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70% of Harvard’s donor-related and legacy applicants are white, and being a legacy student makes an applicant roughly six times more likely to be admitted.
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After the death of affirmative action as (per SCOTUS) unfair preference, the complex business of legacy admits seems also to be circling the drain.
The word “legacy” covers not merely people admitted to selective schools because close relatives attended; it also can involve super-rich people donating (or likely to donate) multiple millions to buy a seat at these schools for their children. And it can have to do with talented athletes (most of them from expensive private secondary schools) admitted for their athletic rather than academic skill. It usually exhibits a mix of some of these elements.
Let’s look at a notorious case that in fact contains every one of these elements.
George Huguely, currently rotting in jail for killing his ex-girlfriend, was a legacy admit to the University of Virginia. “George III, George V’s grandfather, went to Sidwell Friends and the University of Virginia.” A friend of Huguely’s at the expensive, prestigious prep school he attended comments: “He was not a great student, but he didn’t care.” He was a great lacrosse player.
A hopeless alcoholic from a young age (Huguely’s father showed him how), Huguely boasted several booze-related arrests, including a quite serious one in Lexington, Virginia while he was a UVa student:
Officer Rebecca Moss discovered Huguely wobbling drunk into traffic near a fraternity at Washington and Lee University. She told him to find a ride home or face arrest. He began screaming obscenities and making threats. [Apparently he said “I’ll kill all you bitches.“]
“Stop resisting,” Moss said. “You’re only making matters worse.”
Moss and another female officer tried to subdue Huguely. He became “combative,” the police chief reported. Moss stunned him with a Taser, put him in a squad car, and took him to the police station.
At his court hearing a month later, Huguely said he didn’t remember much about the night and apologized. He pleaded guilty to public swearing, intoxication, and resisting arrest. He was fined $100 and given a 60-day suspended sentence.
Huguely bragged about the incident to [UVa] friends…
Some of these friends were, like Huguely, part of a drunk, entitled, obnoxious sometimes to the point of violence, rich lacrosse player culture where you don’t rat out buddies even if you know they’re really really dangerous and out of control. One assumes most of these friends laughed drunkenly along with Huguely as he detailed the latest incident in which he got away with… not murder. Not yet. But things were escalating, and some of his friends certainly knew he was threatening his ex-girlfriend and assaulting people he thought she was dating and just being a really scary violent crazy piece of shit.
It’s certainly worth asking what sort of subculture sees all of this and does nothing. It’s certainly worth asking how a non-academic, violent, total alcoholic with a criminal record was rewarded with an extremely competitive seat at one of the nation’s greatest universities. What did his prep school teachers and coaches, many of whom must have known or guessed how incredibly dangerous he was, write in their letters of recommendation about him? (Think also about poor drunk well-connected short-lived Paul Murdaugh, still a student in good standing at the University of South Carolina despite having recently killed a young woman and injured others while drunkenly at the helm of a family boat. Like Huguely, he already had a bunch of booze-related run-ins with police.
Two months after he was sprung from jail, a judge removed the only condition of his release — allowing him to travel outside the 14th Judicial Circuit, according to the news outlet.
Although he faced BUI charges, the state did not restrict him from drinking alcohol or driving a boat, the report said.
Another entitled rich kid given one free pass after another until… Well, one can’t help feeling for Paul Murdaugh. His own father murdered him.)
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“I was drinking a lot all the time, all the way from my freshman year to my senior year,” Huguely said at his trial. “I was drinking all the time. It was out of control.”
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Look. My point isn’t that legacy admits are murderers and degenerates. Most of them are pleasant well-meaning non-Ivy League material. But there’s a really anti-social pathology underlying the culture of lifelong consequence-free unearned social rewards of which some (not all) legacy admits are Exhibit A. The Varsity Blues criminal syndicate, and whatever current bogus athletics conspiracy has replaced it, is merely the crude extension of the basic legacy M.O. The socially acceptable con game of legacy admits makes the world safe for the scandal of Varsity Blues.
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And can you think of anything more morally corrosive than knowing that your corrupt parents and a corrupt institution engineered your sorry ass into a seat at Harvard? Knowing that you’re little more than a cold hard cash epiphenomenon to the institution – does that bother you at all? Does it feel like a prefiguration of your entire entitled life? Here’s a bunch of nice people getting me into Harvard; here’s a bunch of nice people showing me how to evade taxes. And so it goes.
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The tragedy of wealth-based admissions is that wealthy students are taking up seats from the poor, unconnected students who need them most. This is not a victimless crime.
… [C]ollege leaders … sell access while squatting on multibillion-dollar endowments and spending vast sums of money on palatial campus buildings, leadership compensation, and administrative bloat.
And you’re paying for it:
… If a donor earns seven figures a year and lives in California, taxpayers can wind up subsidizing more than 52 cents of every dollar used to buy his child’s way into college. Even in states with less exorbitant tax rates, taxpayers routinely pick up more than 40% of the tab. That’s because these kinds of donations are wholly tax deductible: As long as there’s no explicit quid pro quo agreement, the IRS allows parents to write off their influence-peddling donations in full.
… Offering a special admissions track to the wealthy on the taxpayer’s dime impedes equal opportunity, rewards influence peddling, and robs the public. It’s time for a change. Colleges and universities should be places of opportunity, not institutions where background or wealth determine success. Wealthy applicants should have to earn their place in a university by the same rules as everyone else.
… We should press college officials to mean what they say about opportunity and equity, and to spend less time strong-arming wealthy donors. But at a bare minimum, we should get taxpayers out of the business of subsidizing campus shakedown artists.
And when I say pathology: Harvard is currently squatting on 53 billion dollars. It has yet more from other sources. And because the government, risibly, continues to consider it a non-profit institution, it enjoys amazing tax breaks. What sort of fucked up institution is still trading its integrity for more money under these circumstances?
On July 1, laws requiring adult websites to verify user ages took effect in Mississippi and Virginia, despite efforts by Pornhub to push back against the legislation. Those efforts include Pornhub blocking access to users in these states and rallying users to help persuade lawmakers that requiring ID to access adult content will only create more harm for users in their states.
Pornhub posted a long statement on Twitter, explaining that the company thinks US officials acting to prevent children from accessing adult content is "great." However, "the way many elected officials have chosen to implement these laws is haphazard and dangerous."
Pornhub isn't the only one protesting these laws. Last month, the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) sued Louisiana over its age-verification law, with FSC Executive Director Alison Boden alleging that these kinds of laws now passed in seven states are unconstitutional.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )
Twitter has imposed limits on how many tweets users can view each day, with owner Elon Musk claiming the drastic change was needed to fight "data scraping" and other "manipulation." Users who hit the rate limits were greeted with error messages like "Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again."
"To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we've applied the following temporary limits: - Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day - Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day - New unverified accounts to 300/day," Musk wrote on Saturday.
