As a 21 year old undergraduate student I bet all the money I had saved (£400) on the Brexit referendum and won, then followed up with the 2016 Snap UK Election and won that too.
Then everything on Trump in 2016.
Optimistic I moved to London, self funding an M.A in Geopolitics, intending to hone my nascent predictive talents with academic rigor.
Something totally different happened.
While studying, I asked a visiting researcher what they considered to be the biggest problem in the field and I was expecting a typical policy answer–
Resolving the Palestine/Israel conflict?
Climate change mitigation, mass migration and resource shortages?
Nuclear war?
What he said was totally unexpected. He told me the biggest issue the field needs to grapple with is that it’s theories hold no predictive power.
As a young academic the collapse of the soviet union came as a shock him and the rest of the field, including the establishment in Westminster and Washington.
After the dust cleared they phased out all of their Russian specialists and he was forced to pivot his career. Now the field and the establishment found itself caught off guard by Russia again (In 2016) and was desperately trying to get the old gang back together, having basically ignored any consideration for Russia for over two decades.
Remember Mitt Romney being ridiculed for suggesting they were a threat?
Being caught off guard by the re-emergence of Russia wasn’t a one off event, he assured me. The experts and models that the field produces are routinely and dramatically wrong.
I couldn't believe that this was tur, but then the realisation hit me —if it wasn’t true I wouldn't have have been able to find such good odds betting on elections, I wouldn't now have the financial resources to come here and study it.
Desperate to find out if I'd bamboozled myself into studying political astrology, I took a critical eye to the field and ended up finding the work of Phillip Tetlock.
Specifically his 2005: “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?”
Not only is it true that experts in the field have never developed a theory with predictive power, but Tetlock showed they do no better than laymen at predicting specific events. Tetlock found that political ‘Experts’ perform almost exactly the same as educated laymen from any other discipline when predicting outcomes.
If this sounds crazy it means you’re normal.
Imagine telling a medical student finishing their degree that their diagnosis of a patient will be about as accurate as an architect that happens to be passing by and feels like taking a guess.
I thought that studying would sharpen my nascent predictive abilities, now it looked like it was probably going to be counter productive. A tough realisation.
Prior to studying Geopolitics I studied Business, and before that I briefly studied Biochemistry.
Biochemistry is a science. You create predictive models of systems, you change your inputs, you get different outputs.
You repeat, you measure. You learn.
The way that modern business is taught and understood is more like an an applied science. We understand how organisations are supposed to be structured, how to plan and execute strategies in marketing and finance.
Similar to how you might outfit a vehicle for different types of terrain, we know how to analyse requirements then measure and modify structure and process to get different outcomes.
Political “Science”, International Relations, Geopolitics and the rest of the gang of cognitive confidence tricksters are neither sciences nor applied sciences.
They are not empirical, they are not rational, they’re unable to deliver intended outcomes.
The EU has sent over €4 Billion in Aid to Afghanistan. The country is the single largest beneficiary of European aid. The first meta review of the effectiveness of this aid was completed in 2020, which determined
“The international community has repeatedly overestimated its own capacity and the capacity of its Afghan partners to bring about rapid social change[…]Interventions in building capacity for the administration, or in sectors such as the rule of law or gender, rarely worked.”
Sweden alone, aside from EU funding has sent $1.5 Billion since 2001.
“International aid interventions in Afghanistan have been based on policy narratives that have pre-defined solutions to the assumed problems. These policy narratives show a limited understanding of how Afghanistan works or how interventions engage with social logics and practices.”
That same report produced on behalf of the Swedish government noted
“The transitions to security, a political settlement and strong socio-economic development have not been achieved and while there have been gains, if anything now the condition of Afghanistan may be worse than it was in 2001”
Is this as unbelievable to you as it was to me?
Let’s try and imagine a hypothetical ‘Crazy World’ world in which the EU spent Billions of dollars to improve the education level of it’s citizens. After two decades of effort somebody bothers to measure its effectiveness for the first time and found that — wait, actually…literacy levels have dropped?
What do you think would happen to the field and theories of education?
How do you think the policymakers and teachers would be regarded?
