Why is foreign policy so hard?

To judge from the confident pronouncements of our fellows on Twitter and other social media, whether academics or commentators, foreign policy is easy and straightforward. Political leaders who get it wrong are therefore stupid, and culpably stupid, if not venal. Our fellow Twitterati tell us without qualms or doubts what foreign policies our governments should be following. But all this confidence and bombast tells me is that none of these gurus has ever worked in a foreign ministry or an embassy. None of them has ever struggled to write a policy paper on the war in Bosnia on a cold November Friday night, knowing that their wife and baby son impatiently await them at home. Because foreign policy is hard and almost impossible to get right, whatever getting it right means. This blog asks why.

The world of international political and economic relations is an inherently complex adaptive system. The complexity of the positive and negative feedback loops make it impossible to predict the results of any policy intervention in all but the shortest term, let alone the long term. Domestic policy also has to deal with a complex adaptive system, to the extent that government frequently resembles a game of Wach-A-Mole as it seeks to beat down one unexpected consequence after another. It is not for nothing that Chinese Daoist philosophers advised political leaders “wuwei erzhi” – do nothing and all will be taken care of. But foreign policy must deal with even more complex adaptive systems, and the unexpected consequences can be lethal.

Foreign policy is hard because decisions must be taken in conditions of extreme uncertainty with imperfect knowledge or information. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, Kissinger has said that the tragedy of foreign policy is that when you have least information you have greatest freedom of manoeuvre; when you have greatest information you have least freedom of manoeuvre. As you await more information, your options shrink. If you wait too long, your options disappear and with them your chance of influencing events. Not for diplomats the luxury of evidence-based policy, or of “following the science”. It may seem strange to complain about imperfect information in the so-called information age awash with data. But the problem is not insufficient data but imperfect information. Nor can big data analysis or deep learning technologies help in a policy area where even historians, fifty years later with twenty-twenty hindsight, cannot agree what the correct decision was.

In foreign policy you never decide your own fate. Outcomes depend not only on the decisions that you take, but also on those of other actors. To some extent this is also true of domestic policy. Outcomes depend not only on the decisions that the government takes but how its citizens react to the decisions. But once the government has taken a decision or adopted legislation it can count on the coercive forces of the state (police, courts, civil services) to enforce compliance. This is not true in foreign policy. Deciding on a foreign policy is only the beginning of the process. You must then persuade or cajole other international actors, above all other states, to follow your policy. There are no international forces of coercion to enforce a given policy (even less so with the UN Security Council deadlocked for the foreseeable future). Attempts at coercion of other states can all too often lead to conflict. Or coercion can be ignored, as the West has learnt with sanctions against Russia: despite the West´s best efforts, most countries have declined to impose sanctions on Russia, prioritising their national interests and commercial relations with Moscow.

But foreign policy cannot concern itself only with the opinions of foreign states and non-state actors. Foreign policy makers can no longer pretend to Lord Salisbury´s magnificent isolation. They must take account, especially in democracies, of domestic popular opinion, a popular opinion often with little understanding of the complexities of foreign policy and driven by demagogic politicians or media. Social media increases the divisions and polarizes the debates. There is nothing new in this. Thucydides complained about the demagogue Cleon whipping up the mob in Athens. In September 1938, one of the reasons that Chamberlain appeased Hitler was that he knew there was no popular support for war in Britain. He was greeted as a hero on his return bearing “peace in our time”. A year later, he had the popular support to declare war on Germany. European political leaders today calculating how far they can take support for Ukraine must also assess what public opinion will take and how that can change over time.

Finally, as diplomats once knew well, foreign policy problems are never solved. At best they are managed in ways that maintain international stability while protecting, as far as possible, national interests. The idea that international problems should be managed rather than solved can be anathema to NGOs and human rights activists, but too often the pursuit of virtue results only in more violence and suffering. As Kissinger has pointed out, often all the options are bad ones. The art of statecraft lies in securing the least bad outcome. This is the position European leaders find themselves in with Ukraine. There are no good outcomes. Even the preferred outcome of a Ukrainian victory (however that is defined) carries significant risks to international stability and the danger of further (and more dangerous) conflicts. The best they can hope for is to avoid the worst of outcomes.

So foreign policy is hard, and certainly harder than the pundits of Twitter think. Perhaps it is something you understand only if you have been involved in foreign policy making at some level, and have had your share in making a mess of it.