Abstract
In his book The Power Game, Hedrick Smith speaks of the foreign policy game in the United States as a "bureaucratic tribal warfare", using a tribal metaphor to describe the fierce fights which take place in Washington, DC. The notion of bureaucracy emerged in the early 20th century, with the work of a German sociologist, Max Weber, who described the process of rationalization in Western administrations. For Weber, the term was positive, but it has now negative implications, for it evokes red tape, lengthy procedures and complexity. The machinery of US national security policy is indeed bureaucratic, since it involves many agencies and governmental departments, and unlike in other Western countries, where foreign policy is run by professional diplomats, political appointees shape the US diplomacy. Since 1945, the United States has asserted itself as the policeman of the world and has generated a huge bureaucracy, along with an enormous military might: the National Security Act of 1947, under Truman, is a watershed date, from which the US never escaped its global responsibilities, even when it was willing to retreat.
