SCHOLARS AND specialists often lament that once the United States commits itself to a course of action abroad, it rarely adjusts its path. Bureaucracies prize continuity over innovation and cling to the prevailing orthodoxy. Top officials often embrace positions predetermined by past prejudices and lessons. The gravitational pull of politics induces presidents and secretaries of state to persist with existing policies even when they aren’t working. Although such inflexibility may not be particularly harmful in ordinary times, big problems can arise when the United States finds itself in uncharted territory or facing unexpected geopolitical shifts.

This reality raises the question of how the country can move from failure to success. How do policy makers transcend their penchant for the familiar and bureaucracies move beyond their attachment to continuity? History tells us that mere presidential frustration with a failed policy does not always bring about change. Consider Lyndon Johnson’s failed Vietnam War policy from 1965 to 1968. Presidents facing multiple national issues rarely start over with entirely new strategic paradigms. Inertia, staff influences and operational prejudices all militate against that.

But there are exceptions worthy of study. In essence, for the United States to move from failure to success, three things must happen. Failure must be seen as posing a cataclysmic threat to both national security and the political fortunes of the incumbent party. A plausible alternative strategy must be evident. And a senior policy maker who enjoys presidential trust and confidence must embrace that alternative, convince the president of its viability and subtly impose it on the system.

In America’s postwar history, three occasions stand out as times when success was salvaged from impending failure: the shift in U.S. containment policy during the early stages of the Truman presidency; the changed U.S. approach to the Vietnam War after Richard Nixon’s 1968 election; and George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq. These three cases took place in different international contexts. But they all demonstrate how change actually can occur and highlight the role of key policy makers in fostering such change.

SHORTLY AFTER Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945, the New York Times assured readers that “there will prevail in Washington a continuity.” The deceased president’s lofty goals, embodied in compacts such as the Atlantic Charter and the Yalta accords, would guide his successor. Roosevelt curiously believed that the United States, China, Britain and the Soviet Union would act as global policemen, patrolling their regional beats and ensuring a level of stability that had eluded the international order for most of the twentieth century. This was a vision predicated on cooperation with unlikely allies and circumspection on behalf of a determined adversary. It was a vision that devalued ideology and assumed pragmatism on the part of the major actors. The ubiquitous European colonial empires would accede to new realities; the revolutionary Soviet leadership would accept the mandates of the new order; and the Chinese Nationalists, however unreliable in the past, would guard the gateways of East Asia.

Joseph Stalin’s increasing penchant for violating his commitments did not dissuade FDR from what he considered his pragmatic vision. Although the peculiar pantheon of gods and devils that occupied the Soviet leader’s mind remained impervious to Roosevelt’s blandishments, that didn’t alter the debilitated president’s strategy. It has been suggested that FDR became skeptical of his own diplomacy as he approached death. It is impossible to know now what he was thinking then. What is beyond doubt is that Roosevelt bequeathed to his successor an uncertain legacy and a policy whose assumptions rested upon a shaky foundation.

The persistent Soviet transgressions did not jolt Harry Truman away from sustaining the fallen leader’s path. Uncertain of himself and surrounded by men with superior knowledge of foreign affairs, Truman was prone to yield, follow and acquiesce. Whether at the Potsdam Conference or in deliberations over Poland, Truman sought to reconcile his call for Eastern European self-determination with his desire to sustain the security cooperation with the Soviet Union. To be sure, Truman soon grew uneasy about his circumstances amid confusion about his options, but the gravitational pull of policy still drew him toward the Yalta accords and its spirit of compromise.

The question of how to approach the Soviet Union turned on one’s perception of the causes behind Moscow’s conduct. The consensus within the U.S. government was that the Soviet Union’s aggressive moves were largely defensive and an American policy of understanding was the best course. Leading policy makers such as Secretary of State James Byrnes acknowledged the Soviet mischief but attributed it to insecurity and vulnerability. A nation that had been devastated twice by the German war machine was bound to be concerned about the developments in its immediate periphery, argued Byrnes and others, and a response of conciliation would take the edge off Soviet actions.

