The importance of the State Department in making foreign policy, relative to the Defense Department, is limited. Examining the importance we place on the two departments, measured by the resources we are willing to devote to each, we see the Defense Department clearly comes out on top. Resources are rarely wasted on that which will have little impact or influence, therefore a larger share of resources indicates a greater level of importance and influence. The Defense Department has a budget that dwarfs the State Department’s budget, and accounts for roughly twenty percent of the total federal budget. The annual budget for the Defense Department is about four-hundred-billion dollars. In contrast, the State Department budget is only about thirty-billion dollars annually. The Defense Department accounts for about two-thirds of the all military spending in the world, and it employs roughly 3 million people. By comparison, the State Department employs only about 35,000 people worldwide.
Additionally, we can look at the positions taken by each department regarding major foreign policy questions and evaluate their importance based upon the final direction taken. When we do so, we clearly see that within the current administration the Defense Department has been much more influential than has the State Department concerning major foreign policy decisions. Early on in the administration, in March of 2001, then Secretary of State Collin Powell publically supported continuing negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program. The Defense Department, notably Secretary Rumsfeld, opposed continuing negotiations, and Secretary Powell was forced to retract his statements in response to the President’s candid statements indicating a more hardened position similar to that expressed by the Defense Department. The media reported that this was indicative of a larger split between Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Collin Powell, characterizing it as a divide between an “ideologically conservative Pentagon and a more moderate State Department” (Jentleson 292). In the time since, it has become apparent that the views expressed by the Defense Department were reflective of the direction American foreign policy toward North Korea would take. Negotiations were ended and the President included North Korea in his axis of evil state of the union address.
The next incident we can scrutinize for indications of the importance of the two departments in impacting foreign policy is the lead up to the Iraq war. There was contention concerning whether or not to go to the UN Security Council for support implementing the doctrine of preemption. The State Department favored gaining United Nations support, and the Defense Department didn’t for fear of prerogative encroachment. After making failing at an initial attempt to gain UNSC support, the Bush administration undertook its preemptive doctrine and went to war without the support of the UNSC, again supporting the position of the Defense Department (Jentleson 375). Furthermore, there was additional tension between the State Department and the Defense Departments regarding the exit strategy that should be employed. The State Department recommended a complex, complicated, and costly plan of postwar strategy, named “the Future of Iraq”, that it had developed involving the rebuilding of the economic, political, and judicial, institutions of Iraq. These recommendations were largely ignored by the administration who, along with the Department of Defense, believed that after a quick victory and removal of Saddam Hussein, Iraq could be turned over to the remaining security forces and soon to follow international forces (Jentleson 412).