Tim takes the usual blogosphere gripe about the lack of accountability for failed predictions one step further:
One of the striking things about the Washington foreign policy world is how unconnected the “experts’” prognostications are to what actually happens. On almost any issue, you’ll have a significant number of people predicting disaster if the United States doesn’t act, and a significant number predicting disaster if they do. Then the United States either does or doesn’t act, one side or the other is proven right, and… absolutely nothing happens to the people who were wrong. They go on prognosticating with the same confidence they did before.
It seems likely to me that, to a first approximation, no one in Washington knows anything about the long-term effects of any given foreign policy choice. The world is a large and complicated place, and the precise effects of any given policy depend on a complex interplay of forces in foreign countries whose cultures we barely understand.It seems to me, therefore, that the best we can do is to focus on maximizing the first-order effects of our policies. And since the most potent instruments of foreign policy toolbox have the first-order effect of destroying things and killing people, that mostly means we should minimize the damage those weapons do by using them as little as possible. We’re not likely to be know for sure if any given JDAM will advance the United States’s long-term strategic goals. But we can be damned sure that every JDAM we drop will destroy a building, kill some people, and turn the friends and relatives of the target into enemies of the United States.
The problem with that, of course, is that such a straightforward foreign policy rule leaves little work for the foreign policy “experts” to do. And it’s boring. What president wants his “legacy” to be “I successfully avoided dropping any bombs on innocent civilians, starting any unnecessary wars, or propping up any unsavory dictators.” Such a president would arguably rank among greatest foreign policy statesmen, but he wouldn’t get much space in the history books.
Imagine how different the world would be if we focused primarily on first-order effects in our foreign policy. Rather than debate unknowable hypotheticals, we'd instead spend our time focused on the real world. Incrementalism might be boring, but in a world as complex as ours its often all that we've got. Theory usually sounds better, and it almost always sounds more exciting, but it very rarely produces the outcomes that the theorists predict. Which, in a nutshell, is why I don't study theory.
Moreover, I think Tim is minimizing the potential good this would allow us to do in the world. Sure thing, the most obviously potent instruments in our policy toolbox are destructive, but that doesn't mean that less obvious ones can't produce real and substantial change. Take, for example, something like this. Or better yet, this.
Solving that sort of problem doesn't produce obvious, undeniable, world historic change, but it would improve life for literally millions of people on a near daily basis. And while that might not necessarily get you ranked as one of the "greatest foreign policy statesmen" of all time, who cares?
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