Thus, Truman and his advisers continued to embrace the Grand Alliance and tried to convince the Soviets of its appeal. The United States was prepared to accept a Soviet sphere of influence but hoped that it would have a benign complexion. The attempt to get the Soviets to see the difference between influence and domination consumed much time and attention. But slowly it became apparent that domination was the Soviet goal.

The process by which the United States moved from considering the Soviet Union an ally (if a stubborn and problematic one) to seeing it as an adversary whose ambitions had to be thwarted was halting and extremely difficult. The task of shifting policy from its established pattern to a new framework proved enormously challenging even when the existing approach was increasingly deemed deficient. But then the ingredients materialized that are indispensable to a policy shift of such magnitude. First, the failure to mitigate Soviet ambitions was proving so catastrophic to American security that it had to be addressed energetically and imaginatively. But the two additional factors—a viable alternative to the existing approach and a powerful presidential intimate bent on fostering new thinking—ultimately emerged as well.

Truman had the fortune of inheriting sober minds such as Admiral William Leahy, who acted as his chief of staff, and U.S. ambassador to Moscow Averell Harriman, who fed him a steady stream of criticisms of Stalin’s rule and stressed the impracticality of uncritical engagement. Increasingly, these advisers challenged accommodationists such as Harry Hopkins and Henry Wallace. Truman initially was not prone to accept their views and disrupt the continuity of policy, but he now had an alternative explanation should his frustrations require it.

It is here that a memo and a speech added further urgency to the need for a course correction. The strength of George Kennan’s iconic memorandum on the sources of Soviet conduct was that it offered authoritative intellectual validation of the emerging anti-Soviet sentiment percolating within the bureaucracy. The “Long Telegram” eviscerated the popular notion that reassurance and concessions could blunt Soviet power and preserve the Grand Alliance. The idea that bargaining and compromise could foster a durable settlement with Stalin was now exposed as flawed as Kennan portrayed a revolutionary state that required external enemies for legitimization of its internal repression.

The call for confrontation came not only from Kennan’s eloquent pen but also from the elegant oratory of a world leader of nearly unrivaled esteem, Winston Churchill. The former prime minister’s speech at Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, was alarming as well as prophetic. “Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organization intends to do in the future,” he declared. “What are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytizing tendencies.” Churchill quickly moved to the next arena of conflict by keenly noting that “Turkey and Persia are both profoundly alarmed and disturbed at the claims which are being made upon them.” While Kennan had been imprecise about the next flash point of the U.S.-Soviet conflict, Churchill was quick to point to the eastern Mediterranean as a place of Soviet intrigue. Although the essential purpose of the speech was to call for an Anglo-American alliance as a bulwark of resistance to Soviet encroachment, Churchill echoed Kennan in stressing that only power, and not lofty speeches or international organizations, could forestall the Soviet menace.

The intriguing point remains that some of the milestones of the Cold War such as the “Long Telegram,” Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech and even the Soviet attempts to peel off portions of northern Iran were not decisive turning points. The elegance and historical analysis of Kennan’s memorandum concentrated many minds, but there is little to suggest that it redirected the machinery of the state. And as imposing a figure as Churchill was, his speech did not reorient America’s policy toward the Soviet Union. Given the speech’s controversy, Truman quickly backtracked from his implied endorsement by falsely claiming that he had not seen an advance copy. Secretary Byrnes similarly distanced himself from its call for vigilance as he embarked on further summitry with Soviet functionaries. As for Moscow’s moves in Iran, Washington still hoped that it could preserve both cooperation with the Soviet Union and the sovereignty of Iran. The United States did call for Soviet withdrawal of its troops from northern Iran as stipulated by wartime agreements, and it did take its case to the United Nations, but such moves did not imply America’s readiness to abandon the homilies of the Grand Alliance.

