Reading Crystal Balls in Foreign Policy

Michael Oppenheimer of NYU – Image Credit: NYU

In May I was invited to be an observer at the Scenarios Initiative of the Center for Global Affairs (CGA) at NYU. The focus of the session I attended was Turkey’s possible futures over the next decade.  It is a fascinating and useful process, described on its website in the following way:

The NYU Center for Global Affairs Scenarios Initiative is a mediated workshop series designed to produce cross-disciplinary, forward-looking thinking on countries and issues critical to U.S. national interest. By gathering experts from diverse areas of expertise and nationalities to participate in scenario-building workshops, the Initiative aims to raise the quality of US foreign policy by improving policymakers’ understanding of and reaction to change.

Basically, this initiative gets a group of very smart people (the group assembled for Turkey was extraordinary, see listing here) in a room for a day and a half to come up with three scenarios that are plausible and offer directions that are distinct from the other.  The process forces people who are leading authorities in their fields to ponder other possibilities.  In other words, every expert involved probably has a scenario they think most is likely to happen.  However, they are still required to think through the other possibilities and what drivers might send things in a direction they had not considered (or at least not considered as seriously as other possible outcomes).  This isn’t just an interesting intellectual exercise – it brings to the fore possibilities and variables that might not be as evident as they should be.  Foreign policy experts can succumb to group think as much as any group, particularly in the policy hothouse inside the D.C. Beltway.   The CGA scenarios report on Iran gives an excellent justification of forcing experts off the dependency of the beaten path:

Too often, in both official and academic policy debates, the future is expected to parallel the recent past. Potential discontinuities are dismissed as implausible, information that conflicts with prevailing mindsets is unseen or viewed as anomalous, pressure for consensus drives out distinctive insights, and a fear of being ‘wrong’ discourages risk-taking and innovative analysis. Too much good thinking falls to the cutting room floor, while consensus coalesces around lowest common denominator extrapolations of recent data, or around the policy commitments of ‘clients.’ This built-in conservatism can artificially restrict policy options and reduce foreign policy choice.  The CGA Scenarios project aims to apply imagination to debates about global conditions that affect U.S. interests. The project will assemble the combination of knowledge, detachment and futures perspective essential to informing decisions taken in the presence of uncertainty. The project will comprise long term research on forces for change in the international system and workshops attended by experts and policy makers from diverse fields and viewpoints. The workshops will examine the results of current research, create alternative scenarios, identify potential surprises, and test current and alternative policies against these futures.

The scenarios event is ably led by Michael Oppenheimer and his team of students.  They make sure that grandstanding is kept to a minimum and that the focus remains on building a persuasive case for each scenario, identifying key drivers of change and which factors precipitate and propel each scenario.  Prof. Oppenheimer guides the assembled team and urges them to consider both domestic and regional factors and what sorts of wild card events might add momentum to the various scenarios.  This requires a suspension of disbelief that, in my opinion, is absolutely crucial if these scenarios are to add something new to the collective thinking and accepted wisdom.  Imagine, for example, what scenarios might have been considered for Europe in the early 1980s if no one pondered the possible fall of the Berlin Wall (almost everyone missed that call).   What wild card variable would have been able to predict the Iranian Revolution?  Or 9-11?  The line between plausible and possible is a thin one and foreign policy experts often return to the comfort of the probable.  Michael Oppenheimer and his team gently nudge them out of that comfort zone and the results are well worth reading.   I have participated in similar kinds of exercises at the Marine Corps War College and conferences at Ditchley Park in the UK.  Both were extremely interesting and informative.  But the CGA Scenarios Initiative’s focus on devising three specific, distinct and detailed scenarios adds a useful twist.

The initiative has already tackled China, Iraq and Iran (reports available here) and will address Ukraine later this year.   More details on the Turkey scenario are available here and here. I recommend that you take a look and see what the future might hold.