Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Might I Have A Few Answers About Foreign Policy?
Let’s start with one observation and one question:
The Observation: To the extent democracy works, it works best at the local level. It’s reasonable to expect that people will see, know, and care what their government does in the cities they live in. It’s reasonable to hope that people will exercise some oversight and discipline — by means of the vote — over these governments when they are manifestly failing to serve them.
But it is not reasonable to expect an average American citizen to have a specialist understanding of US foreign policy in every region of the globe; that’s utterly unreasonable and inconsistent with all common sense and experience. No normal person could really grasp whether — day-to-day — our policies toward Russia, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East make perfect sense, separately or together, particularly given the languages one would have to master to do so, and particularly given that so much of our policy is not transparent, by design.
The Question: Given this, are there any shortcuts by which an ordinary citizen might accurately judge — on the basis of the limited information available to him or her — that the policies we’re pursuing, and the institutions we’re relying upon, are obviously incompetent?
A good shortcut, in my view, would be one that allows ordinary people to put the brakes on an incompetent policy before there’s a hole in the ground where a city used to be.
I’m focusing on the word competence — rather than ethical, sane, dignified, wise, or even the phrase in good faith — for a reason. It’s a more limited category. Sometimes it’s useful to make a question smaller and more precise. I think I’ve identified a few shortcuts. They might be of use.
But first, a question for you: what definition of competence would satisfy you? And here, the answer, “governments are never that competent” isn’t good enough. When it comes to foreign policy, there’s no alternative: only governments can conduct it.
So the first thing to think about is this: what does competence look like, generally? Not just in foreign policy: in any endeavor. And let me suggest, for purposes of comparison, a field of human activity that’s marked, generally, by competence. It’s not perfect — far from it — but basically, even without a lot of specialist knowledge, most of us think it’s conducted to a very high level of competence:
Commercial air travel.
Most of us don’t enjoy air travel, but we generally think pilots and air traffic controllers know what they’re doing. Few of us could really explain how all those planes are staying in the air, but we all know that they are, and that catastrophic failures are so rare as to be almost statistically insignificant.
That’s competent. Not perfect, not a miracle, but competent.
What else in our ordinary experience is like that? Let’s make a list.
Published in Foreign Policy, General
I agree, and no reason even to be superficial–something serious can and should be said about this. I wonder whether deep down you think, though, that the problem is so complex as to be insoluble, and therefore, truly, a waste of time for anyone to think about? Is the popular view (as I’m imagining it) right, in other words?
I don’t think so, but I’d certainly like to hear why I might be wrong.
Let me try rephrasing that:
1) Should we think of foreign policy as something relevantly like commercial air travel?
2) Or should we think of it as (more) relevantly like the climate?
Common sense says: It has relevant elements of both. Let’s recognize 2, but focus on 1.
Claire,
I understand your wishes and respect your judgement but allow me to assert one more piece of abstract theory, Kant’s Right.
Right as a general principle is as I have described. A Law which maximizes the freedom of all justifying government to use force if and only if coercing a coercer. However, Right is broken down further.
Private Right is begun at the level of the individual acquisition of Property. It follows through to a concept of a united will forming a contract for the the exchange of property.
Public Right forms the government which can make the ownership of the property conclusive not just provisional. In short the government’s public right exists only to secure private right.
National Right is the right of the government to act as an individual Nation in respect of other National governments. National Right secures the public right by defending it against incursions of other Nations and has no other purpose.
Cosmopolitan Right is the right of a group of Nations to act in concert to secure the National Rights of individual nations.
This structure could be taken metaphorically as a function.
Cosmopolitan Right (National Right (Public Right (Private Right (Freedom)))).
Written this way it makes it clear why Marxism is an absurdity. Marxism appears at first to be some form of Cosmopolitanism until one realizes that it destroys free individual ownership. No Private Right then no Public Right. No Public Right then no National Right. No National Right then no Cosmopolitan Right.
This set of a priori concepts is the way I would work through problems in foreign policy. For me this general structure gives meaning to the particular features of foreign policy. By themselves the a priori concepts would yield no results but the particulars without the a priori concepts to guide them would soon devolve into a useless relativism.
Usually, a little Kant goes a long way. If I am pushing too hard here please feel free to employ my ideas only as needed.
Regards,
Jim
I want to offer up a very simple, common sense, general public working definition for competence – the ability to handle things.
It’s the simplest thing I could boil down to, but it contains within it a few key characteristics.
1) It pre-supposes events (Events dear boy. Events. -MacMillan?)
2) It assumes re-settling on an acceptable stable state. (Hello, Complex Adaptive Systems)
3) You’d likely never achieve it without significant, pre-existing apparatus.
Because of #1, as a definition it is robust to particular aims. I’m not sure if that’s a feature or a bug. Claire, as a simplifying assumption, do any of your shortcuts drop judgement of FP goals? If not, then I’ve over done the simplicity thing.
It does apply to your commercial air travel example. Safety? Handled. Arrive at destination? Handled. Schedules? Handled. Crash investigations? Handled. Perfection? No, but everything IS handled.
Handling something seems to entail at least some minimal sufficient level of competence. If someone can handle something, it entails trust that it will be done.
Also, all the CAS talk highlights the type of examples you were looking for. They are all, in the common use of the term, systems. So, reach for any example that ends in “system.”
Commercial airline system. Electricity generation and distribution systems. The water works system. The judicial system. Hospital systems. Railroad systems. The system of law enforcement. The system of municipal governance. The telecommunications system. The juvenile detention system. The prison system. And on, and on.
Finally, for the lay audience, the frame up of the argument that there can be short cuts and why might just be as important as the actual shortcuts themselves.
Or, a simplified description of the nature of the game may be as useful as judgement of playing the game itself. I know I’d love to see that well written description.
I’ve had a lot of fun reading through this thread, by the way. I’ll admit – there was a lot of re-reading involved!
I look forward to the next few threads too, and I really hope it all contributes to a compelling argument to do the book.
The only problem with this is that FP happens! You can’t decide not to play – the game exists whether you want to play or not.
So, how complex or insoluble it is is irrelevant.
Well, so does “climate.” “Climate” happens, whether or not we like it or feel especially interested in it, right? Without staking out my own position on “climate,” I can uncontroversially say that some people here–reasonable men and women–would argue that precisely assessing the anthropogenic component of climate change is so difficult as to be more or less impossible, and that we’d therefore be better off investing the resources and mental power in trying to control more obviously controllable things.
Now, I don’t believe that foreign policy is basically like climate. But I am open to the argument that I’m wrong (better now than after I’ve written a book suggesting otherwise), so let’s hear it if someone wants to make it.
Hmmm. I was with you until we got to the juvenile detention and prison systems. Neither seem to me good examples of American competence in its full flower. I don’t want to go off track with a debate about our prison system, but it seems to me there’s a world of difference between the grudging but nonetheless near-complete confidence ordinary people feel in the commercial airline system and the deep unease they feel about the prison system. This doesn’t mean I don’t think you may be on to something, though. Just wondering whether we can identify certain kinds of CAS that seem to be more apt to be marked by competence.
Or maybe you mean, “Certain aspects of the prison system,” in that jailbreaks are very rare; and prisons certainly do work, dependably, to keep people locked up, even if they don’t necessarily work in many other aspects one might wish prisons to work? I’d buy that.
First, no, I don’t think a system’s likely chaotic nature puts it outside the scope of what should be talked about—if anything, it’s likely to make it more important to talk about. Again, I think economics is another field with the same characteristics, and in fact I derive a kind of perverse pleasure in comparing papers written by academic neoclassical synthetic economists with those written by hedge fund research departments. The difference in mathematical sophistication breaks down exactly as you would expect.
That said, I do think it’s insoluble, so I suppose I am offering a counsel of despair: if your goal is to inform the electorate in the domain of foreign policy such that we will elect politicians who will formulate and implement “competent” foreign policy, you will fail. If your goal, on the other hand, is to inform your readership in the domain of foreign policy such that we have a better understanding of foreign policy from your perspective as an American expatriate, with a fair amount of more-or-less formal theorizing about what makes such policy “competent” or not, then I think you have a worthwhile project.
When I think about your father’s and your writing, what I find in common is not just a recognition, but an insistence that you cannot get to the formal—the calculus in “A Tour of the Calculus,” Thatcherism in “There Is No Alternative”—without addressing the human—Newton, Leibniz, Weierstrass et al. in “A Tour of the Calculus,” Thatcher and, of necessity, her inner circle in “There Is No Alternative.” We currently seem to be in the era of post-Cold War “Whew! Look at how awful 1950s command and control systems were! It’s a miracle there wasn’t nuclear war!” navel-gazing (I encourage everyone fawning over Command and Control to immediately read The Theory That Would Not Die). Despite my misgivings, I think, on balance, this is good: we need a popularization phase before we can get to an “of course; everyone knows how RAND used Bayes’ theorem to calculate the probability of nuclear accidents and how it affected Cold War policy!” phase. If you can either popularize foreign policy or help readers’ thinking about it be more sophisticated (or both), I think it will have been worth it.
Bjørn Lomborg, call your office!
It’s worse than this: the incentives for climate “scientists” to cook the books are so perverse they’d make Nina Hartley blush.
If one applies a similar standard to foreign policy, one could argue that governments are getting more and more competent all the time, considering that battle deaths and genocides have been decreasing for centuries, the number of democracies has increased by 500% since World War II, and the number of autocracies has dropped by about 75% or so.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/22/world-less-violent-stats_n_1026723.html
On the other hand, ironically, one could also argue that air travel has become safer over time as it’s become more automated. There’s no longer a dedicated navigation officer in the cockpit, and computers do most of the actual flying, scheduling, etc. The people working in the industry haven’t become more competent. The industry has become more competent as people have been replaced.
Perhaps foreign policy is similar. Perhaps there is less war and more democracy when governments do less and allow individuals to do more?
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.” — Alfred North Whitehead
This is my first substantive comment on Ricochet, but here goes:
So, I have tried to follow this (and the other Berlinski-FP threads), but there is way more here to read than I have time for (forgive me, please). At the risk of covering old ground, the place that I start on this point is Kissinger’s “Diplomacy” which, as a historical (or is it “an historical”? . . . forget it, I’m a Midwesterner, and that doesn’t sound right) account of power politics. It’s brilliantly descriptive as history but uselessly non-normative as a guide to how one should think about foreign policy. This is much in the same way that Mearsheimer and other realists can rant about “I told you this would happen” but be utterly useless about how we should act in the FP realm in a way that recognizes moral agency or U.S. exceptionalism.
The history is important, but it doesn’t tell you where you need to go. I am really uncertain, having read the threads and Claire’s posts, at what level we want to engage the reader. Is this supposed to be foreign policy for dummies? Is this supposed to be a game-theory text on what might motivate actors in the foreign policy realm? Or is this, more or less a, “Conservative Foreign Policy Framework for the 21st Century”? I will assume it’s the latter.
Foreign policy without normative guides, it seems to me, is just mere history. We have plenty of that. It seams to me that a useful book on foreign policy must articulate a worldview that answers the following questions:
1.) When and where do we claim “friends” (is the enemy of my enemy my friend?);
2.) When and where do we claim “allies” (or disclaim them, in the case of Turkey);
3.) How do we respond (short of sending in the troops) to aggression from our adversaries that is not directed at U.S. territories or our allies territories;
4.) How do we respond to the shortcomings (acute or chronic) of our friends; and
5.) Most importantly, “what is the unifying U.S. goal in foreign policy”?
Personally, I think the answer to the last question is only a modification of the Reagan Doctrine:
We will support the opponents of totalitarianism (as opposed to communism) where we find them. We will seek to advance the spread of human liberty, human dignity, free enterprise, and free markets when and where we can because they are the best guarantees of our own safety and of peace throughout the world. We will preach this gospel always and if necessary — and where likely to be effective — with troops.
We reject power politics for the sake of power — i.e., realpolitik — as immoral and responsible for the world’s worse evils (including, but not limited to, both world wars). We reject a balance of power as anything but a temporary compromise, and we seek always and everywhere to dominate and overpower the forces of illiberalism. The enemies of freedom will always feel the hard edge of whatever power we can bring to bear (which will usually be economic but sometimes military).
So, most of this will be soft diplomacy. Trade agreements, fracking, and “Radio Free Europe”/USAID type activities. But there is a case to be made here (including why this view will /not/ lead to the sort of nation-building our liberal friends are so affraid of). No one seems to be making it — or maybe I’m not looking in the right places.
First, thank you–I feel encouraged that the subject prompted you to write your first substantive post on Ricochet. That seems to me a good sign in itself.
And second, you’re right to feel uncertain about what level I want to engage the reader, because that is exactly what I’m uncertain about. I’m asking these questions in some part to try to gauge the level at which readers would like to be engaged. I like to engage–personally–at a level of detail that I know for sure and from experience is of no great interest or use to most people. Left entirely to my own devices, and free of market constraints or any demand upon myself to be useful, I’d probably write stuff that’s academic, obscure, and very unread. So one of the things I’m asking myself is, “What level would be of use?” And I’m trying a few different questions here just to get a feel for that–what kinds of questions, what tone, what level, do people find useful?
What I think I hear you saying–correct me if I’m wrong–is that you’d be interested in a book that’s not only descriptive, but normative; and that this discussion has so far seemed puzzling because I keep saying something like, “Let’s postpone the discussion of the ends and just look, for now, at the means.”
I’ve been doing this deliberately, but can certainly understand why this would be–so far–frustrating to read. What I’m concluding from your post is that perhaps a book proposal or book should not be structured in a way that no one knows what I think until the last chapter. Does that sound right?
There’s an art to providing both descriptive and normative exposition in parallel sufficiently succinctly so as not to lose anywhere from half to all of your audience—a fact I’m keenly aware of every time I decide to give a 40-minute presentation on Type Theory, no matter how brilliant my partner, Amanda Laucher, is. The Collapse of Complex Societies, which manages to discuss two dozen collapsed civilizations over 2,000 years, give specific information about each, and draw plausible general conclusions from these heterogeneous specifics in 264 pages, is probably my touchstone for this. It’s also worth noting that James Rickards refers to this text in his work, which in my mind supports the notion that he’s not the populist lightweight some of his promotional materials can make him sound like.