To be sure, the events of 1946 were not without consequence. Given the egregious nature of the Soviets’ conduct, those prone toward firmness were even more fortified in their views. Still, the advocates of cooperation, who had the advantage of continuity on their side, stressed that the Soviet actions were unexceptional for a great power. The Soviets might have to be rebuffed on occasion—as they were in Iran—but that hardly meant ushering in a new doctrine that treated the Kremlin like an adversary with a global appetite that had to be resisted systematically. Amid this debate, Truman stood confused, oscillating between dramatically differing alternatives. A sweeping transformation of American policy required not just presidential frustration and a bureaucratic constituency with a discerning alternative but also a senior official enjoying the president’s confidence and prone to break down existing barriers to new thinking. That person was Dean Acheson. The United States may still not have had a coherent containment strategy in 1946 had Acheson not been in government service.

Acheson’s centrality in the Truman administration stemmed from his proximity and temperament. As an effective State Department number two—and given Byrnes’s frequent absences from Washington—Acheson spent much time with Truman. And, unlike many members of the East Coast establishment who belittled Truman as an unworthy successor to FDR, Acheson treated him with respect and deference, thus gaining the insecure president’s confidence. As a result, Acheson was pivotally positioned to guide U.S. policy in a different direction.

Acheson already was exposed to a steady diet of anti-Soviet advocacy from some of his aides as well as his friend Averell Harriman. However, even though he found Soviet truculence disturbing, he seemed averse to abandoning the core assumptions animating the Grand Alliance. He insisted on continued negotiations and attempted to ease the Soviet Union into the emerging international structures as a means of alleviating its suspicions. He feared the discord over Germany would lead to a division of Europe, a prospect he didn’t like. He wanted the Soviet troops out of Iran but in a manner that did not inject additional tensions into great-power relations. He admired Churchill but cancelled a New York dinner appearance with him once the prime minister’s Iron Curtain speech proved controversial. He favored sharing nuclear information with the Soviet Union and went so far as to coauthor a plan for international control of nuclear technologies. These were hardly attributes of a cold warrior battling against the naïveté of his countrymen.

But developments in Turkey proved decisive in establishing the containment doctrine. Since 1945, Moscow had been pressing the Turkish government to allow Soviet ships to pass through the Turkish Straits connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. In August 1946, the Soviets augmented their demand with ominous naval maneuvers in the Black Sea and the dispatch of additional forces to the Balkans. Ankara, fearing a Soviet invasion, appealed to the West for assistance.

The Turkish crisis was pivotal for Acheson. All along, he had seen various episodes of Soviet aggression as unrelated events. Thus, he had made no connection between Stalin’s brutal methods in Eastern Europe and his expansionist efforts in the Mediterranean. Now he saw a pattern of Soviet aggression, which disabused him of the notion that conciliation would temper Stalin’s ambitions. He concluded the only real deterrent to Soviet plans for engulfing Turkey and the Middle East would be the “conviction that the pursuance of such a policy will result in a war with the United States.” Meeting with Truman, Acheson argued that the imperative was not just negating Stalin’s designs on Turkey but confronting him with a new approach of firmness and confrontation. In a memorable exchange, Acheson turned to Truman and asked if he understood the gravity of the moment. “We might as well find out whether the Russians [are] bent on world conquest now as in five or ten years,” declared Truman. The president’s inclination toward toughness was now buttressed and legitimized by the man he came to trust. The months of dithering came to an end as the United States would now pursue a new policy of vigilance.

Ultimately, it was Stalin’s aggression in the periphery of Europe that provoked a new direction in U.S. policy. The Soviet moves in the Turkish Straits finally tipped the bureaucratic scales, adding the considerable weight of Acheson to the ranks of those who were calling for change. Faced with joint Anglo-American protest, Stalin quietly backed off his claims on the straits. The fact that the new policy of firmness yielded results so quickly further affirmed its logic. Although the great initiatives of the containment doctrine such as the Marshall Plan and the establishment of NATO would come later, 1946 proved the decisive year in shifting the conceptual foundation of U.S. policy away from conciliation and toward containment.