When Musk says "verified," of course, he means users who pay $8 a month for the Twitter Blue subscription that comes with certain perks, such as adding a blue checkmark to the accounts of subscribers. Prior to Musk's ownership of Twitter, "verified" meant that a user had been confirmed to be notable and authentic.
Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against President Biden’s student debt relief program, his administration is still putting forth other efforts to support borrowers.
President Joe Biden and Education Secretary Dr. Miguel Cardona
These efforts come in the form of a rulemaking process for an alternative path to debt relief; a new repayment plan; and a 12-month repayment “on-ramp” – Oct. 1, 2023 to Sep. 30, 2024 – so that borrowers who miss monthly payments during this period are not considered delinquent.
There will be a virtual public hearing Jul. 18 about the rulemaking effort, where individuals can submit written comments.
The repayment plan, Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE), will half the amount undergraduate loan borrowers have to pay a month from 10% to 5% of discretionary income; make it so that borrowers earning under 225% of the federal poverty level won’t have to make monthly payments under this plan; forgive loan balances after 10 years of payments for those with original loan balances of $12,000 or less; and not charge borrowers with unpaid monthly interest.
The plan will be open to borrowers this summer before monthly payments are due.
Enlarge (credit: Roberto Machado Noa / Contributor | LightRocket)
Last month, the FBI created a national online database to finally start coordinating law enforcement reports about "swatting" attacks nationwide, NBC News reported yesterday.
Swatting is a form of domestic terrorism that is sometimes deadly and has become more widespread in the US, according to a March report from Hal Berghel, a computer science professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Berghel's report defined swatting as:
A malicious act that involves making fraudulent 911 calls to cause emergency response teams, such as law enforcement special weapons and tactics teams, or SWAT teams (that’s where the gerund’s root comes from), to react forcefully to a nonexistent public threat.
Scott Schubert, of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services, told NBC News that the database will help combat the growing swatting problem by facilitating "information sharing between hundreds of police departments and law enforcement agencies across the country pertaining to swatting incidents."
Global climate institutions have embraced the primacy of capital, private firms, and markets—and in so doing have fatally undermined their own efficacy.
A discussion featuring Yakov Feygin, Daniela Gabor, Ho-fung Hung, Thea Riofrancos, and Quinn Slobodian.
Exclusive: Backbenchers tell Michael Gove they may oppose bill designed to stop sanctions separate to those set by government
Michael Gove is on a collision course with a handful of Conservative MPs over his plans to stop public bodies boycotting Israel.
A group of Tory backbenchers have made clear to the levelling up, housing and communities secretary they have concerns about the economic activity of public bodies bill, which is due to return to the Commons within weeks for a second reading.
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Guest post by Costantino Pischedda and Andrew Cheon
Drone strikes targeted Moscow last week. Though much remains unknown about it, the episode appears to be part of a series of unclaimed coercive attacks that US officials attributed to Ukrainian government personnel, including the killing of the daughter of a Russian nationalist, the sabotage of the North Stream pipelines, and drone attacks on the Kremlin.
With unclaimed coercion, perpetrators impose costs on adversaries to signal their resolve to prevail in disputes while denying involvement or simply not making any claim about responsibility. Unclaimed coercion is not unique to the war in Ukraine. Russia launched cyber attacks in 2007 to extract concessions from Estonia, though Moscow denied responsibility, and in 2010 Seoul claimed North Korea torpedoed a South Korean warship, Pyongyang’s denial notwithstanding.
Unclaimed coercion may have strategic benefits. Without unmistakable evidence about the identity of the perpetrator, the absence of a claim of responsibility creates plausible deniability, which, some argue, allows coercers to send intelligible, credible messages to targets while containing escalation risks. It may also reduce the costs of being seen as a norm violator. For instance, Austin Carson observed that, though both Saudi Arabia and the United States viewed the 2019 attacks on Saudi oil facilities as part of an Iranian coercive campaign, the absence both of conclusive evidence and a claim of responsibility prevented Riyadh and Washington from carrying out a tough military response, which would have looked “illegitimate while jeopardizing allies’ support.”
But there may also be drawbacks. Some research suggests that unclaimed acts muddle communication, leaving targets unsure about what is being demanded, making compliance less likely. Even if the coercive message is clear to targets, it may not be credible. If plausible deniability is seen as a way for perpetrators to shield themselves from the costs of appearing as norm violators by third parties and to contain escalation risks, targets may perceive unclaimed acts as cheap. A cheap action may signal unwillingness to engage in costlier and riskier overt acts to prevail in the dispute—that is, low resolve—which could embolden targets to resist.
Furthermore, the absence of a claim of responsibility could reduce the credibility of perpetrators’ reassurances implied in a coercive act (“if you do as I say, I will stop hurting you”). Targets may interpret perpetrators’ unwillingness to acknowledge responsibility as an indication of their deceitful nature, suggesting that promises to end hostile acts in exchange for concessions would likely be violated, in turn reducing incentives to comply.
Besides offering limited coercive leverage, unclaimed acts may fail to contain the risk of escalation. Targets, angry at being attacked, may confidently attribute attacks to the perpetrators despite a lack of evidence—and decide to retaliate. Incidents can engage targets’ reputation and honor, and thus be provocative, even when culpability is uncertain. For example, after the 1898 sinking of the USS Maine in Cuba, “Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain!” became the popular rallying cry for war, even though it was unclear whether Spain was behind it.
Despite the growing interest in plausible deniability, there has been little empirical analysis of the effects of unclaimed coercion. Our research helps fill this gap, leveraging a vignette experiment, fielded in May 2022 on a sample of 854 US residents, recruited using sampling quotas to match Census statistics for gender, age, and education. The experiment exposed respondents to a fictional scenario depicting a major explosion at a NATO base in Poland used to funnel weapons to Ukraine during the ongoing war. All respondents were told that President Putin had previously warned of “unpredictable consequences” if NATO continued providing weapons to Ukraine and that both intelligence agencies and independent analysts identified Russia as the likely culprit without, however, ruling out the possibility of an accidental detonation. By randomizing whether Russia claimed or denied responsibility for the explosion, we were able to assess the effects of plausible deniability on targets’ views about complying with Putin’s demands and taking escalatory actions in response.
We found that when the attack is unclaimed, respondents are less likely to favor complying with Russia’s demands for interrupting the flow of weapons to Ukraine. Moreover, the absence of a claim of responsibility does not seem to affect respondents’ preferences for escalation. In our analysis of two possible escalatory responses by the United States to the explosion—an air strike against a Russian military base on Ukrainian soil and going to war against Russian forces in Ukraine—we found no statistically significant difference between the two groups of respondents. Thus, plausible deniability appears to reduce coercive leverage without the benefit of containing escalation.
