The three wrote, in the book's introduction:

...The political bodies of Presidents and Secretaries of State are strewn all over the place. Ronald Reagan's four immediate predecessors all were felled, and foreign policy played a major role. Each, save Richard M. Nixon in 1972, faced a serious renomination challenge in the primaries, and each challenge exposed deep ideological cleavages on foreign affairs. And at Cabinet level and below, the foreign-policy stage has come to resemble the final gory scene of Hamlet, played in gray flannel and pinstripes.

Why do we act this way? The heart of the problem, it seems to us, is this:

For two decades, the making of American foreign policy has been growing far more political--or more precisely, far more partisan and ideological. The White House has succumbed, as former Secretary of State Alexander Haig recently put it, to "the impulse to view the presidency as a public relations opportunity and to regard Government as a campaign for reelection." And in less exalted locations, we Americans--politicians and experts alike--have been spending more time, energy and passion in fighting ourselves than we have in trying, as a nation, to understand and deal with a rapidly changing world.

The particular tragedy of our times is how unnecessary it seems to continue the old savagery. Much of the continuity (indeed, recrudescence) of the old attitudes can be attributed to continuity of personnel. The President himself nurses a variety of grudges against the "other side," many dating back well before his father's Presidency, and seems determined to suppress all independent thinking on foreign policy, for fear it might serve the interests of his adversaries, real or presumed. This "my way or the highway" attitude has a way of filtering down all the way to the bottom of policy circles. (Why do you think this blog is written anonymously?)

Senior appointees also bear the scars of old battles. The previous President Bush, after losing his re-election campaign in 1992, struck an uncharacteristic last blow in the name of partisanship by pardoning the Iran-contra convicts, claiming that Democrats (and, apparently, federal juries) had criminalized legitimate political differences. The current President Bush implicitly endorsed this view by appointing two of the same individuals, John Poindexter and Elliott Abrams, to important government posts. Even the Republican co-chair of the presidentially appointed Iraq intelligence panel, Lawrence Silverman, was tied to the scandal.

Destler, Lake, and Gelb conclude,

Most of all, it is not in the interest of our future Presidents to continue transforming so much of their foreign policy into the world of domestic politics. In the end, every last one of them in the last twenty years has been damaged by the reality and the perception that they were using foreign policy for their own partisan purposes. Only Presidents can lead foreign-policy making. Only they can get issues resolved in ways that endure in the bureaucracy and in the Congress. But they can do this only if they restore the conviction that in matters of foreign policy, they can set aside partisan politics and really represent the national interest. They, together with other American leaders, must return to responsibility. Otherwise, we will continue to be, as we face the world, our own worst enemy.

Analyst