In the Yugoslav case, trumpeted as a forecasting coup by hedgehog primordialists, some foxes continued to distance themselves from deductive covering laws even after the fact. They stressed the complex confluence of events that made war likely but still far from inevitable: a legacy of interethnic hatred that Tito had temporarily suppressed, the power of economic threat to aggravate latent ethnic tensions, the collapse of the bipolar distribution of power on the continent (with the external Soviet threat gone, rival factions felt free to rekindle old hatreds), and the rise to leadership of ruthless populists in Serbia and Croatia. One fox posed a rhetorical counterfactual: “If Havel had been in charge of Serbia, would we have seen this butchery?” A lot of factors had to be in the right (wrong) position to produce this catastrophe.19
As a matter of cognitive policy, most foxes felt it foolish to be anchored down by theory-laden abstractions. They often tried, for example to blend opposing hedgehog arguments, such as those over the viability of the EMU. The net result was that they made less extreme predictions but leaned toward the view that the currency convergence project would lurch spasmodically forward, albeit with backsliding whenever satisfying the convergence criteria became too painful. In this unglamorous fashion, foxes wound up with the higher forecasting skill scores.20
Several foxes commented that good judges cultivate a capacity “to go with the flow” by improvising dissonant combinations of ideas that capture the “dynamic tensions” propelling political processes. For these self-conscious balancers, the status quo is often in precarious equilibrium and “seeing the truth” is a fleeting achievement for even the most Socratic souls.
Foxes Are Warier of Simple Historical Analogies
Foxes saw kernels of truth in casual comparisons between Saddam Hussein and Hitler, F. W. de Klerk and Mikhail Gorbachev, de Gaulle and Yeltsin, Putin and Pinochet, and Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s and Iran in the late 1970s. But they were aware of the imperfections in each analogy: they looked at hypothesis-disconfirming mismatches as well as hypothesis-confirming matches. As the following examples show, foxes were more disposed than hedgehogs to invoke multiple analogies for the same case.
POST-COMMUNIST RUSSIA (EARLY 1992)
Pessimistic hedgehogs found many reasons to despair over Russia’s future. One popular analogy was to Serbia—an analogy that warned of an irredentist Russia that would fight to reincorporate compatriots who suddenly found themselves on the wrong sides of new post-Soviet borders. An even more ominous analogy invoked the specter of Weimar Germany: it warned of total collapse followed by a ferocious pan-Slavic backlash. Imagine not a minor-league tyrant like Milosevic but a Russian Hitler.
The pessimists also generated—again in classic hedgehog fashion—a battery of reinforcing arguments. They warned of how the risks of irredentism were aggravated by the “political immaturity” of Russians: “Generations of Russians have been indoctrinated that private property is theft.” They warned of how wrenching economic reform would be, of how low production would plummet and of how high inflation would soar, and of how ripe “Weimar Russia” would become for fascist demagoguery. And they pointed to the precarious legitimacy of democratic institutions and to the power of well-connected insiders to subvert privatization.
The pessimists also saw disturbing portents of the fragmentation of Russia itself, still a great nuclear power if nothing else, into regional fiefs. They noted that, within eighteen months of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian army had fought brushfire ethnic wars in Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan (and two warned of looming horrors in Chechnya). The right analogy becomes pre-disintegration Yugoslavia or Austro-Hungary. One expert suggested that Russia by 1997 would control only half of the territory it controlled in 1992.
Optimists countered that Russia now had many attributes of a Western nation. They argued that, contrary to stereotype, Russians were not rabidly xenophobic or opposed to economic incentives. One optimist took heart from the growing use by Russians of the word “sovok” to describe their degradation under totalitarianism. Thoughtful Russians understood the need to change their own underlying psychology, to shift from thinking about “who will destroy whom” to thinking about compromise, persuasion, and mutual benefit.
By contrast, optimistic hedgehogs pointed to Deng Xiaoping or Pinochet as models of what ruthless leadership can accomplish. Although even the most optimistic did not claim Russia had the ingredients for “civil society,” some believed that, after a bout of enlightened authoritarianism, Russia could emerge as a “normal European country” in the next ten years.
