public consciousness for the next 4 years. In many ways, American policymakers bent the grand principles of the 1990s. They justified these deviations using the logic of realists: by identifying an endangered vital interest and promising to “do whatever it takes” to protect that interest.

President George W. Bush planted the realist flag soon after the 9/11 attacks. “These people have declared war on us,” Bush (2003) said about the Al Qaeda terrorist network on September 15, 2001. “We will do whatever it takes to make sure that we’re safe internally” (p. 1113). A few days later, Bush (2003) promised to “direct every resource at our command—every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every weapon of war—to the destruction and to the defeat of the global terror network” (p. 1142).

In following months, the U.S. government adopted many policies that deviated from the ideals of the 1990s. Rhetoric about the rule of law, human rights and transparency gave way to the realities of a new “war on terrorism”: indefinite imprisonment, enhanced interrogation techniques, extraordinary rendition, warrantless searches, and digital surveillance. Rhetoric about small government and free markets gave way to airline bailouts, bigger security bureaucracies, nationalization of airport screening, and increased regulation of critical infrastructure. Rhetoric about fiscal discipline gave way to stimulus spending and the biggest federal deficit in a decade.

These deviations were justified through the logic of realism. Events had put vital national interests in jeopardy, and exceptional measures were necessary in response. This was implicit in the framing of the whole federal response as a war, which implied the use of “special powers” to defend the homeland, as legal advisor John Yoo (2006) explained (p. 8). A senior official told journalist Bob Woodward in October 2001 that “the gloves are off . . . [the Central Intelligence Agency has] the green light to do whatever is necessary” to protect the country (Woodward, 2001). “Defense of the American people was now the nation’s number one priority,” said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (2011), “All elements of our national power would need to step up” (pp. 350–351). Vice President Dick Cheney and Cheney (2011) explained that defending the nation would require working on the “dark side . . . [and] in the shadows, sometimes with less than upstanding individuals” (p. 335). President Bush (2010) himself said that balanced budgets could not take priority over “protecting the homeland and supporting our troops” (pp. 445–446).

Policymakers often caveated their promises to “do whatever is necessary” with the assurance that these measures would be “consistent with our laws” (Gonzales, 2016, p. 188). But laws were stretched at the same time. The head of the National Security Agency, General Michael Hayden, conceded that the legal justification for new surveillance activities was “contentious” and relied heavily on “Raw Article 2, commander-in-chief stuff” (Hayden, 2016, p. 60).

However, there were areas where the federal government clearly did not do “whatever it takes.” The Bush administration persisted with massive tax cuts that aggravated budget deficits, continued to promote free trade despite concerns about the security of container traffic, hesitated to regulate some industries too strictly, and underinvested in war efforts (Roberts, 2008, Chapters 3–5). Choices were made about the domains in which the defense of necessity would be applied.

Indeed, a common refrain after the September 11 attacks was how American leaders were compelled to make “hard choices” or “difficult choices.” This was a change from the 1990s, when the emphasis had been on limiting executive discretion. As noted, leaders in the 1990s were expected to delegate responsibility and don a “straitjacket” that would constrain whatever power remained in their hands (Friedman, 1999, Chapter 6). When vital interests were threatened, however, responsibility bounced back to the center and the straitjacket was thrown off. Leaders believed that they were compelled by circumstances to exercise judgment: to select the domains in which general principles would be bent, how much they would be bent, and for how long. The exercise of discretion proved to be ineluctable.

Realism and the Global Financial Crisis

By 2005, realist rhetoric appeared to ebb. General Michael Hayden noted the country’s changing mood: “After four-plus years of both public and elite opinion clamoring for us to do ‘whatever it takes,’ the burden of proof was now clearly on us to show that what we were doing was both lawful and unarguably essential” (Hayden, 2016, p. 100). But another crisis soon breathed more life into the logic of realism. Panic seized American financial markets in the late summer of 2008. Many people feared a reprise of the crash of 1929 and the onset of another Great Depression.

