by Cheryl Rofer
I’ve been at the Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference and visiting friends this week, and I haven’t been collecting much stuff, so let’s try something a little different.
A couple of weeks back, Steven Walt asked “What is wrong with the financial and foreign policy elites?” The financial geniuses didn’t see the meltdown coming, and the top level of Obama’s foreign policy team backed the war in Iraq. So what are they doing running our foreign policy?
Walt suggests one thing wrong:
It seems that almost all of the senior foreign policy experts in the Democratic Party have been "marinated in the [same] inside culture" as their Republican Party counterparts.He also observes that there’s a lot that can be said about this, which is my view as well, but I won’t say it all in this post.
That insider mentality is important. I would add the fact that a number of the people Walt lists were in Congress, and Congress for the past decade or two has not been the most creative governmental body. And there’s a commonplace that surfaces every now and then that the academic and think-tank branches of the foreign policy community need wars. If things are going swimmingly, they aren’t much asked for advice by the government or sound-bites by the press. A subtext may be that wars demonstrate seriousness, masculinity, and other qualities that are so important to in-groups related to governing.
A few days after Walt’s post, David Rothkopf asked “Where are the leaders?” Now Rothkopf has a blog alongside Walt's, so he must be part of that foreign-policy elite that might provide leaders. So instead of wondering why others aren’t picking up the slack, Rothkopf might just offer up some brilliant leadership himself. This may be one of the answers to Walt’s question: they’re looking for someone else to provide the answers. That starts to get scary.
There’s a value in having detailed knowledge about a particular issue. But gaining that knowledge often means neglecting other parts of the world. There is a tension between detailed knowledge and the big picture, along with the received wisdom that goes along with being an “expert”. That received wisdom is frequently wrong because it comes from too narrow a base, along with the fact that we humans love to be part of the crowd and participate in fashions. The fashion in the financial world was that free markets will regulate themselves. We see how well that worked.
There are fashions in foreign policy, too, and George Bush got a bandwagon going for attacking Iraq. Fashions, of course, tend to overwhelm critical thinking.
A part of foreign policy is asking the big questions, which are shunned in academic or political discourse. That’s something that citizens without specialized knowledge can do, although they are seldom asked to. And even the “dumb” questions can illuminate a fact or two that dropped out of the expert discussions.
I’ve said some of this before. Michael Tanji is another person who’s looking for more participatory ways to examine policy (h/t to Mark Safranski). What do you think? How can we get a greater diversity of views into foreign policy?