Presidents Day weekend is an opportune time to reflect on the role of the U.S. presidency and how it has evolved over time, as well as to take note of the accomplishments and failures of the people—so far all men—who have held the office. As such, that also makes it an opportune time for one of the most entertaining and argumentative pastimes of anyone who has ever taken an interest in America’s highest elected office: ranking the presidents. Political scientists and historians regularly offer their lists of best and worst presidents, with foreign policy being a favorite area to judge.
The challenge with creating a ranking of presidents on foreign policy, though, is that few of them have actually had a single, coherent and consistent approach to the world. Though observers love to play the parlor game of characterizing a particular president’s “doctrine,” or whether they are a “realist” or an “idealist,” their foreign policies are frequently an ad hoc mix. Most of them mainly move from crisis to crisis, hoping only to make the least bad decisions and avoid the worst outcomes.
But there is a way to sidestep the problem of ranking presidents based on their foreign policies as a whole, and that is to dial in on the specific decisions each one made. Along these lines, James Lindsey of the Council of Foreign Relations worked with a committee of historians to compile a list of 120 foreign policy decisions taken between the start of the Revolutionary War and the end of Donald Trump’s first term in January 2021. They then surveyed members of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, during October and November of 2023, to determine which of the decisions on that list historians considered to be the best and worst. CFR recently released the results in the form of a ranking of the 10 best and 10 worst foreign policy decisions in U.S. history.