National-security decisions sometimes seem clearer viewed in retrospect. The process that propelled Truman toward his reconsideration was never without hesitancy, second-guessing and ambiguity. Despite his awareness that the Soviets were violating their pledges, Truman still harbored lingering hopes of rebuilding past cooperation. Although George Kennan is often credited with ushering in the age of containment, it was Dean Acheson who guided U.S. policy away from its predetermined course. Acheson’s formidable intellectual powers allowed him to grasp the salience of the moment and the need for strategies that met the exigencies of the time. Possessing the trust of his president and the inner confidence to revisit and change his assumptions, Acheson used his critical position to translate his vision into a successful policy.

MANY OBSERVERS have long assumed that the terms of the 1973 peace treaty ending the Vietnam War were largely the same as those available in 1969. Thus, the war was prolonged for no reason other than Richard Nixon’s obsession with credibility. North Vietnam’s swift victory in 1975 seemingly lends credence to this perception. However, such views simplify a far more complicated diplomatic dance.

America’s Vietnam policy changed under Nixon in a manner that compelled Hanoi to alter its war objectives and accept a compromise settlement. True, the peace treaty could be enforced only through American airpower and continued material assistance to Saigon, and neither continued after Nixon became embroiled in the debilitating Watergate scandal. Still, the changes brought about by Nixon altered the context of the war and compelled Hanoi to accept an agreement that could have preserved South Vietnamese sovereignty.

While an under secretary of state was critical to ushering in a different Cold War policy, it was the president himself who guided the Vietnam shift. Nixon proved the rarest of presidents, taking command of both the direction and the details of a policy. As early as 1967, in his important Foreign Affairs article, Nixon clearly understood that America’s path in Vietnam had to change radically. “The war has imposed severe strains on the United States, not only militarily and economically but socially and politically as well,” conceded the future presidential candidate. Although aided by Henry Kissinger, this would be a top-down assault on the assumptions and processes by a president unimpressed by an unimaginative bureaucracy. Nixon, whose mastery of foreign affairs exceeded that of most presidents, actively participated in formulating a new strategy to salvage America’s Indochina effort. Among his most innovative policy changes was a realignment in great-power relations that proved crucial in inducing Hanoi to come to terms with the United States.

By 1969, America’s war effort in Vietnam was unsustainable due to stalemate on the battlefield and turmoil at home. To the extent that Hanoi participated in talks, its terms called for a unilateral American withdrawal, cessation of all attacks on North Vietnam, the replacement of the Saigon regime with a coalition of neutralists and Communists, and respect for the territorial unity of Vietnam. Clearly, the North looked at diplomacy as a means of dividing the Western camp and empowering the U.S. peace movement. Upon becoming president, Nixon confronted an adversary whose diplomacy was driven by the notion that revolutionary violence could transform the situation and that there was no point in bargaining seriously with capitalist barons. Hanoi’s objective remained the defeat of the United States, and the talks were merely an extension of that aim.

The new Nixon strategy for reclaiming the initiative had a number of components. He assumed initially that bluster could nudge Hanoi away from its intransigence. An unimpressed North Vietnamese leadership not only persisted with its infiltrations but also rejected Nixon’s offer of secret talks. Having been rebuffed, Nixon launched a new strategy. He removed some of the restraints on his military operations, particularly in escalating the air war. He embraced General Creighton Abrams’s replacement of General William Westmoreland’s search-and-destroy strategy with a more robust counterinsurgency one. A result was the near destruction of Hanoi’s southern Communist cadre, and its privileged sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia also came under sustained attack. The intensification of the military assaults presented Hanoi with a new and more ominous reality.