Foxes could also be divided into pessimistic and optimistic subspecies but, as usual, they shied away from extreme predictions. Most favored “muddling through” scenarios over the doomsday scenarios of harsh authoritarianism or civil war, or the rosy scenarios of free markets and democracy. Foxes appreciated the prescriptive power of the economic laws underlying shock therapy but also appreciated warnings that rapid change could produce nasty backlash and that, without proper legal infrastructure, privatization would just enrich the nomenklatura. One fox saw Russians as “profoundly ambivalent:” they admire the West but they resent it, they yearn for authoritarianism but they thirst for freedom, they dislike capitalism but hold its products in awe. The fence-sitting foxes covered their bets by expecting Russia to zigzag between advancing and retreating from Western ideas of progress.21
INDIA (MID-1988)
Pessimistic hedgehogs saw two principal threats to peace and prosperity: chaos induced by religious violence and economic stagnation induced by overregulation. The gloomiest expected that a BJP (a Hindu fundamentalist party) electoral victory would reinvigorate Hindu-Muslim conflict in India and precipitate disputes with Pakistan that could escalate into conventional or even nuclear war. They likened the BJP to the Nazi Party in the dying days of the Weimar Republic (the Weimar analogy makes an encore appearance).22 One pessimist expanded on the comparison: “Sure, I see similarities: the BJP are Aryan supremists who direct party thugs against an unpopular minority. That should ring a bell.” Another pessimist characterized India as “geopolitically isolated and economically frail …, surrounded by an erratic Muslim adversary to the west and a menacing Chinese adversary to the north, and fated to collapse into sectarian violence in the next decade.”
Optimists countered that the BJP knows it must tone down the extremists in its ranks: “Although its leaders tactically stir up religious passions, they know violence will turn off the middle class whom they must woo to win power.” Some optimists even argued that India needed a BJP government to break up the miasma of nepotism and inefficiency left in the wake of the Congress Party’s long hold on power. In 1993, in a five-year follow-up assessment, another optimist maintained that, regardless of who forms the government in Delhi, the economic reform program started by Rao’s government in 1991 is irreversible and will transform India from a “shackled giant” into an economic powerhouse. India was on the same economic trajectory as China ten years earlier (early 1980s). His lament was that the residual ideology of the British Labor Party in India’s Congress Party had proven so much harder to shake off than Maoism in China’s Communist Party. Sometimes there is a benefit in being “outlandishly wrong.”
By 1998, foxes were closer to striking the right balance. The BJP did take power and it did play a provocative nuclear card (a series of underground tests that prompted retaliatory Pakistani tests). But the BJP did not live up to its advance billing as proto-Nazi. It presided over a reasonably intact polity. And it edged India toward overdue economic reforms. The economy was growing but not as fast as China’s and only barely fast enough to keep pace with population.
KAZAKHSTAN (EARLY 1992)
One hedgehog pessimist—with a low threshold for warning of interethnic violence almost everywhere—characterized Kazakhstan as a “Yugoslavia writ large, … a multiethnic cauldron on the verge of boiling over.” He feared nuclear weapons inherited from the Soviet Union falling into the
hands of extremists. Nuclear civil war or proliferation to terrorists ranked among the most depressing of the downbeat scenarios.
Boomster hedgehogs saw Kazakhstan as a potentially rich country, endowed with massive oil and mineral reserves. One depicted President Nazarbayev as an Ataturk figure: a savvy, secular politician who knew how to mollify Kazakh anger and calm Russian fears and as a forceful autocrat capable of alternating between crushing and buying off domestic opposition.
