Predictions are impossible---subjectivity prevents learning from mistakes
Friedman and Zeckhauser 24 (Jeffrey A. Friedman, Associate Professor of Government, Dartmouth College, USA and Richard Zeckhauser, the Frank P. Ramsey Professor of Political Economy, Kennedy School, Harvard University, USA , he holds a BA and a PhD in economics from Harvard University, “Strategy Is Only Partly an Illusion” in Foreign Policy Analysis (2024), orae015 | czx )
Answering these kinds of questions requires assessing foreign policy competence, defined here as a leader’s ability to make foreign policy decisions that promote expected national interests. Foreign policy competence is notoriously challenging to evaluate, because it is generally impossible to know how well decisions maximize expected national interests without making value judgments or assessing subjective probabilities (Jervis 1997; Renshon and Larson 2003; Burchill 2005). As Betts (2000) puts it, the complexity, uncertainty, and subjectivity of foreign policy decision-making raise the troubling prospect that “strategy is an illusion”—that there are no objective criteria for determining which foreign policy choices are more defensible than others.
Subjective evaluations can play valuable roles in structuring foreign policy analysis. For example, even if it is generally impossible to say that foreign policy decisions are objectively “right” or “wrong,” careful reasoning can winnow complex debates down to the core assumptions one must adopt in order to justify high-stakes choices.1 The balance of expert consensus also provides a useful heuristic for judging leaders’ competence, subject to the caveat that widely shared opinions do not always reflect rigorous analysis (Badie 2010; Schafer and Crichlow 2010).2 The subjectivity that surrounds foreign policy analysis nevertheless raises fundamental problems for scholarship and policy. If researchers lack objective methods for separating good choices from bad, then reasonable people will generally be able to disagree about whether foreign policy decisions were mistaken. That ambiguity makes it difficult to draw firm conclusions about how foreign policy can be systematically improved (Betts 2000). Moreover, any time scholars claim that foreign policy decisions were warped by factors such as domestic politics or personal psychology, they are implicitly claiming that competent leaders should have known that a different course of action was superior to the one they actually chose (Glaser 2010, 2–3; Stein 2013, 369). The subjectivity that is inherent to analyzing foreign policy decisions thus impedes making normative, prescriptive, and descriptive claims about the conduct of international politics.