Some Intellectual Modesty Suggests a Less Assertive Foreign Policy

It seems to me we get in a lot of trouble by "rushing in where angels fear to tread", in part because of our arrogant assumption that we can easily understand foreign societies. Recent experience suggests we don't even understand our own that well.

According to Tipping Points from USInnovation.org

PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA : Barack Obama defeated John McCain by about just over 8.3 million votes out of 124.4 million voters on November 4. With most unofficial results in, the spread between the candidates appeared to be about 6.5% of the popular vote. Contrary to media reports, the number of voters stayed about the same when compared to 2004, and the so-called “youth” vote again did not turn out. The Web publication Politico, quoting noted authority Curtis Gans of American University, estimates that between 60.7 percent and 61.7 percent of the 208.3 million eligible voters cast ballots this year, compared with 60.6 percent of those eligible in 2004...

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED? According to Ed Morrissey, writing in Politico, “Obama got six million more votes than John Kerry and John McCain got slightly under five million less than George Bush. Given the efforts at new registrations, it looks like Democrats turned out well, while a significant chunk of Republicans stayed home. Democratic ‘get out the vote’ (GOTV) efforts worked better than in 2004, but it didn’t produce a landslide. Republican GOTV efforts had been in full swing, but in the end, the ticket simply didn’t produce the excitement needed to carry the GOP to victory.”

FiveThirtyEight.com got the outcome of the election right, but I found the quotation above quite surprising. Actually the Politico article citing Gans stated:

between 126.5 million and 128.5 million eligible voters cast ballots this year, versus 122.3 million four years ago. Gans said the gross number of ballots cast in 2008 was the highest ever, even though the percentage was not substantially different from 2004, because there were about 6.5 million more people registered to vote this time around.

So, I gather that the efforts to increase registrations worked, and that the fraction of registered voters who actually voted stayed about the same. The big difference between electing a Republican in 2004 and electing a Democrat in 2008 was that more Republicans came out to vote in 2004 and more Democrats came out to vote in 2008.

My basic point is that in this very heavily studied country even the most studious observers had difficulty in predicting the dynamics of the election. Thinking back over the last couple of months, it should be clear that everyone was surprised by the evolution of the sub-prime mortgage crisis into a global recession.

Wednesday I got in a discussion of Iran and Iraq. In retrospect it seems clear that many errors were made with respect to Iraq, perhaps the worst of which was in initially underestimating the number of mistakes that would be made in the last six years. In retrospect it seems clear what we should have done at many turning points, but of course we will never know how the rejected alternatives would have worked out if they had in fact been chosen.

We discussed the engineered overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and the following history. It seemed to the group that many current U.S. foreign policy problems could be traced to the decision to let the CIA participate in that coup. It occurs to me that we really can't tell what would have happened in the intervening half century had the coup not occurred.

One thing that I have learned is that development is difficult. It is really hard to understand how social, economic, cultural and political forces interact to influence the course of events. It is therefore hard to figure out interventions that will work to make the situation better.

Looking at Iraq, Iran, and other parts of the world, there are few experts in government on these areas, and almost no information in the American public. The public confronts new crises with almost no understanding of the societies in which they are occurring. We only begin to understand the situation when the crisis is over, and come to simplistic decisions as to what should have been done. And of course, the counter-factual "could have beens" can never be disproven. As a result, we come to both incorrect views of the world and overconfident views of our own wisdom.

In retrospect, a fundamental problem in the American war in Iraq may have been overconfidence of the Bush administration in its own understanding of Iraq and consequent failure to find and attend to the (relatively few) real experts on the region that might have been available to it.

I suspect that a more fundamental problem is that the American public too thinks foreign policy is intellectually easier than it is in reality, and has accepted political leaders who share that misperception. If we can't accurately predict the process in our own elections, we should be very modest in assessing our ability to predict the outcome of an invasion of another country. We should demand such modesty in political leaders seeking our votes. If we fail to do so, we must not only live with the consequences, but so too must many in other countries.