The foxes leaned slightly toward the optimists, but they saw validity in both sets of arguments, and this habit of open-mindedness (or fence-sitting) served them well. The future of Kazakhstan was nowhere near as bleak as the pessimists had feared, but economic growth rates fell short of the optimists’ projections and so did progress toward rule of law and democracy.23
POLAND (EARLY 1992)
Although shock therapy regimens varied in rigor of implementation and sensitivity to safety net concerns, the policies had enough in common to become the epicenter of heated debate in the post-Communism policy literature. Left-wing hedgehogs did not disguise their annoyance at purveyors of shock therapy advice to states struggling to manage the transition from state-controlled economies to free markets. They felt that the fiscal and monetary policies embraced by the Polish government would produce political instability, not economic prosperity. The inevitable backlash in response to the anticipated spikes in inflation and unemployment would pave the way for demagogues—“Polish Perons”—who would do for Poland what the original Peron did for Argentina: set it back by decades.
These observers overestimated the pain and instability that would be linked to transition not only for Poland but for several other economies, including the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia, and Lithuania. Peronist demagogues have yet to take power in these states. But these observers were right that there was some backlash and radically reconstructed Communist parties did sometimes regain power. These parties were socialist, though, in name only and were loath to tamper with an economic formula that seemed to be working.
Hedgehogs of the neoclassical economic persuasion were right that, properly implemented, their prescriptions would eventually breathe new life into moribund economies: “The same formula worked in Bolivia and it will work in Poland.” However, these hedgehogs were insensitive to the intensity of resistance to reform from entrenched interests. One hedgehog noted: “I knew what they should do, but I couldn’t tell you when it would dawn on them to do it.”
Foxes made many of the aforementioned mistakes. On average, though, foxes who wove together dissonant analogies and covering laws were well positioned to reap a few of the forecasting successes, and to avoid some of the bigger failures, of both hedgehog camps.24
WAITING FOR THE LAST COMMUNIST “DOMINOES” TO FALL (1992)
After the collapse of the USSR, many “triumphalist” hedgehogs predicted the imminent collapse of Communist regimes beyond Eastern Europe. Some predictions were bull’s-eyes (e.g., Ethiopia), but others have yet to come true (e.g., North Korea, Cuba).
The bleakest hedgehog visions for the Korean peninsula raised the specter of nuclear apocalypse. One Götterdämmerung, Hitler-in-the-bunker, scenario depicted a North Korean leadership that lashes out in deranged desperation at the South. A second scenario depicted a more rational leadership in Pyongyang that engages in calculated nuclear blackmail and, if need be, reinforces its threats by “lobbing a few radioactive artillery shells across the DMZ into downtown Seoul.” A third scenario involved a Romanian-style meltdown of the North Korean polity, with pitched battles between rival military and security force units. The civil war could not last long—because resources are scarce—but hundreds of thousands would die of violence, starvation, and disease. South Korea would be left to clean up the irradiated ruins.
More optimistic scenarios assigned less rigidity to the top North Korean leadership. One argument held that Kim Jong-il was a closet reformer who, when his father died, would open North Korea up to foreign investment while simultaneously clamping down the political “lid,” following Deng Xiaoping, not Gorbachev. The most optimistic scenario posited gradual liberalization and merging of the two Koreas, following the German model.
Foxes straddled this divide. Most viewed the North Korean leadership as cunning psychopaths who understood the logic of power and the weakness of the hand they had to play, hence the need for lots of blustering. They also expected subtle nuclear blackmail to extort food, oil, and hard currency critical for maintaining the regime’s “elaborate patronage network.” They expected painfully slow movement toward opening the country to foreign investment because “more than anything the Kim dynasty fears destabilization.”25
Turning to Cuba, hedgehogs on the right thought that, with the loss of Soviet subsidies, Castro’s regime would fall quickly. Foxes warned that the simple puppet regime model underlying such forecasts was flawed in three ways: (1) The Cuban leadership was drawing lessons from the collapse of communism elsewhere. Castro would not liberalize, but he would purge deadwood in the party before compelled to do so; (2) Castro is “a quick study” and would “squelch any well-dressed technocrats of the sort who ousted the old guard in the Soviet Union.” And “he won’t repeat the mistakes of vain tyrants (in Nicaragua, Chile, etc.) who believed their own propaganda, called elections, and got crushed”; (3) Unlike the East European regimes, Castro is “an authentic revolutionary” who retains some legitimacy. “Although his disapproval ratings may be high (who really knows), there is no opposition to mobilize the discontent. And Castro can still blame the American embargo. It is a cliché but it is still true. With enemies like the United States, Castro may not need friends.”
