The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) recently published results of a survey of historians on the best and worst foreign policy decisions in U.S. history.

There are few surprises—wars in Vietnam and Iraq fared poorly, and the post-WWII creation of the institutions we associate with the “liberal international order” receives high marks.

Among the most striking results to me is the fact that two of the ten worst foreign policy decisions in this list are related to the Indian Removal Act (one is the act itself; one is the forcible removal of the Cherokee).

Even more striking is that historians simultaneously laud decisions like the Louisiana Purchase in which the United States acquired vast swaths of territory inhabited by Native American groups. These “best” and “worst” decisions exhibit a curious tension.

On the one hand, it’s interesting to see early U.S. relations with Native American groups treated as foreign policy. (CFR partnered with the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations to design the study.)

I have argued that International Relations (IR) scholars ought to do so—my recent book rests on that premise, and I have suggested elsewhere that the 1849 move of the Bureau of Indian Affairs from the Department of War to the newly created Department of the Interior offers a useful landmark in mapping a transition in these relations from “foreign” to “domestic”.

On the other hand, it seems odd to suggest that the United States was right to acquire land but wrong to push the land’s inhabitants elsewhere. Distinct as those decisions may be, the latter was always quite likely to follow from the former.

The passage of the Indian Removal Act and the choices made to implement that law (to say nothing of later nineteenth-century decisions on “Indian Affairs”) were indeed choices—they were contingent human decisions, not inevitable unfoldings of destiny. But these decisions were perhaps overdetermined given the array of U.S. interests pushing for expansion and the limited concern about how others might be affected by that expansion.

So, can we call the Louisiana Purchase one of the best decisions in the history of U.S. foreign policy and the Indian Removal Act one of the worst? Maybe, but the fact that some of the “best” decisions in U.S. foreign policy history are so closely intertwined with the “worst” decisions speaks to the difficulty of any such ranking exercise when individual decisions are not independent of each other.