Unclaimed attacks are among the possible tools at the disposal of governments, whose effects may vary depending on the circumstances. Policymakers considering resorting to unclaimed coercion—or fretting about its use by adversaries—should be aware that the payoffs are likely to be limited. For Ukraine, denying responsibility for attacks on Russian soil might offer the advantage of limiting reputational damage in the West, which would not be captured in our analysis. However, the evidence indicates that unclaimed attacks are unwieldy tools of coercion and are unlikely to reduce the risks of Russia’s escalatory responses.
Costantino Pischedda is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Miami. Andrew Cheon is Assistant Professor of International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins SAIS.
There is an increasing focus in academic and policy circles on research-policy partnerships. These partnerships are often achieved through co-creation, or “the joint production of innovation between combinations of industry, research, government and civil society.” Co-creation is central to innovation in the hard sciences and technology, but its role in international relations scholarship and aid policy remains underdeveloped.
As scholars of international aid practice, we believe that co-creation can help us design and conduct more relevant, rigorous, and impactful research. It is also a core mission of the Research on International Policy Implementation Lab (RIPIL), whose co-creation process engages policymakers and practitioners in: 1) the generation of important, policy-relevant research questions; 2) research on these questions, through regular validation and consultation; and 3) the development and dissemination of findings and their policy implications, which often leads to the identification of important new research questions and opportunities.
In this piece, we focus on the first phase: the co-creation of research questions. This is one of the trickiest phases of the co-creation process because it requires researchers and policymakers to find a common question and research design that aligns with academics’ incentive to publish rigorous research and policymakers’ incentive to feed evidence into the policy process. Future blog posts will discuss how to implement co-created research and disseminate co-created findings.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we initiated a collaboration intended to generate policy-relevant research questions on the changing nature of international aid. Our aim was to get a sense of whether the combined shocks of COVID-19, growing calls to decolonize aid, and the rise of populism and popular protest had changed the underlying power dynamics in aid.
Importantly, in this project, we did not just want to learn from practitioners based in Western Europe or North America. We wanted insights from key thinkers and actors from the context where aid dependency has been most acute: the African continent. We wanted to understand how these thought leaders viewed aid-related power dynamics and how research could help answer their most puzzling questions.
Between 2020 and 2022, we conducted one-on-one interviews, organized virtual focus groups, and hosted a high-level roundtable in Geneva with donor governments and international non-government organizations (INGOs) on power in aid, all to better understand the changing nature of aid and the research questions that matter to policymakers, practitioners, and key African thinkers.
A synthesis of our thematic findings is available here. In this blog, we discuss our four most important lessons learned about the co-creation process itself.
We saw our discussions as an exchange of knowledge. Therefore, we wanted to make sure that we brought something to the table. Before each meeting and workshop, we circulated a summary of the existing research and our discussions from previous meetings. Having set the stage with these syntheses, we then focused each interview and workshop on listening (not talking). This allowed us to build on the existing academic knowledge, and to use the conversations to identify how it diverged from the everyday experiences of our interviewees and workshop participants. It also allowed each participant to arrive feeling well-prepared, in part through the materials we provided.
Importantly, we began each workshop and roundtable with presentations by African scholars and practitioners. They helped shape the power dynamics of the conversation from the outset.
The process worked. Our preparation, planning, and careful facilitation enabled open and respectful communication among key African thinkers and representatives of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), donor governments, recipient governments, and the United Nations.
We wanted to hear what donors, recipients, and key observers had to say about changing power dynamics around aid. We wanted to understand the perspectives of people from different recipient and donor countries to see if there might be broader trends.
Most of the people who participated in our discussions did not know us or each other. To enable an open conversation, we had to create an environment where they could trust us, and each other. This took time. We had to reach out to people repeatedly; build relationships through one-on-one conversations at the beginning of the process; and use these one-on-one conversations and our repeated meetings over time to establish our own credibility. This paid off in the quality of the conversations we were eventually able to have in our focus-group discussions and, subsequently, in our high-level panel in Geneva.
If the point of co-creation is to spark new lines of inquiry, researchers involved in co-creation must be willing to let go of the questions they think they should be asking and be open to the questions that others think are most important.
In our initial one-on-one conversations, we focused on asking open-ended, big picture questions to get a sense of whether participants thought power dynamics had changed and, if so, how. In some cases, their answers confirmed our assumptions. In others, we were surprised by new insights.
For example, respondents indicated that the rise of populism in Africa was leading to a backlash against aid recipients and donors. This led us to start a new research project on aid and populism that we could not have imagined at the beginning of the process.
This is hard to understate. Co-creating research questions involves the translation and transfer of ideas between science, policy, and practice over an extended period. This means that researchers should not engage in co-creation expecting quick wins or immediate research results. Co-creation is not a quick strategy to increase your research output, but a long-term commitment to identifying important research questions and building the relationships necessary to answer them.
When done well, co-creation has the potential to improve the relevance and impact of research, foster greater collaboration and understanding between researchers and practitioners, and ultimately contribute to positive change in the aid sector. But it is time-consuming and requires patience, careful planning, regularly questioning one’s assumptions, and continuous communication.
We believe that the investment of adequate time up front has been worthwhile, greatly enhancing our understanding of the power dynamics in aid today and enabling us to ask (and answer) cutting-edge research questions. It has also given us the connections necessary to conduct research on these dynamics, ensuring that our research authentically reflects the views shared by African stakeholders and is relevant to aid policymakers and practitioners globally.
To learn more about RIPIL, visit https://bridgingthegapproject.org/ripil/.
A recent headline from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz describes a familiar event: “West Bank Palestinian Village Residents Flee Amid Ongoing Settler Violence.” In many respects, this is old news. Settlers have been terrorizing Palestinian residents for decades, and 2023 appears to be a particularly horrific year. In response to these criminal acts, the Israeli army and government have tended to look the other way. The military is often slow to react or a no-show when settlers take to the streets and rampage through Palestinian villages or uproot olive trees. The Israeli government rarely attempts to arrest or punish the offenders, often citing a lack of evidence or persuasive identification of suspected perpetrator, but the dominant reasons range from ideological sympathies with the settlers to the indirect benefits of keeping Palestinians in fear.
The international community has developed a moral register and set of possible responses for such situations: a responsibility to protect. The general claim is that when the state fails in its responsibility to protect its citizens and civilians, then the international community inherits this duty. The original formulation applied to situations of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, but it has expanded over the years to include less severe events and apartheid. These and other state-sponsored or state-enabled actions now sometimes go by the name atrocity crimes. Additionally, the United Nations and other international bodies have a protection of civilian mandate, as do many humanitarian and human rights agencies.
