foreign policy

Matt Yglesias linked to this months-old Emily Stokes profile of Rory Stewart in the Financial Times.  Yglesias highlights one of the funnier metaphors I've seen about the trouble with advising policymakers:   

“It’s like they’re coming in and saying to you, ‘I’m going to drive my car off a cliff. Should I or should I not wear a seatbelt?’ And you say, ‘I don’t think you should drive your car off the cliff.’ And they say, ‘No, no, that bit’s already been decided – the question is whether to wear a seatbelt.’ And you say, ‘Well, you might as well wear a seatbelt.’ And then they say, ‘We’ve consulted with policy expert Rory Stewart and he says ...’"

OK, that's really funny, and I think it's true a fair amount of the time. 

On the other hand, I'm not sure that metaphor holds up all of the time.  Consider another possibility.  From the policymaker's perspective, getting outside advice is like trying to figure out which railroad track to take if you're driving a train.  There are three options ahead, and for myriad reasons each of the possibilities carries some risk.  So you go place an emergency phone call to the head of Harvard's Department of Railroad Studies to get a recommendation.  His advice?  "Why don't you go off-track?"  

To revisit a recurring theme on this blog, sometimes the outside advisor is right to make policymakers question core assumptions.  At the same time, however, sometimes a policymaker has neither the time nor the political capital to go back to first principles.  Sometimes they just need to know what is the least bad policy option.  And I guarantee you that having an academic tell them, "they're all bad policy options" is of no use whatsoever in that moment.   

I suspect that knowing which metaphor applies is more art than science, but I'm curious to hear from commenters on both sides of the policymaking divide. 

In the past month, two peer-reviewed academic articles have aimed point-blank at realism and yelled "Fire!" 

In Perspectives on Politics, Ido Oren argues that there is a logical tension between the idea of realism as an objective paradigm and realists proffering policy prescriptions: 

Realist International Relations thinkers often intervene in political debates and criticize their governments' policies even as they pride themselves on theorizing politics as it “really” is. They rarely reflect on the following contradictions between their theory and their practice: if there is a “real world” impervious to political thought, why bother to try to influence it?

Samuel Barkin makes a similar point in the latest issue of Foreign Policy Analysis: 

Attempts by some contemporary realists to both claim that international politics are objectively predictable and at the same time prescribe particular foreign policies cannot hold together logically, because they are internally contradictory. The core argument of this article is that these attempts not only fail to fulfill their goal, but that the attempt to be scientific, to see the world as predictable, is ontologically incompatible with the core insight of classical realism, that we must see the world as it is, rather than as we want it to be.

To which I say.... meh. 

I see where Barkin and Oren are coming from, really, I do.  It is certainly the case that this is an area where, say, constructivism has a comparative advantage over realism -- because the former is a theory that allows discursive and rhetorical strategems to affect real world events. 

That said, this is also one of those logical points that sounds devastating in a grad seminar but seems less persuasive when applied outside the world of Imre Lakatos (though I would pay money to see someone from APSA flash their badge at the annual meeting and say, "Freeze, Mearsheimer!!  You can't use an interest-group explanation to explain such a broad swath of American foreign policy and still call yourself an offensive realist!  That violates section 2.1 of the negative heuristic.  You'll have to come with me!") 

First, it's not clear to me that these sins are unique to realism.  Other paradigms can claim objectivity, posit systemic effects and yet still proffer policy advice. 

Second, structural effects can take different forms at different junctures.  A realist could therefore proffer policy advice along the lines of:  "No matter what you do as a policymaker, the inevitable outcome is going to be X.  However, if you choose policy action A, X will happen with a lot of unnecessary bloodshed and expenditure, whereas if you choose policy action B, X happens with a minimum of negative side-effects." 

Third, there is a difference between a scientific paradigm and individual experts offering concrete advice.  The latter might contradict the former, but then again, the complexities of the real world often contradict the simplifying assumptions we make in our models.  The art of policymaking often requires knowing exactly which model applies under what conditions -- and this is hardly a matter of settled debate. 

What do you think? 

Your humble blogger is fully aware that everyone and their mother has been blogging and writing about the big Obama speech from yesterday.  Why, you might ask, have I been silent?  [I might, I might indeed!--ed.]

