America needs a Council of International Strategy

Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers Jason Furman speaks about the Congressional Budget Office  report and the Affordable Care Act at the White House in Washington. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Since 1994, with the establishment of a Political Instability Task Force (PITF), scholars in political science have been advising U.S. government agencies, using statistical methods to forecast instability events across the world. This task became more urgent in 2011-12 with the outpouring of revolutionary fervor during the Arab Spring that caught scholars as well as intelligence agents by surprise. From that time, the criteria of an “instability onset” expanded beyond authoritarian breakdown, civil war and genocide to include radical democratization; and the time line for forecasting has been reduced from five-year projections based on structural variables such as infant mortality and governing institutions, to recent demands for six-month predictions based on the use of big data from news sources.
As a sometime consultant to the PITF, I have observed a gap in American foreign policymaking that demands filling. While the statistical models produced by the PITF have garnered praise from high-level policy makers, they seem to play little or no institutionalized role in assessing expected returns from differing policies when an instability onset is forecast or actually occurs. This gap should be filled by a team of strategic analysts capable of using the statistical models of the forecasters and applying that knowledge for purposes of modeling how differing treatments (aka policies) could lower the probability or reduce the impact of an instability event that could threaten U.S. interests.
What about a government agency staffed by academic analysts experienced with quantitative data and also with strategic thinking about foreign policy, modeled after the Council of Economic Advisors, whose job it would be to advise the president on probabilistic effects of differing policy courses? Call it the Council of International Strategy (the CIS). As with the CEA, its recommendations would not be decisive; but it would be an institutionalized forum whose analyses would contribute a more research-based perspective on policy decisions amid or in advance of international crises.
Do we already have this expertise in the USG? I think not. The NSC is typically staffed with people of broad international experience, experts in the different regions of the world, and people of known good judgment. But it has not been led by figures in the political science world comparable to Alan Greenspan, Martin Feldstein and Alan Krueger in the world of academic economics. The State Department has even greater deficiencies. Several years ago when Alan Krueger and I noted the State Department’s errors in its annual terrorism report to Congress, we learned that the department had no statistical unit capable of analyzing trends in any of the copious amounts of data the department produces. Informal discussions at the CIA and the NIC suggest that there aren’t such units with this combination of forecasting and analytic skills there either. Thus, a CIS would provide a crucial piece to help solve the puzzle of effective intervention in international affairs.
For illustrative purposes only (I haven’t fully studied these cases), I suggest here several possibilities where deficiencies in strategic analysis might have been costly. Consider the international negotiations concerning Kosovo that took place in 1999 in Rambouillet, France, and in which Richard Holbrooke served as the principal adviser to Secretary of State Albright. Holbrooke was confident that he could scare his long-time adversary President Slobodan Milosevic into compliance. But would a careful analysis — based on academic studies of compellence — have predicted that the threat of a NATO bombing campaign would have induced compliance? Or would it have concluded that a rush to ethnically cleanse the region was more likely? The latter was sadly the actual outcome. Suppose a CIS study would have shown that the Rambouillet agreement was more likely to lead to genocide. Holbrooke might still have prevailed in his preferred strategy. But he would have had to answer far more compelling questions if the president were armed with a careful assessment of the probability of successful compellent threats under similar conditions.
Now take the recent invasion of eastern Ukraine by ethnic Russian militias, with strategic support from the Russian federal government. Our present policy, though surely there are secret negotiations about which I am not privy, is centered on increasing the extent of sanctions on President Vladimir Putin’s close allies. It may succeed. But I wonder whether an academic study of crisis bargaining would have recommended that very strategy. Bargaining models suggest that an attractive offer to Putin could have defused the crisis. One possibility would have been a commitment coming from German Chancellor Angela Merkel that if Putin pulled all his troops back 100 kilometers from the border with Ukraine for 12 months, Merkel would announce recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea. Merkel would have had some credibility, in part because her predecessor Helmut Kohl (albeit with a very different strategic situation), ignoring international norms, recognized the Croatian secession from Yugoslavia. And Putin might have been, and might still be, tempted by such a deal. (Indeed, something of this sort might be what Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has secretly offered). Putin might well reject this offer outright. After all, Nikita Khrushchev lost his job by making a similar deal in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But if a crisis bargaining model were introduced into policy debates by a group of independent scholars capable of reading statistical models and applying them to cases, one might question whether the present course of action in regard to Ukraine would have won out.
When I showed a draft of this proposal to Monkey Cage contributor James Fearon, a scholar who would be an ideal CIS chairman, he responded (in my interpretation of his more measured reply) that mine was an idea that was headed for the dustbin of history. He believed that a CIS would be quickly captured and dominated by the foreign policy establishment of would-be secretaries of state and politically ambitious scholars of international relations who don’t care much about social science or research.  He followed up by writing that “there is no acceptance that technical or theoretical or empirical expertise confers any serious value on strategic thinking or analysis either in policy circles or even in the academy.”
Though he may be correct, Alan Krueger – a past CEA chairman – reminds me that the example of the CEA reveals similar issues, at least until Arthur Burns in the Eisenhower administration set a precedent for the CEA to be the preserve of well-respected economists. It may be difficult to get similarly well-respected political scientists to give up their academic positions for service in a CIS, as Robert Axelrod – another of my ideal scholars to serve as chairman of a CIS – warned me in a note on an earlier draft of this memo. But there is the possibility, as with the early CEA, of having a full-time chairperson of outstanding academic reputation, with a staff of senior academics on one-year academic leaves. These positions should be incentive compatible with a research career.
Although there are constraints to getting the best strategic minds to vet international policy decisions, there is a case to be made for better analysis of data, trends, and context, to bring in experts who aren’t wholly beholden to agency interests and competition, and career trajectories. Their presence could institutionalize the availability to the president of policy alternatives that combine theory and statistical probabilities in times of international crisis. I therefore hope this posting will induce a recognition that our gigantic policy community can be profitably made even larger, with a Council for International Strategy.
David D. Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins professor of political science at Stanford University.