The question I explore here is: What does it mean to be an expert in foreign policy?
This challenge has motivated me for nearly two decades, as a congressional aid during debates over the Iraq War, as a diplomat supporting the war in Afghanistan, as an academic, and now as the founder of a think tank, fp21.
Are you a skeptical observer of US foreign policy? Are you already a policymaker with a sense that your office’s work could be more effective? Are you an aspiring leader in foreign policy? I hope we can use this space to explore foreign policy expertise together.
The bad news …
… is that nobody really knows what it means to be an expert in foreign policy. Sure, there are people with impressive resumes and deep reservoirs of experience. The government treats them like experts, the press treats them like experts, and universities treat them like experts. But are they successful at crafting winning foreign policy? We really can't say.
We can’t say because there’s virtually no attempt to measure success and failure in US foreign policy, and thus little ability to claim merit. There is no standard training program and no objective view of success. When I’m feeling cynical, I joke that “foreign policy is the art of setting ambiguous goals and always claiming success.”
Indeed, policymakers love to talk about the “art” of foreign policy. Their view – the dominant view – is that policy effectiveness arises from an elusive combination of gut instinct and hard-earned experience. Surely, experienced policymakers know a lot about the world and are dedicated to their work. But good foreign policy must be more than simply a matter of taste. Even art requires technique and fundamentals.
Everything we know about the science of expertise suggests expertise is more than the mere accumulation of years of experience. Expertise t cannot flourish under the ambiguous conditions presented by our foreign affairs organizations.
The good news…
…is that the profession of foreign policy is ripe for a paradigm shift. From Silicon Valley to financial services, political campaigns to baseball, today’s most successful enterprises have built cultures grounded in evidence, analytics, and innovation. The old guard has been replaced by a new generation of leaders who have demonstrated that their approaches are superior. Within foreign policy, a new generation grew up traversing the information superhighway. They think differently about the production of knowledge.
The single most important ingredient for expertise, according to the best-available research, is feedback about success and failure. Without feedback, confidence grows as experience deepens, but effectiveness does not improve.
For foreign policy expertise to flourish, we need to build institutions that relentlessly focus on success.
The decline of the United States’ position in the world in the two decades since I joined the profession should inspire serious reflection about the methods by which our decisions are made. The United States made a historic blunder in Iraq, mismanaged the supposed “good war” in Afghanistan, fell into a violent confrontation with Russia, failed to capitalize on the Arab Spring, set a confrontational course with China, and contributed to a backsliding of democracy.
Despite this decline, nothing has changed in the cloistered profession. It has overlooked tectonic shifts in the knowledge economy and jeopardized the competitive edge of US foreign policy. Our capability to make effective policy has atrophied at a time when the international environment is more fast-paced and threatening than ever before.
Topics I write about:
Evidence-based decision-making
How to build a culture of learning
Developing curriculum for foreign policy experts
Academic research on expertise and decision-science
The relationship between politicization, control, and expertise in our foreign policy organizations
The most effective use of intelligence in policymaking
Information collection and knowledge management
Forecasting, prediction, and uncertainty
Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning
Workforce issues (promotion, diversity, hiring, etc.)
Bridging the gap between academic research and practice
Data-driven tools, including AI
