Danny Orbach
Profile:
Danny Orbach is an associate professor of military history and Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His book, Punishment: Behind Japanese Military Brutality is forthcoming at Hurst.

What do international law, cooking regulations, civil service hiring, and intelligence recruitment have in common? On the surface—absolutely nothing. But if we take a closer look, we may uncover a hidden thread that reveals a profound structural weakness in the ability of developed democracies to compete with authoritarian rivals like Russia, China, and Iran. That thread is bureaucratic inertia—a creeping accumulation of rules, protocols, and procedures that, like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowly but surely drag down their agility and effectiveness.

Let us begin with a relatively old story. In 1992, then-CIA Director Robert Gates urgently needed an intelligence officer who spoke Azerbaijani Turkish—likely for a covert mission. After an exhaustive search, he finally found a candidate with the right security clearance. But then, a Kafkaesque obstacle emerged. All CIA recruits had to pass a standard battery of tests, including an English writing exam. The candidate failed the writing portion—and was rejected by the hiring committee. Gates exploded: “I have thousands of people who can write English. I have no one else who speaks Azeri. What the hell were you thinking?”

This isn’t merely an amusing bureaucratic anecdote. It’s a glimpse into a structural malaise. Consider the experience of Professor Yaacov Lozowick, Israel’s former Chief Archivist. In a somber exit interview, he described how civil service procedures made it nearly impossible for him to plan, let alone execute, any long-term vision. Budget approvals were so delayed and restricted that he couldn’t even plan month to month. Hiring? He wasn’t allowed to read the résumés of applicants, due to anti-discrimination policies and bias-prevention procedures. The result? Paralysis.

The same principle applies to dialogue within parliamentary institutions such as the U.S. Congress. Systems of checks and balances are designed not to allow any one faction to dominate entirely, but to encourage compromise among competing interests. A notable example is the filibuster, which effectively requires at least some degree of bipartisan support to pass legislation.

However, these mechanisms rest on a fundamental, though often unspoken, assumption: that all parties are genuinely interested in finding common ground and reaching workable solutions. When identity politics take precedence, however, partisan actors often prioritize inflaming divisions and stoking identity-based rivalries over collaboration. The result is legislative gridlock and institutional paralysis.

Now switch to a seemingly unrelated field: restaurants.

In the 19th century, penniless immigrants to the United States—particularly Italians—often survived by opening tiny eateries. If you had a pot, a stove, and a good recipe, you could make a living. Today, starting even a modest restaurant legally in a Western city requires a dizzying array of health, fire, accessibility, and zoning permits. These regulations are often so onerous that they drive aspiring entrepreneurs either to expensive middlemen or into the black market—where they are easy prey for petty corruption.

But these stories are not mainly about corruption, or even bad intentions. Rather, they are about the slow but relentless buildup of procedural “barnacles” that sap the West’s institutional agility. The longer a ship is at sea, the more barnacles accumulate on its hull—each tiny and seemingly harmless, but together capable of drastically slowing the vessel. In naval warfare, speed was once a matter of life or death. So too in today’s global competition.

In the 1950s, the CIA hired people based on managerial discretion. Security vetting was simple and swift. Scandals and genuine threats, such as Soviet infiltration, understandably led to tighter controls. But these processes have now metastasized: today, a CIA security clearance can take over a year at best. In the 1970s, Professor Shlomo Na’aman, head of the history department at Tel Aviv University in Israel, hired a young academic after a casual conversation over ice cream—impressed by her intellect. Today, a hire at an Israeli University requires the approval of four committees, external readers, and multiple levels of administrative review.

Let’s be clear: some regulations are good, even essential. We don’t want a return to the days of nepotistic hires or unsanitary food carts. But the deeper issue is structural: the tendency of bureaucracies to expand regardless of necessity.

The British historian C. Northcote Parkinson once observed that as the British Empire shrank, the Colonial Office grew. As the Royal Navy had fewer ships, it somehow gained more admirals. Bureaucrats, by nature, seek more subordinates and fewer rivals. They create procedures for one another to follow. And when performance is not tied to outcomes—as is often the case in government—there’s little internal incentive to streamline. Another engine of procedural overgrowth is the cultural drive toward novelty and personal legacy. Activists, bureaucrats, and even legislators in Western societies often grow up immersed in certain values—say, accessibility, human rights, or environmental consciousness. To make their mark, they must propose something new. Not satisfied with existing norms, they push for ever more refined (and sometimes extreme) interpretations. In the U.S. Congress, lawmakers looking to pass a “social” bill often do so by layering new restrictions rather than repealing outdated ones. Add them all together, and you get a regulatory snowball. In Israel, for instance, building a business website now requires compliance with a thick web of accessibility rules that few people are able to navigate.

This creeping proceduralism also weighs heavily on Western strategy. International law, multilateral treaties, and complex interpretations of the laws of war—all noble in origin—have become a tangle of constraints that hamper military and diplomatic flexibility, further hampered by identity politics paralyzing dialogue in parliamentary insitutions. As political scientist Tanisha Fazal has noted, there is a sociological gulf between those who write the laws of war (judges, UN officials, legal scholars) and those who fight wars (military commanders). The former group, driven by progressive ideals and peer recognition, produces ever more restrictive rules—sometimes even considering emotional distress to civilians or harm to animals in their calculus of proportionality. Meanwhile, the enemies of the West—Russia, Iran, Hamas—are under no such constraints. This imbalance creates a dangerous asymmetry. The West fights wars that are expensive, slow, and legally fraught. Its enemies fight dirty, cheap, and fast.

These same barnacles are gumming up the West’s strategic and diplomatic gears. Why does it take NATO months to decide on weapons transfers to Ukraine? Why do EU membership decisions drag on for over a decade? Because every new action must navigate through an ever-thickening jungle of procedural norms, internal protocols, and multilateral approvals. Even enforcing deportations of illegal immigrants—where courts have issued clear rulings—can become impossible in countries like France, where domestic and EU regulations form a nearly impenetrable web.

Ships must be cleaned periodically, or the barnacles will sink them. But scrubbing the hull is disruptive, sometimes even destructive. Think about Donald Trump.