Dramatic interventions by the federal government prevented a major financial collapse (Khademian, 2011, p. 841). Principles about limited government, free markets, and fiscal discipline were quickly set aside. The federal government provided US$700 billion in emergency aid to financial institutions, took direct control of several large financial institutions, and became the majority shareholder in General Motors and a minority shareholder in Chrysler (Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission 2011, pp. xvi–xvii). It also adopted a US$787 billion economic stimulus program. In 2009 the federal deficit was 10% of gross domestic product (GDP), the biggest since World War II (Office of Management and Budget, 2020, Table 1.1).

The Federal Reserve also changed course during the crisis. In the preceding quarter-century, experts had warned that central banks should guard their independence, focus strictly on fighting inflation, and refrain from buying government debt. In 2008, however, the Federal Reserve worked closely with the Treasury and cut interest rates dramatically, putting aside worries about inflation. It purchased large amounts of government debt through a practice called quantitative easing (Roberts, 2010, pp. 42–43).

Hank Paulson, who served as Treasury Secretary under President Bush during the onset of the crisis, recalled that many of the government’s actions were “deeply distasteful . . . [but] absolutely necessary.” Paulson (2010) said that “it was the prospect of immediate economic catastrophe that drove me to act over and over again . . . [W]e were single-mindedly focused on preventing an economic disaster” (pp. xiv–xv and xxii).

President Bush shared Paulson’s distaste for these policies, but agreed they were necessary to “safeguard the American people from a severe economic hit.” Measures to save auto manufacturers were especially troubling to Bush. “[I] believed strongly that government should stay out of the auto business,” he said. “Yet the economy was extremely fragile . . . I had to safeguard American workers and families from a widespread collapse” (Bush, 2010, pp. 453–454 and 468–469).

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke also promised to “do whatever was necessary” to prevent the collapse of the financial sector and help the economy recover. He later explained that “policymakers confronted with extraordinary circumstances must be prepared to think outside the box, defying orthodoxy if necessary” (Bernanke, 2015, pp. 53, 452, 510).

The administration of President Barack Obama thought about the financial crisis in exactly the same way. The day after the November 2008 election, a top economic advisor said that Obama’s “number one priority is going to be preventing the biggest financial crisis in possibly the last century from turning into the next Great Depression” (Leonhardt, 2008). A few days later, Obama himself told journalists that “we have to do whatever it takes to get this economy moving again . . . [W]e shouldn’t worry about the deficit next year or even the year after that . . . [T]he most important thing is that we avoid a deepening recession” (CBS News, 2008).

Timothy Geithner, Obama’s first Treasury secretary, compared the handling of the financial crisis to the challenges confronting a surgeon who must make “life-or-death decisions in a fog of uncertainty, dealing with the constant risk of catastrophic failure.” Government must act decisively, Geithner (2014) said, “even if it looks profligate and immoral, even if it seems to reward incompetence and venality, even if it fuels perceptions of an out-of-control, money-spewing, bailout-crazed Big Government” (pp. 493–494).

The logic of decision-making during the financial crisis was the same as after the September 11 attacks. Unexpected events had posed a profound threat to a vital national interest—this time, economic stability. Responsibility for saving the economy fell squarely on the shoulders of leaders at the center of government: they could not shake it off. Nor was there a simple formula for resolving the crisis. Leaders were again confronted with hard choices. Given the severity of the threat, refusing to intervene as a matter of principle was out of the question. Leaders were expected to do whatever was necessary even if that meant behaving in unprincipled ways. This was the logic of realism.

The Pandemic’s Twin Crises

The economic and political aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis lasted for several years. By the mid-2010s, however, many commentators were ready to say that the “worst of the financial crisis is behind us” (Blanchard et al. 2013). The world seemed to be returning to normal—that is, to a world of principled decision-making, perhaps with some of those principles modified through experience. In 2020 this world was upended by a third crisis. The corona virus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic began in Wuhan, China in December 2019. By June 2020, more than 100,000 Americans had died. There were fears that the death toll would go much higher.

