COLUMN: Ukraine/Russia crisis highlights complex nature of foreign affairs
During my junior year of high school, which saw abnormally capricious spring weather, the cheeky hallway wisdom was that weather forecasting was the only industry in which you could be wrong 60 percent of the time and still keep your job.
I’d like to put another industry in that category: predicting foreign affairs.
The parallel between the weather industry and foreign affairs carries quite well. Weather forecasting, which involves understanding complex correlation between countless atmospheric and geological factors in order to predict weather patterns, isn’t an easy job. Neither is predicting foreign affairs, wherein analysts try to understand the way the world works and anticipate how people will act and interact, from the supranational level down to the state and even individual levels.
Both industries are based on some science and lots of history; observing what’s happened in the past under similar circumstances and using past patterns to predict probable future outcomes – whether that prediction deals with the trajectory of a developing hurricane or a brewing war between Russia and Ukraine. In both industries, analysts are susceptible to being flat-out wrong, despite their best predictive efforts.
We tend to harshly blame analysts in both fields when their forecasting of future events is less than stellar, whether that entails predicting when we’ll finally get a good powder day at Beaver or whether Putin’s aggression in Crimea will reignite the Cold War. But in reality, the systems these experts are analyzing are so complex and unpredictable that sometimes predicting future developments is all but impossible.
So how can foreign affairs experts do the best with what they have? I’ll leave weather forecasting to our resident meteorologists. There are three ways that foreign affairs experts – and we as Americans in general – can improve our understanding and prediction of foreign affairs.
First, we need to understand history. Which modern events have precedents in world history? For example, Russia’s military aggression in Crimea since last Friday bears strong resemblance to Russia’s 2008 incursion into Georgia – the country, not the peach-loving state, folks. It also carries more than a few overtones of the Cold War, where aggressions between the United States and the Soviet Union were indirectly played out on third-party land like Korea and Vietnam. Knowing the past doesn’t give us a perfect roadmap for the predicting the future, but it does help us make much more informed guesses.
Second, we need to understand culture. This goes beyond appreciating the artistic nuances of the Bolshoi Ballet. Rather, it means understanding what makes the people of another nation tick – what deep-set norms and values influence the way they think and operate. We have a blinding tendency to assume American values are universal. For example, because we view the Ukrainian people as being under attack by Putin’s Russia, we assume their worst fate would be falling under Russian control. Yet a closer examination reveals a sizable minority of Ukrainians actually identify themselves as ethnic Russians, and a proportion of those might actually favor seceding from Ukraine and being annexed by Russia. There’s no way we can accurately gauge how foreign affairs crises will play out if we’re operating from a completely inaccurate point of view.
Finally, we need to understand what we do not know. That isn’t a paradox: It is absolutely critical that we recognize there are bits of information – ranging from Putin’s inner thoughts to the intensity of secessionist sentiment in eastern Ukraine – that we simply do not, and cannot, know. Frustrating as it is to acknowledge the perpetual incompleteness of our understanding, it is our only protection against falling prey to our own hubris and shortsightedness.
– Briana is a political science major in her last semester at USU. She is an avid road cyclist and a 2013 Truman Scholar. Proudest accomplishment: True Aggie. Reach Briana at b.bowen@aggiemail.usu.edu.