Foxes who foresaw a combination of economic misery and political stability, plus continued impasse with the United States and a frantic scramble for hard currency, were better forecasters. But foxes did not disagree with hedgehogs who defended their predictions of imminent collapse by arguing that they were just off on timing. Foxes agreed that “after Fidel, all bets are off. The two nations are destined—by geography and demography—to be close.” At the same time, foxes were not impressed by the off-on-timing defense. One fox paraphrased Keynes: “Sure, they’ll be right in the long run. But in the long run, even Fidel will be dead.”26
SAUDI ARABIA (1992)
Hedgehog observers who foresaw the demise of the ruling al-Saud family brought up the precedents of coups and revolutions that had deposed monarchies in the Middle East over the last five decades, putting special emphasis on the Islamic revolution that smashed the shah’s regime in Iran. They also had no difficulty in generating reasons to bolster this prediction: the growing clamor among Wahhabi clerics for stricter enforcement of Islamic law, the growing corruption and declining legitimacy of the government, growing budget deficits that would eat away at the lavish welfare state, growing discontent among the well-educated elite who want democracy, and a growing sense of relative deprivation among lower-middle-class Saudis that would make them receptive to fundamentalist appeals. One pessimist mused: “The Saudis have a split personality: one part Islamic Vatican and one part gas station to the world.” Another pessimist wrote off most Saudi princes as “Arab versions of the Beverly Hillbillies.”
By now, we should have acquired the foxlike habit of being wary of the sound of one analogical hand clapping. Foxes listened to both hands but gave more weight to hedgehog experts who emphasized the enormous resources controlled by the king, the loyalty of the military and police, and the adroitness with which the opposition has in the past either been intimidated or co-opted. One fox, responding to the “hillbillies” remark, observed, “Maybe so, but that works to their advantage. Back in the 1970s the shah of Iran lectured King Fahd that he should follow the shah’s example and modernize lest he lose his throne. Fahd responded that he appreciated the shah’s advice but Reza Pahlavi should not forget that he is shah of Iran, not France. Sophistication can be fatal.”
The foxes emerged relatively unscat
hed. They put more weight on the arguments for the perpetuation of the status quo (in the words of one fox, “Betting against governments is usually a bad bet”). But they conceded a risk that the “tiger” that the Saudi elite is feeding (puritanical clerics sympathetic to terrorism) might eventually “chew them to pieces and spit them out.” Hedgehog performance was weighted down by those who prematurely consigned the Saudi royalty to the ash heap of history.27
ANALOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE ROOT CAUSES OF WAR AND PEACE
No discussion of analogical mapping would be complete without the two pivotal geopolitical analogies of the twentieth century: the Munich appeasement episode (the lodestar for deterrence theorists who fear that weakness will tempt ruthless adversaries to press harder) and the six-week crisis preceding World War I (the lodestar for conflict spiral theorists who fear that misunderstanding can lead to wars that no one wanted). Conflict spiral observers had lower thresholds for sending out strong warnings of the dangers of old enmities igniting into new wars (from Cyprus to Golan to Kashmir to the Taiwan Straits and the Korean DMZ) and of the dangers of new nuclear powers using their weapons against old adversaries. One hedgehog spiral theorist foresaw a nuclear war over Kashmir “that would grow out of a guerrilla skirmish that triggers an Indian retaliatory strike that, in turn …, and eventually Islamabad or Delhi becomes convinced that they are in a ‘use them or lose-them’ situation, that a preemptive strike is essential, and suddenly more people are dead than in World War II.” He felt that the temptation to strike first will be strong for a dangerously long time too because neither side would have secure second-strike capabilities any time soon. He saw similarities to “the rigid mobilization schedules that locked the great powers of Europe into the escalatory cycle preceding World War I.”
Expert Political Judgment Page 18