These various protection discourses and mandates were built for situations like the territories. Israel has routinely violated international law, including that related to refugees, human rights, and occupation. In addition, it has demonstrated an unwillingness to provide protections for Palestinians from the growing number of settlers. But the international community—specifically the West—has failed to act for two major reasons. It tolerated these abuses and arbitrary rules in the name of the peace process. The peace process led Western states to hold their tongues, creating something of a human shield for Israel. Relatedly, the US, for reasons owing to the peace process and domestic politics, played the role of protector of last resort in various international bodies and, most visibly, in the UN Security Council, where it reflexively vetoes any resolution that is critical of Israel. Only in the last days of the Obama administration did it find the “courage” to abstain. The US has been Israel’s “get out of jail free” card.
The peace process has been dead for at least a decade and there is now a “one-state reality” from the river to the sea. In this one-state reality, Palestinians have few rights or protections and Jewish privilege is enshrined in various laws and rules that systematically discriminate against Palestinians, providing strong evidence for claims that Israel is now an apartheid state.
The question is: what is the US and the international community prepared to do to stop these mass violations of human rights? The recent history of efforts by the international community and the UN to protect civilians gives little reason for optimism. Where the international community has intervened, it has usually been in cases of active war, which does not currently apply to Israel. There is much less success with lower levels of violence. Without enforcement mechanisms, human rights law has little effect. That said, human rights monitors do have a record of compelling better behavior from those in power. Humanitarian agencies attempt to protect civilians through provision of life-saving resources such as food, water, medical care, and shelter, but have little ability to stop combatants that are determined to harm and terrorize civilians. States, meanwhile, often hide behind sovereignty to deny access to those who want to protect populations at risk. Israel has played this card, even though it has control but not sovereignty over these territories.
The best thing the US and others who have protected Israel can do is change their role from an enabler of the oppression of the Palestinians to an erstwhile guardian. The US should stop reaching for the veto every time a resolution on Israel and its violations of international law comes to the Security Council. Israeli actions should cease being called an “obstacle to peace” and instead be labeled as violations of international law. The US should consider suspending or reducing its aid package, and scrupulously ensure that its financial assistance does benefit Israeli hold over the territories. The international community might consider a role for human rights monitors or using drone and satellite technology to monitor Israeli actions in the territories, and make public their observations and findings. There are many American-born settlers, and if they are involved in violence in the territories they should be prosecuted in a court of law alongside other American-born terrorists. The West might consider placing smart sanctions on Israel and leaders that benefit from Israel’s hold over the territories, or introducing trade restrictions. The European Union and other countries that provide fast-track visas for Israeli citizens should remove this highly desired perk.
Sticks like sanctions often do not work in deterring or compelling action. They often do not hurt enough because the targeted state can often escape them by developing other arrangements and alliances. Alternatively, for states like Israel that might see their cause as integral to the existential identity or security, then they are likely to absorb the pain of the sanctions. But sanctions and other kinds of discursive condemnations can have important symbolic effects. Israel likes to present itself as part of the West and having shared values with the US and other Western countries. Western countries can stop propping up the idea of a “special relationship” built on shared values, now that Israel ceases to share them. It can expel Israel from the Western bloc in the UN and other international bodies.
The international community has developed a range of options for attempting to deter states that trample on the rights of civilians. Few of them have the necessary impact and they often have unintended consequences. But even a serious conversation by the US and the West would be a momentous moment and possibly cause Israel to recognize that its policies have a cost.
Frances Gavin’s recently declared that “the gap” between policymaking and academic research “has been bridged!” As evidence of International Relations’ newfound influence on the making of U.S. national-security policy, Dr. Gavin points to a handful of scholars who, having crossed the Gap on their own two feet, now occupy prominent government positions. This underscores, he argues, that programs like the International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network and the Nuclear Studies Research Initiative—as well as his own Texas National Security Review—have successfully constructed a communications channel between academia and policymakers.
This is a common line of argument among “gap-bridgers”—scholars who emphasize the importance of forging close connections between the academic study of international relations and the world of policymaking. The Bridging the Gap team’s recent, thorough review provides a good example. It focuses on opportunities and challenges for connecting academic knowledge to policymakers, while also celebrating the influence of a number of scholars on the policy landscape.
The gap-bridgers do, indeed, have much to celebrate. But I worry that the bridges that they aim to construct and maintain suffer from some critical design flaws. Chief among them: they are made by academics for academics. The engineers ask little of the policymakers on the other side.
Bridge-building must move beyond catering to policymakers. Academics bridge no gaps if they, for example, content themselves with providing validation for policymakers’ existing beliefs. It means little if someone with an academic background occupies an influential policy position if they perform their role no differently than would any other appointment.
The problem is that gap-bridgers tend to start with the wrong set of questions. Instead of asking “What do policymakers want from us?” we need to ask ones like “What should policymakers want from us?” and “What do we want from policymakers?”
Perhaps no scholar did more to advance the conversation about the divide between academia and policymaking than Alexander George. In Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy, he identified three types of policy-relevant knowledge: abstract conceptual models of foreign policy strategies, generic knowledge (that is, empirical laws and causal patterns), and actor-specific behavioral models.
Other scholars have built upon George’s arguments. Dan Reiter wrote that scholars help policymakers know their tools. Michael Horowitz offered four measures of policy-relevant knowledge: policy significance, accessibility, actionability, or agenda-setting impact on the public debate.
None of this knowledge matters, however, if government officials ignore it. Henry Kissinger, perhaps the most (in)famous academic-turned-policymaker, noted that policymakers have no time to study while on the job; they can only bring to the table what they learned before entering the policy arena.
Bridge-builders encourage scholars to ‘hide’ their methods and evidence
“Even the most highly developed general knowledge of a strategy cannot substitute for competent policy analysis within the government,” Alexander George wrote. But participants in the policy process suggest that, in recent years, it has gone from bad to worse. A report from two influential officials called the State Department’s clearance process “hell.” Putatively serious analysis in foreign policy occurs infrequently, and much of what does emerge is ad hoc rather than rigorous and systematic. It almost never includes consultations with academics or draws from scholarly research.
Even if policymakers do engage with academic work, there’s no guarantee that officials will understand it. Preparation for careers in foreign policy rarely emphasize training in methods and methodology. Surveys of policymakers demonstrate their deep distrust of social science methods.
Many, as I have learned in my frequent interactions with policymakers, are downright hostile to them.
Gap-bridgers must pay more attention to the degree that the foreign policy community simply dismisses much of the knowledge produced by social scientists. “It’s almost impossible to quantify what we do, and in fact, I think that there’s a great danger in trying,” said an influential former Ambassador at a recent event on the State Department’s Congressionally-mandated Learning Agenda. A high-ranking official concurred, “Diplomacy is an art, not a science.”
When policymakers extol the art of foreign policy, they are advancing a theory of knowledge—that is, they are taking a position on epistemology that ex ante rejects a lot of what we do in social-scientific research.
