American Crisis Management for a New Era

There is one type of study which I have not seen, which I hope we can do something about in the months ahead. The pilot of a jet aircraft has a checklist of many dozens of questions that he must answer satisfactorily before he takes off his plane on a flight. Would it not be interesting and revealing if we had a checklist of questions we should answer systematically before we take off on a policy?

There is no evidence that anyone in the audience that day followed up on Rusk’s request. Nor, it seems, has anyone proposed anything similar since. But Rusk was onto something and—in this respect, at least—ahead of his time. Checklists for managing complex, high-stakes tasks in time-pressured circumstances have been widely adopted by many professions. The State Department, however, is notoriously resistant to routinized policy planning, preferring to treat diplomacy as more of an art than a science. That is not to say there have never been valiant attempts to systematize planning (for example, the creation of the Policy Risk and Opportunity Planning Group in 2022), but those efforts rarely, if ever, live beyond the administration that originates them.

On the face of it, foreign policy-making seems nothing like flying a passenger plane, conducting open heart surgery, or operating a nuclear power plant—all of which entail performing discrete, step-by-step tasks in a carefully prescribed manner. Foreign policy-making, by comparison, requires operating in a far messier and volatile environment where actors often confound and counter every move.  

That difference, however, does not invalidate the potential benefits of a more systematic approach to foreign policy-making, especially in crises. Although every foreign policy crisis differs in its specific circumstances and actors, the underlying conditions and specific triggers that produce them tend to recur. An earlier study conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) found that most U.S. foreign policy crises in the post–Cold War era stemmed from roughly a dozen commonly occurring types of instability, such as coups, insurgencies, and major terrorist attacks. In each case, moreover, U.S. decision-makers consistently faced the same core fears: threats to American citizens and national interests overseas. So too was the range of generic policy responses. In short, there is enough consistency to U.S. crisis management to justify systematic preparation and routinized operational guidance. Foreign policy crisis managers, in other words, need to have the same level of professional grounding as pilots, surgeons, and power plant managers.

Accordingly, we have produced a Crisis Management Checklist for U.S. officials to use as needed. Based on interviews with two dozen experienced policy planners and drawing on lessons learned from previous crises, this checklist identifies the necessary steps that officials should take in the first hours and days of a foreign policy crisis. This is a generic tool and thus applicable to most if not all foreign policy crises, regardless of their origin.

Policymakers, however, need more than such a checklist; they also need a way to quickly assess and choose among alternative policy options as a crisis unfolds. Pilots, surgeons, and power plant managers, after all, follow predetermined, carefully sequenced procedures; they do not have the latitude to pursue alternative goals with the tools at their disposal. For this reason, we have also developed a set of Crisis Response Playbooks, operational reference guides for practitioners to use in specific contingencies. Each contains standardized operating procedures for evaluating evolving situations that threaten U.S. interests, choosing among pre-identified policy responses, and then setting in motion the authorities, players, and instruments needed to implement them. These playbooks are based on best practices and lessons learned from previous comparable emergencies, and their value will only grow as the world becomes more turbulent.

Evolving Crisis Management Challenges

As secretary of state through most of the 1960s, Rusk was involved in more than his fair share of high-stakes crises. Although the core challenge that he and others faced at the time—the need to make consequential, time-sensitive decisions under conditions of uncertainty—has not fundamentally changed, the landscape for U.S. crisis management has been transformed almost beyond recognition.

The world is undeniably more complex, interconnected, and fast-paced. U.S. interests have multiplied: American citizens, companies, and military bases can be found in virtually every corner of the globe, not to mention the many allies the United States has sworn to protect. The threats posed by state and nonstate actors have similarly grown, as have many natural hazards.

Violence, in particular, is on the rise. In 2025, there were sixty-five active state-based conflicts, the highest number since 1989. That year also capped a five-year stretch that saw the most battlefield deaths since the Cold War. The character of conflict is also changing: cheap drones, off-the-shelf cyber tools, and fragmented power among state and nonstate actors have made violence easier to initiate, cheaper to sustain, and harder to contain. Artificial intelligence threatens to accelerate this further, enabling crises that unfold at speeds outpacing traditional U.S. response times.

Meanwhile, U.S. power is increasingly challenged around the world. America’s rivals are expanding their ability to impose economic costs on the United States. The international supply chains, communications networks, and economic infrastructure on which American daily life depends are increasingly vulnerable to deliberate interference. American citizens, allies, and forward-deployed military assets also face disruptions that, twenty years ago, would have been considered remote. The erosion of American influence overseas has further reduced U.S. leverage to shape the outcomes of crises. Countries that were once reliant on economic and security partnerships with the United States can now turn to other powers and blocs—above all, China—to meet domestic needs.

The United States’ foreign policy infrastructure has not adapted to those challenges. The military, intelligence community, and federal law enforcement institutionalize crisis response: they have doctrine, dedicated planners, and habits of capturing lessons. The National Security Council (NSC) and the State Department, the parts of the government most involved in responding to crises, generally do not. Furthermore, the conflict and crisis expertise that the State Department built after 9/11 has contracted through successive reorganizations, while the structures and processes established at the NSC have been sidelined. When a crisis breaks, the foreign policy bureaucracy will, more often than not, respond belatedly and in an improvised fashion.

Meeting the Challenge

Adopting policies designed to promote long-term stability—of both the international system and specific regions and countries—is clearly desirable, as is better preparing for plausible contingencies.