Foreign Policy Doesn't Promote Expertise: But It Could

Examining the policymaking process through the lens of expertise, especially at the US State Department, exposes the weaknesses of the current approach. Here are some pathways to improve.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivers a speech. Photo credit from Flickr, uncredited.

Statesmen love to wax poetic about the “art of foreign policy.” Their view – the dominant view – is that policy effectiveness arises from a combination of gut instinct and hard-earned experience. “History teaches by analogy,” asserts Henry Kissinger in his magisterial book, Diplomacy. To be sure, experienced policymakers have a deep reservoir of experiences from which to analogize. They tell riveting man-in-the-room stories of famous leaders and weave compelling historical narratives. But is it true that such experience creates the conditions for expertise? I believe the answer is no.

As I discussed in my post last week, research suggests that expertise (which I defined as “consistently superior performance”) forms in environments that provide two ingredients: a) continual feedback about the success and failure of one’s actions, and b) repeated opportunities to use that feedback to practice the aspects exposed as weaknesses.

Our institutions of foreign policy fall woefully short of providing these conditions for expertise to develop.

Picture a seasoned American diplomat preparing to lead a ceasefire negotiation to end a violent civil war. You might imagine her carrying a dog-eared manual that describes a variety of negotiation techniques and a summary of evidence-based research on best practices for achieving success. She reads over case studies of previous ceasefire attempts, reevaluating their triumphs and failures. As her jet lands in the war-torn country, she thumbs through her notes, preparing to score a big win for U.S. diplomacy and international peace.

Unfortunately, this description is a fiction. As an American diplomat, I found out that no such manual exists in government. Little training is available for policymakers on how to negotiate effectively. The State Department provides no guidelines for successfully managing peace processes. Validated metrics for success and failure are absent, as is any systematic evaluation of results. Job assignment processes frequently rotate policymakers to new challenges rather than encourage them to master a subset of skills. Whereas Winston Churchill is often quoted (apocryphally) as having said, “Diplomacy is the art of telling someone to go to hell and having them ask for directions,” a more cynical quip might be “foreign policy is the art of setting ambiguous goals and always claiming success.”

Whether the United States is supporting a democratic election, combatting terrorism, or advancing human rights, policymakers are expected to rely on their own intuition and judgment to decide the best course of action. It is dangerous to ignore the importance of expertise in foreign policy.

Intuition Is Not the Enemy

Let me be clear: Intuition is not the enemy of expertise. It is necessary for many aspects of policymaking, such as identifying our country’s core national interests, ensuring our actions align with our ethics, or managing interpersonal relationships. These are fundamentally human endeavors that derive from our values and beliefs.

Further, intuitive expertise may be quietly flourishing within some pockets of the institution. For instance, a 30-year veteran of the US mission to the United Nations might develop a great deal of expertise through daily negotiation of multilateral statements. Such a setting would provide the official with the key ingredients for expertise: feedback and practice.

For readers of this newsletter who have studied or participated in foreign policy, I would love to hear whether you believe certain tasks in foreign policy meet the above standards for intuitive expertise to form.

Perhaps even more interesting would be to hear from you about tasks that could be redesigned to promote expertise more effectively. An example: Today’s promotion process for Foreign Service Officers involves a committee of examiners evaluating each officer’s portfolio of recent performance reviews and deciding whether the candidate merits a promotion. The examiners typically only perform the job for a single cycle of applicants – less than a year. They receive no feedback on whether the officers they promoted went on to great things, nor do they get the opportunity to practice and learn how to improve their promotion judgment over time. A system that provided both of these elements would facilitate the development of expertise and likely be far superior than our current system. 

Our foreign policy leaders are extraordinary public servants: intelligent, dedicated, and worldly. Such leaders know a great deal about the world. However, we need to more carefully distinguish between the attainment of information and the attainment of expertise. And we need to be very careful about when we can and cannot trust our intuitions, even of our most experienced policymakers. And as I explained last week, vast experience will often lead to stubborn overconfidence rather than actual expertise.

Organizational Level Expertise

Last week, a reader raised an interesting question: Is the development of expertise at the individual level different than at the organizational level? For instance, can a unit or bureau develop expertise even if its officials rotate over time?

My short answer is “yes” – I believe that organizations can develop expertise in much the same way individuals do. Firstly because organizations are comprised of and led by individual decision-makers. But also because organizations develop processes and procedures that can be analogized to an individual’s intuition and judgment.

Stated simply, developing expertise requires an organization to objectively evaluate whether their actions achieve their goals and to propagate those lessons back into the behavior of the organization.

Many organizations design their processes and standard operating procedures to avoid accountability and resist change. I liken such organizational behavior to “bad intuition.” As I have argued before, the State Department is not designed to learn, nor is it capable of admitting failure; it has bad organizational intuition. In other organizations, decision-making processes are designed to continually learn and adapt, thus facilitating consistently superior performance (aka expertise).

Needless to say, I am critical of the process by which foreign policy is made. It is not designed to adjudicate whether a strategy is likely to actually accomplish a particular mission. Instead, the process is more effective at achieving consensus among competing bureaucratic interests, often at the lowest common denominator. (My organization has published a report about the bureaucratic processes surrounding decisions in foreign policy if you want to go deeper.)

Uncertainty is unavoidable, and one can never be sure exactly how a policy will affect events on the ground. Failure is inevitable and even healthy! Expertise forms when organizations can learn from today’s failures in order to improve the likelihood of success tomorrow. The U.S. military leans on after-action reviews, and many foreign assistance programs already incorporate monitoring, evaluation, and learning tools. But most civilian foreign policy lacks these features. It is hard to imagine, for instance, a State Department official admitting they got something wrong.

Conclusion and Next Steps

My studies of expertise have clarified a central proposition of this publication: the depth of foreign policy expertise is dependent on our ability to evaluate our actions and produce evidence about what works. Much of this space will be dedicated to evaluating that proposition.

This discussion of expertise hinges on the assumption that we will be able to effectively evaluate whether our actions have achieved their goals. In the messy world of international relations, this is a tricky proposition. In fact, many believe it’s impossible! But I reject such pessimism.

The purpose of learning (and scientific research, evidence-based decision-making, etc.) is simply to reduce uncertainty, not “perfectly” identify the causes of an infinitely complex reality. I’d challenge a skeptical reader, for instance, to find a scientific law of nature that perfectly describes any natural phenomenon (If you want to deepen your relationship with the vastness of what humans don’t understand about the world, read a bit about quantum physics, dark matter, or chaos theory. Even our best physics equations are just useful theories and approximations.). One need not be a strict determinist to find value in science’s ability to reduce uncertainty about a complex world.

Ultimately, this publication is intended to be an optimistic story. Building stronger institutions of foreign policy and deepening our expertise in this vital field is manageable.

In the coming weeks, I’ll start fleshing out some of the improvements we can make to advance the cause of foreign policy expertise.

Did I get something wrong? Overlook some evidence or argument that would have improved this article? Leave a comment or send me a note!