Meanwhile, the Americans initiated a “Vietnamization” program designed to transfer much of the ground fighting to South Vietnamese armed forces. This strategy not only buttressed South Vietnamese capabilities but also transformed the conflict into a Vietnamese one. The North had long depicted its war as emancipating Vietnam from the clutches of Western imperialism. Now it was a civil war with Vietnamese fighting each other. The enhanced capacity of South Vietnam and the disruption of the North’s supply lines did much to soften Hanoi. The argument can be made that despite the success of such tactics, given Hanoi’s resilience, it would soon find ways to cope with these measures. But Nixon added his détente with the Soviet Union and reconciliation with China, which differentiated the president from his predecessors and made a profound impression on the North.

To be sure, Nixon was the inadvertent beneficiary of the cracking of the Communist monolith. Since the mid-1960s many Western officials had acknowledged the fissures in the Soviet bloc and the essential breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance. But by 1969, those tensions manifested themselves in large-scale military clashes. It appeared to many that the first use of the Soviet nuclear arsenal might actually be against a fellow Communist power. Nixon’s triangular diplomacy sought to exploit this situation by further luring China away from its erstwhile ally while simultaneously negotiating arms-control and trade agreements with the Soviet Union. Nixon perceived no contradiction between his outreach to Beijing and his quest to harmonize relations with Moscow. Indeed, he sensed—far more than Kissinger—that a diplomatic opening to China could induce Russian accommodation.

There was still one more twist to the triangular diplomacy that directly affected America’s Vietnam struggle. The White House quickly settled on the notion of linkage—tying issues of mutual concern with the Soviet Union and China to Vietnam. This stood in stark contrast to a bureaucracy that viewed arms control as too critical to be disturbed by other issues of contention. Meanwhile, the State Department remained skeptical of any opening to China given the ideologically rash nature of Mao’s regime and the obstacles this could create for détente with the Soviet Union.

The psychological impact on North Vietnam of Nixon being toasted in both Beijing and Moscow has often been underestimated. As with most ideological regimes, the North had invested much in the notion of socialist solidarity and strongly objected to the Communist giants’ embrace of Nixon. Ironically, Chinese and Russian attempts to reassure Hanoi only inflamed its anxieties. The fear of betrayal was one of the critical factors that led the North toward a more serious diplomacy. Confronted with Vietnamization’s continued progress and the devastation of a more intensified air war, Hanoi abandoned some of its revolutionary shibboleths.

Beijing’s defection to détente policy was even more unsettling for Hanoi than Soviet diplomatic practices. After all, Moscow had long engaged in summit diplomacy with Washington and had even agreed to various nuclear agreements. China, on the other hand, had been a strident critic of the United States and made supporting national-liberation movements the defining tenet of its foreign relations. It was inconceivable to Hanoi that Mao could abandon his long-standing aversion to dealing with the Americans or move away from his support for Third World liberation struggles. It was only a matter of time before Chinese pragmatism and self-interest overwhelmed the country’s revolutionary commitments. Geography and history had long bound the North Vietnamese and Chinese Communist parties together. Now Hanoi was isolated.

Once the United States agreed that the North did not have to withdraw its forces in exchange for an American departure, China began to view the arguments for persisting with the conflict as increasingly hollow. For Beijing, Hanoi’s insistence that South Vietnam’s president Nguyen Van Thieu resign before a peace compact could be concluded seemed shortsighted. As Mao warned a visiting Pham Van Dong in 1971, “Where the broom cannot reach, the dust is not swept away.” This was significant, as China previously had persistently advised the North not even to enter negotiations. As a succession of American emissaries passed through Beijing, Hanoi grew concerned that Vietnam and Taiwan would be conjoined after the United States had tied the withdrawal of its forces from Taiwan to a favorable Vietnam accord. Although China’s leadership pointedly rejected Kissinger’s attempt to craft such a linkage, the North Vietnamese began to fear that time was not on their side.