It's a combination of four things:

1. Like Mark Lynch, I want to wait and see what the longer-term effects are -- if any.  By longer term, we're talking past the six-hour window that bloggers would consider as long-term.
2. There are plenty of FP bloggers who can write about this to any ideological flavor.  So I'm free-riding off of them rather than write about a subject on which writing persuades no one and brings nothing but loopiness to the comments section.
3. [He's waaaay behind on some other writing assignments!!--ed.]  You weren't supposed to say that out loud.
4. Superficial cultural gadfly that I am, the thing that caught my attention this AM was not the reax to the Obama speech, but A.O. Scott's devastating evisceration of Sam Mendes' new movie Away We Go (though I do grant that the trailer looks amusing).  In this paragraph, Scott articulates for me the response I always have to Mendes' work: 

To observe that they inhabit no recognizable American social reality is only to say that this is a film by Sam Mendes, a literary tourist from Britain who has missed the point every time he has crossed the ocean. The vague, secondhand ideas about the blight of the suburbs that sloshed around American Beauty and Revolutionary Road are now complemented by an equally incoherent set of notions about the open road, the pioneer spirit, the idealism of youth.

Clearly, Sam Mendes is not the film equivalent of de Tocqueville.  This, of course, leads to a vital film question:  who is the cinematic equivalent of Alexis de Tocqueville?

Ooooh, William Broad has a story in the New York Times that is the secret fantasy dream article for anyone wanting to criticize the Obama administration on national security grounds.  The first few paragraphs consist of gift after gift: 

The federal government mistakenly made public a 266-page report, its pages marked “highly confidential,” that gives detailed information about hundreds of the nation’s civilian nuclear sites and programs, including maps showing the precise locations of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons.

The publication of the document was revealed Monday in an on-line newsletter devoted to issues of federal secrecy. That publicity set off a debate among nuclear experts about what dangers, if any, the disclosures posed. It also prompted a flurry of investigations in Washington into why the document was made public.

On Tuesday evening, after inquiries from The New York Times, the document was withdrawn from a Government Printing Office Web site.

Several nuclear experts argued that any dangers from the disclosure were minimal, given that the general outlines of the most sensitive information were already known publicly.

“These screw-ups happen,” said John M. Deutch, a former Director of Central Intelligence and Deputy Secretary of Defense who is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s going further than I would have gone but doesn’t look like a serious breach.”

But David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks nuclear proliferation, said information that shows where nuclear fuels are stored “can provide thieves or terrorists inside information that can help them seize the material, which is why that kind of data is not given out. It can become a physical security threat.”

The information, considered sensitive but not classified, was assembled for transmission later this year to the International Atomic Energy Agency as part of a process by which the United States is opening itself up to more stringent inspections in hopes that foreign countries will do likewise, especially Iran and other states believed to be clandestinely developing nuclear arms.

President Obama sent the document to Congress on May 5 for Congressional review and possible revision, and the Government Printing Office subsequently posted the draft declaration on its web site.

[Um, isn't this really the fault of the Government Printing Office, and not Obama per se?--ed.]  Well, the GPO is the proximate source of the blame, sure.  Stepping back, however, we have the following:

1. A pretty significant national security lapse;
2. A lapse that occurred because the U.S. was trying to comply with an international organization;
3. A reassurance that this isn't a big deal from John Deutch.  This is like having Eliot Spitzer comment on the gravity of an ethics scandal. 

Have at it, conservatives!

A recurring theme of this blog has been the relationship between academics and policymakers.  What, if anything should academics have on offer?  What should they have to offer? 

Stanford's alumni magazine offers an interesting take on this question, asking six scholars and policymakers affiliated with the university about, "what lessons they drew from conflicts they studied or had a role in, and how they relayed their insights to the people in charge."

The most fascinating anecdote comes from Priya Satia: 

In 2007, the U.S. Directorate of National Intelligence invited Satia to address staffers from more than a dozen different intelligence organizations about Middle East counterinsurgency. She spoke about the risks of groupthink, and the price British and Iraqis paid for that. But the message seemed to pass people by.

They wanted to hear more about T.E. Lawrence, she says, not sounding very surprised. “The kind of people who get into intelligence have been inspired by the T.E. Lawrences—they staked their careers on having some kind of secret role in the making of history, and when you tell them that’s not going to work, I mean, what are they supposed to do with that information?”

I assume Satia must have been talking to the operations people, because I find it hard to believe that analysts are really all that inspired by T.E. Lawrence. 

That quibble aside, Satia raises an interesting point.  Many social scientists focus on the myriad structural reasons why things are the way they are.  Policymakers believe they can help shape the way things are.  The last thing they often want to hear is why their ideas won't work.  And while scholars can often explain why an idea won't work, they are often at a loss to offer a superior, politically viable alternative. 

This might be an "irreconcilable" problem, but I'll leave that question to the commentators. 

My latest bloggingheads discussion is with Joe Nye of the Kennedy School of Government.  We discuss Joe's Washington Post op-ed, the academic response, Obama's soft power, and how policymaking is viewed like heroin within the halls of academe.

Go check it out, or view it here: