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Foreign Policy: Who Has a Good Record at Predicting What Will Happen, and Why?
I’m busy organizing all the questions you’ve asked and making notes about your comments; you’ll see the fruits of this, I promise! Meanwhile, let’s take a detour. Among major politicians and pundits, who strikes you as having the best record for accurate predictions? Short-term, medium-term, long-term? What’s his or her secret, in your view?
I haven’t put together anything like a complete list — let alone a systematic ranking — but a name that came to my mind for inclusion on this “good” list was Michael Totten’s.
In January 2011, for example, he wrote this:
Unlike in war-torn Afghanistan or fanatical Saudi Arabia, Tunisian democracy is a real possibility. It’s a bit unlikely as it’s only one possible option of many, but it could happen. …
… I’ve spent time in more than a dozen Muslim countries, eight of them Arab, and Tunisia is — or at least was before this month when things fell apart — one of the most advanced and stable. The majority of its citizens belong to a well-educated middle class, the infrastructure seems no worse than Europe’s, and a high percentage of women in the cities have discarded the veil and the headscarf and dress like Europeans. The latter may sound like a small thing, but in a Muslim country, it visually indicates how much women’s rights have advanced. The overwhelming majority live near the coast in cosmopolitan cities that have traded and been in cultural contact with Europeans for millennia. It’s not a Western country, but it fully belongs to the Mediterranean region and is oriented more toward the West than most Arab countries. …
…The place feels pre-democratic in ways other Arab countries, with the exception of Lebanon, don’t. Political opinions are far more moderate, at least in my anecdotal experience, than what I hear elsewhere. Radical Islam either barely exists or is so ruthlessly suppressed it may as well not exist….
…I am by nature an optimist, but the years I’ve spent working in the Middle East have taught me the hard way about pessimism. Every time things begin looking up — in Lebanon, Iraq, with the Palestinians, you name it — political and religious maniacs break out the rocket launchers. The Western, and especially American, concept of progress seems all but absent in the Arab world where everything instead goes ’round in circles…
Tunisia is better. I don’t know if it’s better enough, but it’s better.
That’s a column that stands up to time pretty well. In my experience, most of what Totten writes stands up to time pretty well, too (maybe all of it does; I’d have to go back and re-read it all to say that confidently). I’m speaking short-term, obviously: we can check back in a hundred years to see how he fares in the medium-term. Remind me.
I don’t think there’s a secret, per se. He spends a lot of time in the places he’s discussing; he speaks to a lot of people; he listens to what they say; he asks the right questions; he works hard; and he’s had a lot of experience. It’s not magic, but it’s notable that all of these things are more rare than you’d expect.
Who else does pretty well at making good predictions for the right reasons?
Published in General
Short term: Walter Russell Mead. I think he succeeds because of his comprehensive, nuanced understanding of America’s roots and ongoing influences. In my opinion crucially, he doesn’t handwave away the role of religion in American foreign policy, and he gives the Scots-Irish cultural backbone of the “Jacksonian” tradition the weight it deserves. At worst I think his own moderate Episcopalianism might tend to make all influences seem moderate to him, but I don’t believe I’ve seen that lead him into outright error the way it has other pundits.
Medium term: too early to tell, but I’m keeping an eye on James Rickards.
Rush Limbaugh.
The War Nerd might be potty mouthed and crude, but he’s frequently right:
On Rickards: I haven’t read him, but I looked on Amazon and goodness, I hope he’s wrong. (What else can I say?) It looks as if it might be a book that’s better and less sensational than the cover and blurbs suggest: It has that “the publisher thought this needed to be hyped with the word APOCALYPSE or it will never sell” vibe. Am I right?
On Mead (who I like, too): Your mention of him reminded me of Adam Garfinkle— also at The American Interest but not as much of a household name. He’s hugely under-appreciated. I’m not sure why. I always read what he writes with admiration. I’d have to go back and see what he’s been predicting, over the years, to really say with confidence that he’s good at prediction, but if it turns out that he isn’t, I’d have to revise my prejudices about what would make someone good at it.
Well, he’s certainly made some predictions about ISIS and Iraq that are very testable. No one could accuse him of hedging his bets.
I’m not finding his archives very user-friendly: I wanted to go back a few years and see what he’s predicted, but couldn’t immediately see a way to do that–can you?
The late Barry Rubin called it totally correctly on the situation in Syria and the rise of ISIS — and how Obama fecklessness was accelerating the worsening of said situation.
Lee Smith and Michael Ledeen on Obama’s horrific Iran policy.
Caroline Glick lately seems to be telegraphing Netanyahu policy decisions about 3 months out in advance — fortunately for Israel’s survival, Obama doesn’t seem to be one of her readers.
Forgot to add Jennifer Dyer over at the Optimistic Conservative blog, especially but not limited to matters pertaining to Chinese regional military activity.
Vali Nasr for most things Middle East.
Does anyone remember a specific prediction–from anyone–that Russia would invade Crimea? Oh, speaking of which–keep an eye on Melik Kaylan, whom I’ve always admired. He’s wondering whether Putin’s about to go for the gusto and full-on invade Ukraine. Just a few days ago he wrote an “I told you so” column about Moscow, and it does seem he told us so:
(No, I don’t why the text formatted that weird way. It makes me go bananas when it does that.)
Yes, and Rickards himself can sometimes read as if he’s been spending too much time with his publicist, too (the opening chapters of “Currency Wars,” where he spends most of his time burnishing his credentials and those of his colleagues who participated in a CIA financial war-gaming scenario, are just painful), but his overall message—that the global financial system is a tool in warfare and always has been—seems simultaneously obvious (John Maynard Keynes having become Lord Keynes for writing The Economic Consequences of the Peace, after all) and somehow totally neglected in foreign policy discussions, at least in the US, where we have a nasty habit of taking international financial markets and, especially, the dollar as the world’s reserve currency for granted.
That said, I should mention my own prejudices: being of a strongly Austrian economic bent, I find the “no one could have seen it coming” reaction to the 2008 meltdown ridiculous, as over a dozen financial analysts did see it coming. It’s just that those analysts weren’t neoclassical synthesists. Debunking Economics is probably the best text on this I’m aware of. So when James Rickards makes the point that international financial markets are a tool of foreign policy generally and warfare in particular, and that some conditions in those markets have more-or-less predictable consequences, especially when you take into consideration that bad actors may be manipulating them, I am admittedly predisposed to pay attention. But again, it’s somewhat too early to tell whether his outlook has identifiably good predictive power or not.
They’re a pain, aren’t they? It’s probably easiest to study him by reading his book.
Also, you could read the work of Angelo Codevilla, who wrote a great book in Advice to War Presidents. I haven’t read his most recent one, To Make and Keep Peace.
Re: Putin and Crimea. After flattening the Chechenya, Georgia, and Ukraine, I feel like Putin is becoming a geopolitical one trick pony. He invades small nations as a show of strength. It’s what he does, and expecting him to do otherwise is like the frog expecting the scorpion to do otherwise.
I find the “no one could have seen it coming” reaction to the 2008 meltdown ridiculous, as over a dozen financial analysts did see it coming.
Claire,
This was a short piece by yours truly here at Ricochet on Sept 27. In it I go for a whimsical ironic attempt to get people to realize the absurdity of not matching the immediate Russian threat on the border of Ukraine with anything remotely credible. I let Andrew McCarthy at NRO deliver the professional goods on ‘intent’ and the Obama Administration’s immense incapacity to grasp Putin’s proven ill intent.
Baron Munchausen rides the canon ball again, my fantasy allegory. When he asks the soldiers why they are not silencing those enemy canon they reply “It’s Wednesday.” This absurd excuse is no more absurd than the excuses given for not sending the Ukrainians heavier arms to make Putin think twice about invasion, full scale or partial. This is not so much a prediction but a warning about the consequences of inaction.
You must coerce the coercer.
http://ricochet.com/archives/its-wednesday-in-the-age-of-reason-again-gentlemen-dont-you-think-it-would-be-a-good-idea-to/
Regards,
Jim
PS Good Shabbos
Very few saw it coming. I certainly didn’t, either. In fact, it was the event, and the sudden focus on “sub-prime lending” and the financial world in general, that got me to really dig into the subject. What’s fascinating to me about this is how thoroughly the mainstream in economics got it wrong, and yet the mainstream in economics not only hasn’t been kicked to the curb, they’ve gotten a good chunk of their wish lists: more power, more political discretion, more centralization. The pundits who saw it coming continue to be considered fringe crackpots, as opposed to being the people with the right intellectual framework(s).
OK. So what other domains might be subject to a great deal of groupthink, aided and abetted by having neat, tidy, simple conceptual (but scientific and mathematical!) frameworks that render them politically untouchable (because technocracy)? The obvious example is climate. But I suspect that many (other) aspects of foreign policy do fall into this category, if for no other reason than the politician’s syllogism:
Well there were a ton of fashionable ideas about democratisation (transitions to, inevitability of) and modernisation (how-to, stages inevitable) in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall that are a whole lot less fashionable now–those might fall under the same penumbra.
Would this be of interest, perchance?
Also, Robert Fisk’s take on Assad’s staying power seem to have been correct.
Mark Steyn.
Tom Clancy predicted it, and he died several months before the invasion. Here is an excerpt, courtesy of a Jim Geraghty column at National Review:
http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/372469/no-one-could-have-predicted-except-tom-clancy-did-jim-geraghty
“It is easier to turn an aquarium into fish stew than fish stew into an aquarium.” — Lech Walesa
Of course it’s of interest!
I have nothing substantive to add to any of these discussions, but I’ve found each one of these threads riveting and stimulating.
My thanks to all, especially Claire, for the intellectual stimulation. Please keep them coming along.
This is an interesting project. One question: How do you distinguish between insight and random chance?
Obviously someone with a good grasp of reality and deep understanding of the personalities and forces involved will be more successful at predicting how history will move. But on the other hand, sometimes people just get lucky despite their understanding and beliefs.