This is not, at heart, a matter of ‘qualitative versus quantitative methods,’ or ‘constructivism versus rationalism.’ Rather, their stance entails a rejection of the usefulness of systematic method altogether. It is a claim that the most important tools for policymaking are rooted in the ‘gut instincts’ and idiosyncratic beliefs of professional policymakers—and that the only ones qualified to assess foreign-policy decisions are, naturally, those who share the necessary experience to develop comparable instincts and hunches.
Dominant methods of policy analysis and decision making are badly outdated
The epistemology of the U.S. foreign-policy community bears a strong resemblance to what scholar Robert A. Kagan termed “adversarial legalism.” Instead of prioritizing solutions aimed at achieving policy objectives, the policy process weighs legal and political risks between entrenched bureaucratic interests. The “right policy” is whatever emerges from that process. The “top expert” is the official who has achieved decision-making authority.
Social-scientific epistemology is very different. Its goal is to produce the “right” answers. Even if one believes—as many academics do—that we will probably never know the exact “truth” or provide the “best” answers, social-scientific training emphasizes self-consciousness and transparency when it comes to epistemic choices.
The defining features of academia—the practices of citations, peer-review, hypothesis testing, university training and certification, a focus on methodology, and so on—aim to facilitate intellectual progress. In principle, scholarly authority derives from the quality of scholarship, not the other way around.
Efforts to “bridge the Gap” need to better wrestle with these differences.
Bridge-builders often encourage scholars to ‘hide’ their methods and evidence when speaking with policymakers. But this renders even the best scholarship indistinguishable from opinions, guesses, and even misinformation.
It is this state of affairs, not the nature of social science itself, that makes “lab leaks” from social science so dangerous.
At the very least, academics should avoid validating the anti-scientific views of many policymakers who dismiss social science as irrelevant.
Alexander George understood the challenge. In Bridging the Gap, he explained:
Quite obviously, substantive knowledge of foreign affairs can have no impact on policy unless it enters into the process of policymaking. Substantive knowledge must combine with the effective structuring and management of the policymaking process in order to improve the analytic (versus the political) component of policymaking.
But George never answers the question of how policy analysis within the government should work. One of the most important tasks of bridge-building involves providing answers.
Scholars should push policymakers to think more like scientists.
At the very least, scholars need to use their privileged position to hold policymakers accountable for making decisions that violate basic scientific norms. They must speak up when officials subordinate hard-won substantive knowledge to intuitive judgment and parochial political considerations. In the words of the longest-serving member of Congress in history, John Dingell, “If I let you write the substance and you let me write the procedure, I’ll screw you every time.”
Dominant methods of policy analysis and decision making are badly outdated, if not outright anti-scientific. Rather than expecting scholars to conform to policymakers’ ‘ways of seeing,’ scholars should push policymakers to think more like scientists.
If social scientists believe their work has value, then they (necessarily) believe in the value of their methods and epistemological beliefs.
Scholars have the tools and training to help improve every stage of the policy process. An improved foreign policy epistemology must:
Upgrading policy processes might include finding ways to improve, for example:
In short, a true “bridge” between scholarship and foreign-policy making should be constructed around the evidence-based policy movement and other efforts to improve the effectiveness of foreign policy.
The U.S. foreign policy community can learn a great deal from those other sectors of government that foster a much closer connection between research and practice, including public health, economic policy, and education. Even within the national security community, some agencies do a better job than others. Evidence-based methods play a larger role in international development, the intelligence community, and the Department of Defense than in the State Department or the National Security Council.
The good news is that bureaucratic footholds are emerging for scholars interested in advancing more scientific foreign policymaking. The Department of State recently launched its Learning Agenda, which Congress requested in the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018. The Global Fragility Act is prioritizing evidence and learning to reform the way the US government prevents and responds to conflict. Both the Departments of Defense and State are making high-profile investments into analytics and data.
Ultimately, the responsibility of building a bridge does not lie solely with academics. Those of us who care about the quality of foreign policy must help policymakers help close the Gap between research and practice. Neither academics nor policymakers have all the answers. But Americans – and billions around the globe affected by our decisions – deserve the best possible foreign policy.
Guest post by Patricia L. Sullivan
During her recent trip to Africa, US Vice President Kamala Harris announced a $100 million commitment over ten years to West African Nations to fend off the increasing threat of extremist groups. The announcement followed President Biden’s pledge of $55 billion to the continent for the next three years. While these promises reveal a US commitment to greater engagement with African states, the often-dodged question is whether citizens of these states will benefit. Will US security aid improve human security in fragile and conflict-affected African states? How is US security assistance likely to affect governance and state repression for citizens that often suffer at the hands of both extremist groups and their own security forces?
The empirical record is mixed. Between 2002 and 2019, the US spent almost $300 billion on security assistance and trained at least one million foreign military personnel. In some countries, such as Ukraine, these programs have improved both the capability and professionalism of the state’s armed forces. In others, they escalated human rights abuses and increased the risk of coups d’état. Take the example of Kenya—one of the largest recipients of US military training and equipment in East Africa. The state’s security forces have been found to engage in torture, extrajudicial killings, mass arrests, and forced disappearances. Or the Philippines, where President Duterte employed the country’s military—armed and trained by US aid programs—in a brutal war on drugs that took the lives of thousands of civilians.
Although some studies have found that security assistance can reduce civilian targeting by state security forces, there is mounting evidence that it often fuels human rights violations. Recent research suggests that the risk of civilian harm is greatest when donors transfer weapons to postconflict states or provide aid to states with fragmented, “coup-proofed” security forces. On the other hand, effective institutions to constrain executive power in recipient states, and the provision of some forms of “nonlethal” security assistance—like military education for officers and defense institution building—appear to mitigate the potential for civilian harm.
As the War on Terror spread from Afghanistan to the African continent, the US greatly expanded the use of security assistance—funding, weapons, equipment, and training provided to a state’s security sector by external actors—to build the capacity of weak states to take on the counterterrorism mission without sacrificing American troops in ground combat. According to data collected by the Security Assistance Monitor, funding to train and equip foreign security forces increased more than 300 percent in the ten years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Over the past two decades, the US has provided security sector assistance to more than two-thirds of the sovereign states in the world. Between 2015 and 2020, $4.8 billion in security aid went to sub-Saharan Africa.
While the goal is to reduce the threat posed by violent non-state actors, Kristen Harkness at the University of St. Andrews points out that most aid went to “repressive, heavily coup-proofed authoritarian regimes,” even though boosting military capacity in non-democratic states can fuel grievances that drive recruitment to extremist groups and increase political violence.
When “lethal” aid—weapons, military equipment, and combat skills training—reaches countries that lack effective institutional constraints on executive power, as in many autocratic and anocratic regimes, the risk of extrajudicial killings at the hand of security forces spikes, according to data that follows low- and middle-income recipients of US security force assistance between 2002 and 2019.