In 1972, North Vietnam gambled its fortunes on a major military offensive that it hoped would end the conflict decisively and compel the United States to accept its terms. Hanoi’s leadership seemed also to have perceived that its military invasion would complicate the great powers’ détente policy, as it would be difficult to persist with summits and diplomatic conclaves while the war intensified in Vietnam. This was a grave miscalculation. The bombing campaign unleashed by Nixon crippled the invasion, while the South Vietnamese army proved surprisingly effective, even launching counteroffensives of its own. The offensive’s failure disabused the North of its perception that it could garner a quick victory on the battlefield.

The Communist giants’ reaction to the offensive demonstrated the complexity of North Vietnam’s war strategy in the midst of an unfolding détente. The U.S. bombing was greeted with perfunctory criticism from China and the Soviet Union. Contrary to Hanoi’s wishes, Leonid Brezhnev refused to cancel a forthcoming summit meeting with Nixon, while the Soviet leadership once more urged the Vietnamese to come to terms with the Americans. For his part, Mao now declared, “If I were North Vietnam, I would not refuse to speak to Thieu.” Both Beijing and Moscow registered their displeasure with Hanoi by reducing their aid. The Communist powers’ behavior confirmed Hanoi’s fear that its sources of support might yet prove unreliable. The seeming success of Vietnamization and the pressures of détente finally compelled the North to seek a settlement on less than its maximalist terms.

Among North Vietnam’s concessions was acknowledgement of the integrity of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating the two Vietnams. In essence, the accords implied that the line partitioning Vietnam was a potential boundary denoting two sovereign entities. For a regime that had denied the legitimacy of South Vietnam, this was a bitter pill. If the DMZ agreement were to be enforced, the North would have difficulty supplying and rotating its remaining troops in the South. The United States retained the right to provide South Vietnam’s army with advisers, and the Thieu government could remain in power in advance of an armistice. Nixon had succeeded in imposing terms on Hanoi that it had long abjured.

The Paris peace accords have been perceived widely as a prelude to the collapse of South Vietnam—a decent interval at best. Hanoi’s determination to violate the agreement seemingly affirms this notion. However, the key issue was whether the United States had the appetite to reengage in the conflict when the North launched its inevitable invasion. In 1972, American airpower fortified South Vietnamese morale while its punishing blows curtailed Hanoi’s advance. But, with its troops withdrawn and prisoners home, would a Washington mired in Watergate and the economic recession muster the same resolve? For the agreement to hold, the United States had to continue providing aid to Saigon and keep its airpower at the ready. Ultimately, Congress was not prepared for such a prolonged commitment. If the Nixon-Kissinger team missed anything, it was not Hanoi’s propensity to violate its treaty obligations but the willingness of the American people to rebuff those violations.

Given the collapse of South Vietnam, it may seem strange to proclaim Nixon’s policy a success. However, the relevant factors suggesting a switch from failure to success are actually present here. The collapse of South Vietnam was seen as endangering America’s national security. A new set of policy makers inherited a failed strategy and proceeded to draft an imaginative alternative. The issue was of sufficient importance that it engaged not just the top policy makers but the president himself. Continuity had ceased to be a viable option.

A treaty is a living organism: it must be implemented and enforced every day. The failure of the Nixon administration was not the content of its Vietnam policy, which turned the tide of battle, isolated North Vietnam internationally and buttressed the power of America’s South Vietnamese ally. Its failure was its inability to hold the domestic front together and craft a national consensus behind enforcement of the treaty. And that failure stemmed from factors beyond Nixon’s actual Vietnam policy.