Government at all levels took extraordinary measures during the pandemic. A national emergency was declared on March 13. The federal government blocked entry into the United States by foreign nationals from more than 30 countries and prohibited nonessential crossings of land borders (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020). Forty-two states ordered businesses to close and people to stay at home (Mervosh et al., 2020). President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act, an artifact of the early Cold War, to compel production of medical equipment by General Motors, General Electric, and other companies. In late March, the federal government adopted a two-trillion-dollar economic stimulus package. Experts predicted that the federal deficit would reach 20% of GDP in 2020 (Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, 2020). (“Just a year ago,” the New York Times observed in May 2020, “running such a large deficit would have been politically untenable” (Tankersley, 2020).) The Federal Reserve (2020) promised to buy as much government debt as necessary to keep markets running smoothly.

All of these measures deviated from the principles of the 1990s, and we are again interested in how these deviations were justified. Realist logic prevailed. “This is an extraordinary time in this nation’s history,” New York State governor Andrew Cuomo explained in March 2020. “It will go down in the history books as one of those moments of true crisis.” Cuomo acknowledged that New Yorkers might be upset by orders to close schools and nonessential businesses, but said that his judgment was “to do whatever is necessary to contain this virus and then we will manage the consequences afterwards” (Office of the Governor, 2020).

Realist logic was deployed by federal officials as well. On February 29, President Donald Trump said that “we’re going to have to do whatever is necessary” to protect public health, and that markets would have to “take care of themselves” (Crowley et al., 2020). On March 11, while announcing restrictions on international travel, Trump said that he would “never hesitate to take any necessary steps to protect the lives, health and safety of the American people” (Executive Office of the President, 2020a). On March 22 Vice President Mike Pence, head of the White House’s coronavirus task force, again assured Americans that “we’re going to bring all the resources of this nation, we’re going to do whatever it takes” (Executive Office of the President, 2020b). On April 10, Trump told workers at the Boeing Corporation that “we’ll do whatever is necessary” to save their industry (Kitroeff & Vogel, 2020). On May 10, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin promised that “we’re willing to spend whatever it takes” to avoid economic collapse (Budryk, 2020).

The Trump administration’s claims had to be taken with a grain of salt. Critics pointed out ways in which the administration had dragged its heels or refused to act at all. One reason for inaction was simple incompetence and disregard for expert advice (Lipton et al., 2020). But political calculations also influenced decisions about whether and how the realist logic would be applied, as it had during earlier crises. States in which voters favored President Trump were less affected by the pandemic and more hesitant about preventive measures, and so Trump avoided broad directives about what those states should do (Medina & Gebeloff, 2020). Trump also avoided directives that might alienate the evangelical community (Sun & Dawsey, 2020). At the same time, he used the realist logic to advance long-standing priorities of the administration. New immigration restrictions and deregulation efforts were justified as essential elements of crisis response (New York Times, 2020; Shear & Haberman, 2020).

There was one possible defense of the Trump administration’s equivocations. The pandemic endangered not one but two vital interests: public health and economic stability. It was impossible to do “whatever it takes” to protect both interests fully: strong action to protect one interest often meant jeopardizing the other. Trump emphasized this dilemma in an all-caps tweet about pandemic response on March 22, 2020: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.” A more eloquent president might have said that policymakers were confronted with a tragic choice that could not be resolved with any simple formula. This sense of the inescapability of painful choices is a feature of the realist mentality (Gewen, 2020).

