PERSPECTIVE ON FOREIGN POLICY : Hurleyism Swamps Foggy Bottom : Theorists with no practical expertise about the areas they target could again poison the well for decades.

The first year of foreign policy under Bill Clinton displays all the marks of a typically American self-inflicted wound. This wound is caused by the reliance on “generalists,” usually lawyers and professors, to carry out difficult new initiatives. Such people are trained in what they like to call “cutting-edge skills” but are totally innocent of the histories, cultures or languages of the countries where they so readily apply their theories. At best, they are engaged in expensive on-the-job training, which, if successful, will make them useful just as they are leaving office.

It is not just that most American political appointees are catastrophically misinformed about the countries they are dealing with. They are also ideologically blinded to the kinds of knowledge they would need to be effective. They believe that theory is all that matters, much as their Marxist-Leninist counterparts argued in Brezhnev’s Russia and Mao’s China.

Current examples of the results of theorists prevailing over people with practical expertise include the collapse of economic reform in Russia and the United States’ inability to do anything about its $50-billion trade deficit with Japan.

In Russia, economics professor Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard applied an ideologically rigid program of economic reform, based on some English-language textbooks intended to justify Anglo-American-type capitalism, without any attention to the country in which these reforms were being applied or even an ability to read Russian reports about how things were going. The results were predictable--the movement toward democracy has been undercut, Boris Yeltsin is being discredited, Vladimir Zhirinovsky is advancing on an ultranationalist platform and many Russians are nostalgic for Lenin.

Had Sachs and his band of free-market shock-therapists read Alexander Yanov’s “The Russian New Right,” published in the late 1970s, they might have had a much better idea of how to shape their policies to make them effective. And they would have been forewarned that some measures of change in Russia, such as the strong reappearance of the Orthodox Church, do not mean the same thing that they might mean in Sachs’ own society.

American policy toward Japan since last summer’s collapse of the Liberal Democratic Party offers another example of ideological blindness. Lulled by the notion that Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa was a “baby boomer” and a “consumer advocate,” the United States, without a single high official who has substantial knowledge and experience of Japan and the ability to read the language, now faces yet another year of $50-billion-plus trade deficits with Japan.

The intellectuals who have crafted recent American policy toward Japan include C. Fred Bergsten, a former Carter Administration official, whose idee fixe about the yen/dollar exchange rate has virtually destroyed the Japanese-American relationship, and Jagdish Bhagwati, a Columbia University economics professor whose Indian provenance has evidently given him a deep-seated distrust of economic planning. Bhagwati recently organized an economists’ plea to Hosokawa to resist any efforts by the United States to consider results in making trade policy, even though a demand for results might force the Japanese government to end its policies of shielding Japanese manufacturers from international competition.

There are other recent examples of American myopia. For example, the NAFTA debate scrupulously tried to avoid any mention of Mexican economic conditions or social policies until guerrillas in Chiapas put them on the front pages. These and other cases suggest to me a return of the Patrick Hurley syndrome. Gen. Patrick J. Hurley is indelibly associated with what is surely one of the two or three greatest disasters in the history of American foreign policy--the misanalysis of the Chinese revolution of the 1940s, leading to the collapse of U.S. foreign policy in the Pacific, the Korean and Vietnam wars, McCarthyism and American isolation from China for two decades.

Hurley was an Oklahoma politician, Herbert Hoover’s secretary of war, an amateur diplomat and President Roosevelt’s mediator between the Chinese Communists and the Chinese Nationalists in the civil war that followed the Japanese surrender. Hurley knew neither Chinese nor anything else about China. He bungled his mission because of overconfidence and because he totally misread the situation in terms of Chinese popular sentiments. But he dishonorably blamed his failure on the China specialists of the State Department, charging that they had predicted a communist victory (accurately, as it turned out) and were therefore pro-communist. Together with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Hurley thus managed to poison American China policy for more than two decades.

Our government again seems to be populated with Hurleys, this time from the legal profession, the professoriate and retreads from the Carter Administration. We have not learned what went wrong with Hurley. He was in over his head, and his credentials in domestic politics were not transferable to areas where there is no substitute for knowledge and experience. The return of Hurleyism to Washington suggests the likelihood of the recurrence of foreign-policy disasters comparable to the debacle of postwar China policy.