In the absence of effective legislative or judicial constraints, leaders can use military aid to buy the loyalty of their security forces and incentivize compliance with orders to repress dissent. Of course, lethal aid also directly increases the capacity of state security forces to quell civilian threats to the regime with force. Security assistance signals that a foreign patron is invested in regime survival. While soldiers ordered to use deadly force against the civilian population might experience moral conflict, or fear facing consequences for targeting civilians if the regime is overthrown, foreign security aid increases the odds that repression will succeed, the regime will survive, and soldiers will be rewarded for their loyalty.
One way to avoid the risk that US assistance increases human rights violations is to provide aid only to countries with effective legislative and judicial institutions. But many regions where extremist groups are active would offer a limited menu. An alternative is providing safer forms of aid.
Separating “non-lethal” security aid—a broad category encompassing professional military education, security sector reform, defense institution-building, and a variety of other types of assistance—from “lethal” aid—which includes material aid, direct combat assistance, and combat training—reveals divergent effects on state violence. While increasing lethal aid significantly raises the risk of extrajudicial killing, non-lethal aid appears to have a dampening effect. The exception is authoritarian states in which leaders have created overlapping and competing security institutions to “coup-proof” their regime. In these states, all forms of security assistance are associated with civilian harm. In post-conflict countries, one study shows that while weapons transfers and military aid increase human rights abuses, levels of Official Development Assistance (ODA) are associated with improved human rights protections.
Moving forward, as the US promises a new wave of security assistance to African states, it has a choice. Considering the recipient country’s institutional context, the state of its security forces, and the type of military aid, can decrease the risk that those resources are used to commit human rights violations.
Patricia Lynn Sullivan is an associate professor in the Department of Public Policy and the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies.
Feminist foreign policies (FFP) are considered the latest contribution of feminism to global governance. Eleven countries around the world have embraced FFP, aiming to “systematically integrate a gender perspective throughout” foreign policy agendas.
In recent years, FFP has spread to Latin America: Mexico introduced an FFP in 2020 and the newly elected Chilean and Colombian governments have expressed their intentions of adopting the framework.
This growing interest in FFP across Latin American raises important questions: What exactly is this feminist foreign policy and what is there to gain by naming foreign policies “feminist”? Should Latin American feminists engage, support, critique, or be suspicious of this global trend? What does FFP look like in a Latin American context?
FFP is emerging as a new subfield in feminist international relations. Building on women’s rights and peace movements around the globe, feminism occupies an important position within academic and political spaces since it provides a powerful source of intervention against different forms of discrimination.
The theoretical foundations of FFP, however, are still not clearly defined. What an FFP looks like depends largely on a government’s interpretation of the concept.
Sweden first proposed a general FFP model built on what they call the three R’s: resources, representation and rights. Their model went on to define “six long-term external objectives” centered on policy making with a gender perspective: freedom from different types of gender-based violence; women’s participation in preventing and resolving conflicts, and post-conflict peace building; political participation; economic rights and empowerment; and sexual and reproductive health and rights. This initial Swedish proposal served as a basis for other countries’ policies.
For many foreign policy observers and feminist activists these objectives were still too vague and ambiguous. First, what does foreign policy entail? This question underlies the discussion among academics and activists about feminism being co-opted for neoliberal economic purposes, or if it maintains its potential as a critical proposition. There are also questions concerning contentious topics for feminists. For instance, how is the gender perspective incorporated into defense and security? Given the long tradition of pacifism in the feminist movement globally and its demand for an active commitment to disarmament, how can countries like Canada simultaneously export arms and pursue an FFP?
International organizations have tried to provide definitional clarity. In its most ambitious expression, UN Women proposes that an FFP should aspire to transform the overall practice of foreign policy—including a country’s diplomacy, defense and security cooperation, aid, trade, climate security, and immigration policies—to the benefit of women and girls.
Feminist civil society, however, tends to take a more critical stance. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in Germany believes that “fixating on the production of a universally acceptable and concrete definition of a feminist foreign policy fails to consider the different and varied political realities that shape our global landscape.” Thus, it proposes five concepts to inform policy development that better accounts for this variation: intersectionality; empathetic reflexivity; substantive representation and participation; accountability; and, active peace commitment. Regardless of the concrete definition, FFP aims to achieve explicit normative and ethical goals. Yet, as Jennifer Thompson notes, FFP is a state invention in which foreign policy goals are often shaped by state interests rather than feminist activists’ normative principles. While civil society often formulates FFP demands, states implement foreign policies. In other words, it is states that ultimately decide what counts as FFP and what does not. As a result, FFPs may not fulfill their ethical promises—particularly in countries without strong accountability mechanisms. Mexico’s attempt to develop an FFP is a case in point.
In September 2022, Internacional Feminista, a Mexican feminist organization that I co-founded, published the first evaluation of Mexico’s FFP. My colleagues and I concluded that there is no clarity as to what the FFP actually entails and no policy roadmap detailing the FFP’s actions, outcomes, indicators, and intended impact. The Mexican FFP has stalled.
Regarding the question of what constitutes foreign policy, the Mexican FFP has a broad and ambitious scope. The Secretariat of Foreign Affairs seeks to mainstream gender perspectives across all foreign policy areas as one of its core objectives, yet we found this does not happen in practice. Discussion of the FFP is most visible in Mexico’s rhetoric in multilateral fora. However, tangible evidence that Mexico is actually considering a gender perspective is largely absent from other foreign policy issues, such as defense, trade, and diplomacy.
One innovation of Mexico’s FFP was prioritizing gender parity within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its diplomatic corps. Nonetheless, it is not possible to assess whether there is gender parity across the ranks as the Secretariat has no available records of personnel demographic data, disaggregated by gender or rank. The lack of available data disaggregated by gender suggests that this is not as much of a focus area as it’s made out to be.
Another feature of the Mexican initiative was its aim of strengthening the protocols to address and prevent gender-based violence within the foreign ministry. However, there is very little information available regarding how these are implemented and if they have achieved their intended outcomes. The absence of information again suggests that this was not a priority task. In fact, two cases call into question Mexico’s commitment to FFP: one involved failures in consular attention to a Mexican woman victim of gender-based violence in Qatar, and another involved an attempt to appoint a man accused of sexual harassment as Mexico’s ambassador to Panama.
In its FFP plan, the Secretariat also announced funding for intersectionality-related efforts. However, data shows that the budget remained constant from 2018 to 2020. Following the austerity policies of the current administration, no additional resources were granted to support these efforts. Moreover, the budget document labeled these resources as “Expenditures for equality between women and men.” By continuing to interpret “intersectionality” and “gender perspective” as synonymous, the Mexican FFP dilutes the disruptive spirit of intersectionality that accounts for multidimensional identities beyond binary gender categories.
