The perils of getting too personal in foreign policy

Personality can open doors, but it cannot rewrite geopolitics.

- Hillary Rodham Clinton and Keren Yarhi-Milo

When US President Donald Trump picked up the phone on June 17 to speak with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, he expected the conversation to showcase his command of personal diplomacy. Instead, it unravelled into a rupture.

Mr Trump boasted of having "solved" the conflict between India and Pakistan - and suggested that Pakistan was going to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Mr Modi bristled.

Within weeks, Mr Trump had slapped 50 per cent tariffs on Indian exports, and Mr Modi was literally holding hands with the leaders of Russia and China. It could end in a realignment that would undermine decades of careful American courtship, from President Bill Clinton's groundbreaking 2000 visit to President George W. Bush's landmark civil nuclear deal.

This is the danger of over-personalising foreign policy. While diplomacy has always contained a human element - and yes, some degree of flattery - when the chemistry between leaders becomes a substitute for a coherent strategy, international relations become more volatile and less predictable.

We know this firsthand. One of us is a former secretary of state; the other, a scholar of the psychology of leaders and crisis decision-making. Together we teach a course at Columbia, Inside the Situation Room, where we highlight the human element in foreign policy and the risks and blind spots that emerge when leaders try to gauge the intentions of their adversaries and the threats they pose.

This human dimension is both the focus of a growing body of scholarship and something practitioners have long grasped intuitively. Insights from both communities have shaped our teaching and led us to edit a book on the subject.

We study and teach how leaders navigate ambiguity in an uncertain world. Every day their inboxes are flooded with cables, memos, intelligence assessments and advice. Separating signals from noise is one of their most urgent and difficult tasks.