The US spent 2 Trillion Dollars, twenty years of effort and tens of thousands of lives on a state building exercise in Afghanistan, only for it to fall apart while American soldiers were waiting around for the plane home.
There was derision of their efforts, yes. But there were also very prominent people publicly stating that the project was ended too soon. There were protests about the withdrawal. The architects of this program have either been promoted within the US military or have left government altogether for cushy jobs in the private sector.
The ‘experts’ that delivered this outcome are still considered experts. The field and it’s theories are still being taught.
This shouldn’t be as surprising. 40 years earlier the US illegally bombed Cambodia and Laos, likely resulting in the deaths of well over a million innocent civilians and creating generational pain and suffering. The sheer volume of landmines and carcinogenic agents used is still killing people today 60 years later.
This was justified by the belief in “Domino Theory”, the idea that communism would cascade through Asia and the world if a single country was allowed to turn communist.
The US dropped more than twice the amount of bombs on Vietnam than was used by all the combined forces of WW2. This absurdity reaching a crescendo with Henry Kissinger — the most vocal proponent of ‘Domino Theory’ having to talk President Nixon out of dropping a nuke on Vietnam when they realised the tide was turning.
The US eventually withdrew from Vietnam leaving a communist government in control. Their inspiring victory was the first domino that would ultimately lead to a grand total of 1 other country (Laos, which the US had been illegally bombing) turning communist.
If a scientist produced and promoted a theory that resulted in the needless death and suffering of generations of people — even if they believed they were doing the right thing—their work and the entire philosophical foundation of the field would be called into account. It would be challenged, academically and publicly. It’s practitioners might be regarded the way we now think of alchemists.
They would certainly not be allowed to address the most powerful people in the world to give further recommendations on present policy problems decades after their failures had become apparent.
Henry Kissinger spoke at the world economic forum, just a few days short of his 99th birthday to recommend that the west withdraw support from Ukraine and that Ukraine cede territory to Russia so they can ally as a group against China.
Henry Kissinger, famous proponent and vocal defender of domino theory. Architect of the illegal bombings and murder of countless civilians in Cambodia and Laos.
Henry Kissinger, Nobel peace prize holder.
How did it end up like this?
I think the the field has three inherent problems.
The first —
Natural human biases and assumptions pollute research and policy long before the first word is ever written.
This is a problem with most policy making. The type of people that design and create policy are often very disconnected from the outcomes. You can have all the data in the world to build your policy recommendations but it’s only useful if you know what you’re looking for, if you know who is going to deliver it on the ground and you know how the people that it’s going to affect are going to react.
This is often botched with domestic initiatives but in the case of foreign policy, the failures are particularly egregious as the policymakers are separated not just by wealth and class as is often the case with domestic policy, but by now by geography, culture and entire philosophical/religious traditions too.
It’s these kinds of ‘blind spots’ that can lead to a group of social scientists in Stockholm thinking that spending millions of dollars to teach rural afghanis about social democracy and pride parades was going to elicit anything other than confusion.
It leads to healthcare workers being killed trying to deliver vaccines to rural afghanis, because the policymakers in Geneva can’t imagine a world in which in which these people regard it as just another western weapon to deploy against them.
The second -
There is so much money and power at stake that — like economics — outcomes are often decided upon first and will be decided first and then analysis and policy created and enacted with beneficiaries already in mind.
The focus on Sovereign States, NGO’s, International Organizations and Geography as the largest drivers of outcomes misses (sometimes very intentionally) how decisions are actually made in government.
The US has sent Israel nearly $100 Billion in (disclosed) aid. It presently provides Israel around $3B per year.
Ask yourself who has had the largest impact on this being the case, the analysts in the pentagon and DoD?
The analysts and policymakers in the Washington thinktanks?
Or the lobbyists at AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee)?
The “behind-the-curtain” analysis is rarely considered by international relations. There’s no theoretical perspective which accounts for the fact that states can (and often do) act against their own national interests while benefitting the individuals behind the curtain of political theatre.
There’s little accounting for irrationality in general. Maybe Russia invaded Ukraine because Putin got a whim and felt like it.