BY 2006, the Iraq War had turned into a divisive conflict that polarized the public and estranged some of America’s most important allies. An emerging civil war threatened to envelop Iraq, while in America the rosy optimism of the initial invasion gave way to a severe decline in the Bush administration’s political standing and a Democratic Party resurgence. The Republican Party, whose political fortunes were vanishing in the sands of Iraq, was growing uneasy amid calls for withdrawal from America’s political class as well as its rank and file. George W. Bush, who had staked his presidency and legacy on the Iraq War, found himself confronting prospects of defeat.

In invading Iraq, Washington made certain assumptions about how the war and the occupation would unfold. The U.S. strategy was predicated on the notion that a cumbersome and intrusive American military presence would stir Iraqi nationalism. So U.S. forces were housed in large bases and would undertake sporadic raids against Al Qaeda cells and insurgent strongholds and then return to their command centers. In a strange way, the American military brass seemed to accept the arguments of war critics who warned that the U.S. presence would fuel and not extinguish the insurgency.

As Iraq continued to disintegrate, the United States sought to train Iraqi forces and transfer security obligations to them as quickly as possible. In the meantime, it was hoped that elections and plebiscites would create opportunities for political participation for all but the most recalcitrant elements. The received wisdom was that stability was possible only through a democratically constituted Iraqi government determined to reconcile sectarian tensions. Thus, a stable and secure Iraq would follow a genuine attempt at reconciliation—not the other way around. And then came the 2006 attack that destroyed the golden dome of Al Askari mosque in Samarra, one of the most important Shia shrines. The attack was accompanied by a killing spree that claimed the lives of a hundred Iraqis within a day and more than a thousand in the next few days. Iraq quickly became immersed in a sectarian civil war.

These powerful developments led to a search for answers and alternatives in Washington. But continuity proved a persistent habit within the government. An obstinate Donald Rumsfeld was a formidable obstacle to fresh thinking. Nor were the Joint Chiefs of Staff prone to devote more resources to Iraq. The commanders on the ground in Iraq, Generals George Casey and John Abizaid, advised that Washington should maintain its patience and not discard the current train-and-transfer strategy. The president’s closest foreign-policy adviser, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, had grown weary of the Iraq entanglement. And a highly praised bipartisan study group led by foreign-policy mandarins James Baker and Lee Hamilton had endorsed a path of recalibration and retreat. For the president to reject such a consensus would be viewed by many as an act of peculiar defiance.

Certainly, there was presidential frustration and a faltering policy. But a switch to a successful alternative requires a high-ranking official who rejects the prevailing consensus and offers a plausible counterstrategy. Stephen Hadley, Bush’s national-security adviser, assumed that role in the Bush White House. As Bush recalled later, “He knew my anxiety. He knew my intensity on the issue. He read me like a book.” Hadley did not originally devise the actual strategy, but he provided high-level sponsorship inside the administration for those interested in rethinking the policy. Under Hadley’s direction, a group of National Security Council staffers, assorted former generals and think-tank analysts began formulating a different approach. The views of the White House planning group now coincided with the perceptions of important military officers such as David Petraeus, who already were thinking of a different policy involving additional troops to bolster a new counterinsurgency strategy.

Once the new strategy was articulated, Hadley proved critical in getting it adopted. To be sure, he was responding to urgent concerns of a beleaguered but determined president. Still, he had to overcome bureaucratic barriers, determined opposition from key military commanders and U.S. diplomats, and a Democratic Congress that was losing faith in the war. Throughout this exercise, Hadley proved a pivotal figure. He could have urged the president to give the local commanders more time. He could have joined the withdrawal chorus. Instead, he opted to salvage the president’s policy.

The reigning assumptions of the previous American strategy now came crumbling down. The conflict had been seen as a battle between the central government and an insurgency seeking to displace it. But now it was considered a sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shia, with Al Qaeda’s violence aggravating those tensions. U.S. forces were seen not necessarily as catalysts for violence, but as agents whose more active participation and patrol could mitigate the sectarian war. The new strategy recognized Iraq’s diverse landscape and tailored tactics to that diversity. Instead of emphasizing top-down reconciliation, the new approach focused on bottom-up accommodation. Population security became critical as U.S. commanders reached out to Sunni tribal leaders and even aligned with their militias against Al Qaeda. The American presence on streets and in neighborhoods increased to give protection to Iraqis and foster confidence that they could escape their predicament. This naturally entailed not just more troops, but also different commanders and ultimately a different secretary of defense.