Without clear implementation guidelines and evaluation criteria, Mexican officials have struggled to navigate the contradictions within the government. The most notorious is the lack of support from the president himself who, according to Mexico’s Constitution, is responsible for defining foreign policy objectives. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is openly hostile towards the feminist movement, and a recent leak indicates that the Secretary of Defense spies on feminist activists. Yet, diplomats continue to uphold feminist principles in multilateral forums. The president’s hostility and the mismatch between secretariats obstructs necessary dialogue with feminist civil society and blocks the chances of effective policy accountability.
The Mexican experience highlights the challenges of implementing FFPs in Latin America.
First, it is clear that FFP is not as boundary-pushing as its supporters suggest. It is limited by the lack of accountability mechanisms, broad political support and budget constraints. As a result, FFP is often insufficient to drive change on critical issues. Yet, feminism in the region, as Claudia Korol puts it, “is a rebellious movement in which the plural and diverse bodies and the different struggles seek their place, and demand to be named.” In other words, feminism is in tension with the circles of institutionalized, disciplined and ordered practices, such as government-led foreign policies.
In countries with rampant economic inequality and high rates of gender violence against women, feminist principled policies are sorely needed. Due to institutional resistance, however, policy implementation is far from guaranteed. The design and implementation of foreign policies in the region have historically been a space for male elites and, as the example of Mexico illustrates, the FFP has been insufficient to break this inertia. In the words of feminist scholar Angela Davis, “if standards for feminism are created by those who have already ascended economic hierarchies and are attempting to make the last climb to the top, how is this relevant to women who are at the very bottom?”
After recent elections in Chile and Colombia, leaders are now developing their foreign policies and both countries have declared their interest in adopting an FFP. As consultations develop in Bogotá and Santiago, it is worth remembering that simply labeling a foreign policy as feminist without implementing policies that account for gender perspectives or advance women’s rights creates an illusion of change, while keeping systems of oppression intact and further setting back gender justice.
Genuine efforts to advance gender justice ought to reimagine traditional international relations and diplomacy. As I have argued elsewhere, this can be achieved by more fully considering local dynamics and actors in developing foreign policies. Feminist civil society has been at the forefront of driving successful changes in domestic policies—and we ought to incorporate their strategies and insights into foreign policy development.
Guest post by Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Molly Wallace, and Ned Dobos
Ukraine has received tens of billions of dollars worth of military aid since the Russian invasion began one year ago. The international consensus seems to be that supporting Ukraine means financing its war effort. But a few dissenting voices have emerged of late, more ambivalent about the prudence—and ethics—of the current policy. Colonel Douglas MacGregor, a former advisor to the US Secretary of Defence, has warned that the choice of cure could turn out to be worse than the disease.
At least 7,000 Ukrainian civilians have already perished in the war. Thousands more have been injured, and millions have been displaced. MacGregor’s primary concern is that the bleeding will continue for as long as the fighting does. Russian forces advance, Ukrainian forces resist with violence, Russia responds with counter-violence, and the bodies continue to pile up. The Ukrainian state retains its sovereignty, but eventually we get to a point where, to quote MacGregor, “There are no longer any Ukrainians left!” This is hyperbole, of course, but that should not distract from the valid point MacGregor is making. States exist for the sake of their citizens, not the other way around. Therefore, if a given method of defending the state is causing its citizens to be killed or to flee en masse, that is a compelling reason to explore alternatives.
What is often overlooked about armed resistance is that, when it “works,” it does so by producing a mental rather than physical effect. Wars are won by breaking the enemy’s will to fight, not necessarily its ability to fight. Victory usually comes, if it comes, long before there are no enemy soldiers left; it comes when those soldiers who remain and/or their leaders are no longer motivated to fight, or in more extreme cases, when the soldiers are so demoralized that the leaders can no longer mount enough coercive pressure to make them continue fighting. Everything hinges on how the remaining members of the opponent group react to the destruction of their compatriots’ lives and their military or civilian infrastructure, not on the destruction itself.
Once we realize that the condition of surrender is not physical but psychological, it is only natural to wonder: Is there no way to change minds except through violence against bodies?
Nonviolent resistance is an alternative strategy for breaking the will of the aggressor. Protests and fraternization can engage the moral sentiments of the aggressor’s functionaries and citizenry, leading to a loss of popular support. Boycotts and blockades can alter the material cost-benefit equation of the aggression, so that it is no longer worth it. And nonviolent sabotage can directly diminish the aggressor’s capabilities by physically disabling military, transportation, or communications infrastructure.
Ukrainians have been engaged in various forms of such nonviolent resistance since the Russian invasion began. It took more visible forms at first—ordinary civilians demonstrating in Ukrainian colors or standing between Russian tanks and their towns—and has since shifted to less visible, more dispersed methods in response to Russian occupation and repression—graffiti, non-cooperation with Russian authorities, alternative communication, and governance institutions. There were even overtures to the Russian public and soldiers, eliciting responses from significant scientists, clerics, and journalists.
Unlike the militarized resistance, however, the nonviolent resistance has received no significant material support from the international community. Consider for example the Ukrainian government’s early offer of money and amnesty to Russian deserters, which circulated via SMS messages containing instructions on how and where to surrender and collect payment. According to The Times (UK), there was some initial uptake—a Russian soldier was photographed surrendering himself and his tank to Ukrainian forces in March, in exchange for cash and an offer of permanent resettlement in Ukraine. But consider what might have been.
Suppose the international community were to double the Ukrainian government’s offer of $50k per deserting soldier, as economist Bryan Caplan suggested. Desertion is a risky proposition, but for twice the payoff perhaps many more Russian soldiers might have considered the risk worth taking. Additionally, countries besides Ukraine could have offered Russian deserters amnesty and even citizenship within their own borders. This way deserters would need not worry about Russia eventually winning the war, occupying Ukraine, ousting its government, and taking its vengeance against them. The recent involvement of Wagner Group mercenaries on the Russian side only underscores the utility of economic incentives to alter the motivation of soldiers.
Of course, we cannot say for certain that a nonviolent approach will work. But we cannot say for certain that violence will work, either. So far it hasn’t.
If there are nonviolent ways to break Russia’s will to fight, why the reluctance to exploit them?
One possible reason is the widespread belief that nonviolence, although it can be effective, is not nearly as effective as military force. But this belief is more an a priori assumption than a rational conclusion based on an impartial appraisal of the evidence. Scientific research suggests that, during 1900–2006, nonviolent resistance outperformed violent resistance by a ratio of almost 2:1.
Maybe our desire to see wrongdoers not simply thwarted but punished explains the preference for violence here. Perhaps our sense of justice recoils at the thought of paying Russian combatants to desert, instead of making them suffer for what they have done—though this stance ignores the coercion and manipulation that Putin’s government has used against its own armed forces.