This analysis won’t sell many books or get you on CNN, but it’s a plausible reason as Russia having an inherent need to expand it’s borders because of it’s geography.
The third -
By far the largest issue the field faces is that there’s no real ‘expertise’.
We know who the fastest runners in the world are, we know what the best trading strategies are because in these domains we receive immediate, conclusive feedback about their efficacy. In foreign policy and international relations we often think in terms of the next few decades or centuries.
It means if you producing a compelling narrative about what the world will look like in 100 years, you’ve got 100 years to extract as much attention and wealth as possible before your theory can be disproved.
If your goal was to advance your career within the field the best strategy would be to produce analysis that is outrageous, not accurate. the most successful individuals make wild promises with the veneer of being a serious analysis based on a rigorous academic field.
The true talent being cultivated here is not forecasting, prediction or rationality, it’s being able to maintain the readers suspension of disbelief while producing an analysis that confirms their biases, in whatever direction you choose.
There are numerous examples of this being the case:
George Fridman wrote a book called ‘The coming War with Japan’ in 1991 which predicted the US going to war with Japan in the next two decades. He founded Stratfor, a strategic consulting firm based on his expertise in 1996.
Ashraf Ghani, former professor at Berkley wrote ‘Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World” in 2008. With US help he was elected as president of Afghanistan and would later end up fleeing with briefcases full of cash as the Taliban entered Kabul to little resistance.
The one common theme is that there is absolutely no repercussions for getting things wrong.
This is due to the fact that the results of foreign policy decisions are all Over There.
If the US spent trillions of dollars building bridges all over the country that immediately collapsed there would be outrage and ridicule of the engineers.
But the technological, military and economic supremacy of the west for the last century means that the bridges are collapsing over There, not over Here.
The results of these botched theories are largely unnoticeable to the average western citizen. To the extent that they do notice, when they see dead soldiers on TV, the price of imported goods increase or terror attacks on their own soil, the axe of public opinion falls on the necks of elected officials and not the theorists that laid the groundwork for the disastrous decisions in the first place.
Where do we go from here?
Perhaps in recognition of their uselessness the fields have largely splintered into bickering theoretical factions. International relations has developed the realist/liberal framework, the constructivist framework, the Marxist framework and so on.
It’s scholars spend their spend time arguing whether identity should be the main lens through which the international system is understood, or maybe it’s through class struggle? Are the main actors states, or international organisations?
How about none of them?
How about all of them, all at once?
A fact that’s immediately obvious to anyone that’s ever worked in or with government.
Geopolitics has splintered even further-
‘Popular geopolitics’ which has more in common with film studies than economics. Engage with it’s scholars to talk about Trump hats and TV shows.
Critical geopolitics is the same post-structuralist cancer that seems to have metastasised to every non-stem academic discipline. It’s scholars will in derridean fashion discuss the fields use of language, and then produce analysis about that discourse. And discourse about the discourse and so on (and on) It produces activists, not empiricists.
Lastly there is the so-called ‘practical’ geopolitics, which aims to examine geopolitical reasoning and produce geopolitical strategy. It’s sadly the smallest and least attended to perspective, which is something that needs to rapidly change as it seems to be the field asking the most worthwhile questions like:
How will climate change affect food security and political stabillity?
If our governments are to confront the enormous challenges that are rapidly approaching (Climate change, Populism, AI & Automation, Resource Shortages, population collapse and so on (and on, and on…) they cannot be dependent on the same modes of thinking that have been demonstrated only their ability to consistently deliver catastrophe.
They cannot be dependent on a field that is busy examining the geopolitics of Marvel.
We need to pay less attention to this type of work and focus on actionable, impactful and predictable problems.
The field is publishing papers about ‘The geopolitics of south park’ at the same time corporations are racing to develop an artificial general intelligence. When climate change is going to displace hundreds of millions of migrants through the next century.
We can’t afford catastrophic mistakes when the very ecology of the planet is at stake. When the absolute best case scenario of AI means billions of people losing their jobs. If we get any of these questions wrong, we won’t get second chances to make more.