The Curse of Necessity

In a democracy, there are strong incentives for leaders to talk like idealists. People must be motivated to vote, and campaigning on grand visions and principles is one way to do this. Voters also want to know what they are getting. Leaders voice their commitment to principles as a way of reassuring voters about their future conduct. In the 1990s, the principles that were endorsed by many leaders gave even more assurance to voters about future behavior. Those principles said that government power should be strictly limited, and that any discretion remaining in the hands of politicians should be constrained by clear rules.

The pressures of governance in the 21st century have pushed American leaders away from the idealist mentality. So far this has been a turbulent century, filled with unexpected threats to vital national interests. In moments of crisis, delegations of power by leaders have proved to be elastic, while constraints on their discretion have proved to be malleable. At critical moments, responsibility has snapped back into the hands of decision-makers at the center of government. The problems confronted by leaders in these moments of crisis cannot be resolved neatly by the application of simple principles. Leaders face hard and tragic choices. And voters have no patience with temporizing or half-measures in moments of crisis. They expect leaders to do whatever it takes to protect vital interests.

We have just described the realist mentality of rule. It is an approach to statecraft that would have been familiar to the earliest advocates of raison d’état like Machiavelli, Richelieu or Metternich: an approach in which leaders are driven as much by the “curse of necessity” as by high principles (Kissinger, 1994, pp. 63–64 and 86; Meinecke, 2017, Chapter 1). This mentality is most likely to arise in especially turbulent and dangerous times, like the past two decades.

The next decades will be turbulent as well. American policymakers will wrestle with immense challenges such as climate change, geopolitical shifts, advances in automation and artificial intelligence, population aging and migration, among other factors. All of this means that the realist mentality—that attitude of ideological flexibility and improvisation—will persist. Decision-makers will be less confident about the availability of principles that dispose neatly with major problems of governance. More often, they will be confronted with new and complicated circumstances that compel hard choices, as well as moments of real danger in which it is necessary to do whatever it takes.

For this reason, we should explore in more detail how the realist mentality operates in an advanced democracy. One question is how vital interests are defined. Realists in previous centuries worried mainly about the integrity of the state itself. Today, leaders are more sensitive to problems of economic stability and public health. This is partly because they are democratically elected, and partly because governmental capabilities have improved enough that it seems reasonable to expect strong government action. Changes in the structure of mass media also matter. National leaders are expected to act decisively because they are constantly in public view (Maestas et al., 2008).

We can also explore in more detail how the realist logic is deployed. We have seen that it may be applied selectively: that leaders may do whatever it takes in one domain but not in another. Leaders might also behave like faux realists: that is, making a show of promising to do whatever it takes while continuing with business as usual. A study of the factors that explain when and how the realistic logic is activated would be useful.

We could also consider how the realist mentality shapes our attitudes about the design of governing institutions. For example, we have seen that crises have tended to result in a shift of power toward the executive branch and concentration of power within the executive branch. Leaders demand the freedom to do whatever it takes. But we have also seen experimentation with new mechanisms for monitoring how these expanded executive powers are exercised. We might also see renewed interest in institutional support for top-level decision-making—in areas such as forecasting, planning, crisis response, and coordination. We might even reconsider the role of political appointees, as crises reveal the high costs of amateurism and short-termism.

Finally, we should explore the relationship between realism and policy learning. One interpretation is that the realistic logic is only a part of the process of policy learning. That is, a crisis arises because a prevailing governance paradigm is ill-suited to new circumstances, and the crisis itself eventually generates modifications to the prevailing paradigm. The best evidence for this hypothesis might be the evolution of thought about central banking over the last 20 years. We might say that central banking is principled today as it was in the late 1990s, but the principles have been altered as a result of crises. The realist mentality is only activated as a survival mechanism during the moment of crisis itself.

That would be one view. The alternative view is that no governance paradigm can ever be perfected, and that there is no set of principles that provides a “single, sustainable model” for rule. Realists believe that the world is too complicated for that. It is unpredictable and dangerous, and leaders must be prepared at any moment to do whatever it takes to protect the nation’s vital interests.