In any case, surely what matters most in all this is the welfare of the Ukrainian people. The reality is that massively financing the war effort has produced a state of attrition with no end in sight. Persisting with the current policy regardless, expecting things to change while the casualties mount, is a combination of delusion and depravity. We should now turn the spotlight onto those Ukrainians who—despite the loud calls for military weaponry—have been steadily engaged in various forms of nonviolent resistance and defense since the invasion. Their actions deserve more support—both moral and material—than the international community has so far provided.
Alexandre Christoyannopoulos is a reader (associate professor) in politics and international relations at Loughborough University, and his publications are listed on his website. Ned Dobos is a senior lecturer in international and political studies at UNSW Canberra, and author of Ethics, Security, and the War Machine: The True Cost of the Military. Molly Wallace is adjunct assistant professor in conflict resolution at Portland State University, senior contributing editor at the Peace Science Digest, and author of Security without Weapons: Rethinking Violence, Nonviolent Action, and Civilian Protection. The three of them are the editors of the new Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence.
The government of a country makes explicit or implicit threats to another: “if you cross this line, we will inflict harm upon you.” The threat fails; the government crosses the designated line. Has deterrence failed?
Well, yes. Of course. By definition. It is, for example, unequivocally true that the United States did not deter Russia from invading Georgia in 2008, nor Ukraine in 2014, nor Ukraine (again) in 2022. Should you have any doubts about this, you can always go read a nearly four-thousand word Foreign Policy article on the subject.
I agree with its authors, Liam Collins and Frank Sobchak, that U.S. policymakers made a number of mistakes in handling Russia. Trump’s rhetoric concerning NATO, Russia, and Ukraine did not exactly help make U.S. deterrence credible; then again, Trump wasn’t in office when Putin ordered the invasion. In retrospect, Obama’s decision to withhold lethal aid from Ukraine was probably mistake, as not much seemed to happen when the Trump administration reversed course. But do we really think that providing more javelins in 2015 or 2016 would have deterred Putin’s invasion?
Apparently, yes. For Collins and Subchak, Washington’s failure to deter Russia means that U.S. policymakers should, ipso facto, have adopted a more hardline policy toward Russia. But much like the opposite claim—that Georgia and Ukraine “prove” that the U.S. should have adopted a more accommodating approach toward Russia, for example, by not expanding NATO—we’re looking at reasoning that is less “ipso facto” than “post hoc ergo propter hoc.”
That is, just because X preceded Y does not mean X caused Y. In the context of policy analysis we might add that just because Y is bad doesn’t mean Y’ would be better.
Sometimes, X isn’t even X. The fact that ‘deterrence failed’ doesn’t imply that any attempt to accommodate Russia was a capitulation to Moscow. Sometimes the opposite is true.
For instance, Collins and Sobchak argue that Ukraine shows the folly of Obama’s decision to cancel the “Third Site” anti-ballistic missile system, which involving placing radar in the Czech Republic and interceptors in Poland.
But the Obama administration replaced the “Third Site” with the European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA), which (as the Russians soon figured out) was easier for the United States to upgrade into the kind of system Moscow worried about. EPAA also entailed eventual deployments in Romania; Obama committed to stationing Patriots on Polish territory, as well “left open the door to stationing new types of missile defense interceptors in Poland, an offer the Poles later agreed to accept.” Moreover, at the Wales NATO summit Obama convinced NATO to affirm that missile defense was part of its collective mission.
Given all of this, it seems bizarre to claim, as Richard Minter did in 2014, that after “Obama delayed deployment of missile defenses in Eastern Europe, Putin knew he had a free hand to reassemble the old Soviet Union piece-by-piece. Invading his neighbors would now be cost free.”
Now, Collins and Sobchak don’t write anything quite so ridiculous. But they sometimes land come within striking distance.
Consider the very opening of the article, which discusses the U.S. response to the Russia-Georgia war:
Recall the aftermath of the 2008 invasion of Georgia. The Bush administration airlifted Georgian soldiers serving in Iraq back to Georgia to fight, provided a humanitarian aid package, and offered tersely worded denouncements and demarches. But it categorically rejected providing Georgia with serious military assistance in the form of anti-tank missiles and air defense missiles and even refrained from implementing punishing economic sanctions against Russia. The United States’ lack of resolve to punish Russia for its gross violation of international law was underscored when U.S. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley’s remark “Are we prepared to go to war with Russia over Georgia?”—made during a National Security Council meeting after the war started—was later released to the media.
Keep in mind that they’re talking about an effort to proved anti-tank missiles and air-defense systems during a war that lasted five days—one in which Russia systematically annihilated the shiny systems that the United States and its partners had previously provided. If the argument is that the United States should have given Georgia anti-tank weapons or air-defense missiles after the conflict, then (while that might have been a good idea) it’s not clear to me how that would’ve signaled U.S. resolve.
(Stephen Hadley’s remark first appeared, if I remember correctly, in Ron Asmus’ book about the Georgia war. So the passive voice is definitely doing some work here. At the time, Hadley refused to comment on the specific quotation but did confirm that the Bush administration decided that the risks of using force outweighed the benefits. This “revelation” shouldn’t have surprised anyone, including Moscow, since, you know, the United States did not, in fact, use force. What’s particularly strange about this example is that it’s backwards. What surprised people was the extent of support within the administration for a more aggressive response. The headline of the Politico article that I linked to above wasn’t “The United States didn’t risk war for Georgia.” It was “U.S. pondered military use in Georgia.”)
It is not obvious that the United States could have secured support for, say, more punishing sanctions. The Georgia War did not deter France from closing a deal to sell two Mistral-class helicopter carriers to Russia. Paris only cancelled that sale after the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, when Hollande (rather than Sarkozy) was president (interesting side note here).
But, as is typical for this genre, the article never seriously considers either the viability or the downside risks of alternative policies. This is… problematic… given that it is very difficult to assess what the world would like after fifteen years of concatenating changes produced by different policy decisions.
None of this means that we shouldn’t evaluate past policies and work through conterfactuals. That’s a crucial element of policy analysis, social-scientific inquiry, and policymaking, Collins and Sobchak, like too many others, don’t even do the bare minimum—in their case, despite writing a piece that runs as long as a short academic article in International Relations.
That failure is particularly pernicious when an obviously “bad outcome” makes it easy to gloss over. In fact, the last sentence of Collins and Sobchak’s article gives the game away:
The sad irony is that U.S. leaders, of both parties, chose to avoid deterrence for fear of escalating conflict—only to find themselves continually escalating their support once conflict started. Time after time, the United States chose the option that was perceived as the least provocative but that instead led to the Russians becoming convinced that they were safe to carry out the most provocative action of all: a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The United States ignored the eternal wisdom of the Latin phrase Si vis pacem, para bellum (“If you want peace, prepare for war”) and instead hoped that half-steps and compromise would suffice. While so far those decisions have prevented direct conflict between two nuclear-armed superpowers, they have caused Russia and the West to be locked in a continuing series of escalations with an increasing danger of a miscalculation that could lead to exactly that scenario.
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