The surge, which increased U.S. deployments in Iraq by some twenty-one thousand troops, provided an umbrella of security that allowed nascent trends to mature. In reality, between 2004 and 2006 Al Qaeda’s harsh tactics alienated Sunni tribes at times, causing them to reach out to local U.S. commanders. But subsequent efforts at cooperation failed because the United States did not have the capacity to offer the necessary protection to cement deals. The Sunni tribesmen needed arms and a degree of support in order to establish a force able to patrol their areas and protect them against Al Qaeda assaults. The new strategy allowed Sunni tribal leaders, already chafing under the threat of Al Qaeda, to defect and thus allow moderate Sunni opinion to gain greater force vis-à-vis radical elements.

The surge probably would not have succeeded without the central government of Nuri al-Maliki committing itself to declawing Shia militias, particularly the movement of Moktada al-Sadr. In March 2008, the Shia government of Iraq moved beyond its presumed sectarian affinities and launched an assault on radical Shia forces in Basra. Thus, the government proved to skeptical Sunnis that it favored national stability over sectarian empowerment.

The surge strategy emerged through a series of thoughtful exercises that assessed all options and their potential for success. However diligent the process may have been, the notion that additional forces protecting population centers were essential for stability had been around for some time. The Pentagon could have embraced that strategy at the outset of the invasion and thus provided Iraqi institutions time to establish themselves and their authority. But, because Washington wanted regime change on the cheap and with a limited footprint, it pursued an occupation policy that proved disastrous.

The future of Iraq remains uncertain. However, there is no doubt that a change in strategy salvaged the American enterprise and saved Iraq from collapsing further into a horrific civil conflict, with America caught in the conflagration. It required not only presidential anguish and leadership but also an incisive policy maker to translate concern into a new policy. The surge brought about a quick turnaround. Had the level of violence not declined as quickly as it did, George W. Bush likely would have met Nixon’s fate: a president who launched a successful counterstrategy only to run out of time.

IT IS rare for presidents to take direct command of their foreign-policy failures. Presidential frustration doesn’t necessarily yield alternatives. Lyndon Johnson indisputably was frustrated with his Vietnam strategy, as Barack Obama must be with his Iran policy. Yet change doesn’t always emerge simply because a chief executive is exasperated and appreciates the cost of failure. Nor will a bureaucracy, set in its ways, often come to his rescue. An extraordinary alignment of interests and opportunities must come together for the ship of state to change direction. Continuity in the midst of failure has been more of the norm than the exception.

The philosopher John Dewey said that “institutions tremble when a new idea appears.” In their own ways, Dean Acheson, Richard Nixon and Stephen Hadley not only transcended such fears but also actively pursued new ideas. Acheson today stands as one of the preeminent historical figures in American foreign policy primarily because, at a key historical juncture, he turned his assumptions into questions. Nixon proved the rarest of presidents when he discarded the conventional bureaucratic wisdom and played a direct role in devising a different path. The tragedy of Nixon’s presidency was that his disgrace and fall prevented his country from taking advantage of his successful strategy. Hadley was an unlikely catalyst for change, as circumspect and cautious men steeped in legal training usually don’t buck existing templates and precedents. Yet these very different men can lay a claim on history for accomplishing the rarest of achievements: turning failure into success.

Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Image: Pullquote: The future of Iraq remains uncertain. However, there is no doubt that a change in strategy salvaged the American enterprise and saved Iraq from collapsing further into a horrific civil conflict.Essay Types: Essay