On PI day, March 14, 2015, we are mathematically reminded that the universe is infinite and unknowable and that we, humans, are finite and ignorant. The mystery of a number that never repeats itself, even if calculated to an infinite number of decimal places, evokes Romain Rolland’s oceanic feeling.
This week, while randomly reading science articles on Yahoo News, I was reminded that fluid dynamics is another aspect of reality that humans have not yet been able to solve mathematically. The article stated that it is possible that the behavior of gases and liquids will never be accurately modeled. The human race will never be able to forecast the weather nor anticipate the length of a traffic jam.
These musing on the infinitely unsolvable in mathematics and physics made me think about history and the foreign policy establishment. Is history the foreign policy equivalent of fluid dynamics? Are historical currents so infinitely complex and unfathomable that accurate prediction is an analytic impossibility? Should Churchill’s maxim be re-formulated from “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” to “No finite human mind can contain enough historical knowledge to foresee the infinite possibilities of the future”.
Looking at the events during the past generation, it is clear that the foreign policy community and our national leadership failed to anticipate the consequences of their actions. No one predicted that Charley Wilson’s war would lead to the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and ISIL/ISIS/Daesh. Or that Saddam Hussein would have been better for the Iraqi people in terms of loss of life, economic prosperity and everyday security than an American invasion followed by ‘democracy’. Or that the expansion of NATO and the EU would re-awaken the Russian bear. Or that the economic resurgence of China would lead to chauvinism and imperialism, not integration with the West. Or even that oil prices would collapse this autumn.
Is the explanation for these foreign policy failures that the future like fluid dynamics is unknowable, unpredictable, that there are too many ‘molecular’ actors interacting in both predictable and unpredictable ways for any finite intellect to grasp the outcome.
Frankly, I am on the fence. One side of my brain is telling me that no one can predict the future – no one called the recent drop in oil prices — , while the other side of my brain is blaming democracy, i.e, the way the executive branch is elected. Politicians are not statesmen by training — George H. W. Bush is an exception because he was not really a politician — and therefore can better understand the political consequences of their foreign policy decisions than the historical consequences. On the other hand, Presidents should have access to the best information money can buy and can be advised by the ‘smartest’ foreign policy wonks around like Henry Kissinger and Robert Gates. The real problem may lie in that Presidents prefer to listen to like-minded ideologues, instead of realists.
I say this because a brief study of the history of revolutions would have predicted the general outcome of the Arab Spring, i.e., civil war followed by dictatorship. A short study of the historical conflicts between Sunnis and Shiites as well as Arabs and Kurds would have predicted the disintegration of Iraq into ethnic enclaves lacking a central strongman. A cursory understanding of Imperial Russia’s strategic imperative to have a warm water port in the Black Sea and the structure of the military-industrial complex in the former Soviet Union would have predicted that Russia would not tolerate the Ukraine becoming part of the West.
Even if the future is unpredictable, there is one foreign policy learning that can be gleamed from the events of the past 30 years; American foreign policy is poorly served if it is linked to ideology such as the spread of democracy and human rights. The world will never be safe for democracy because most of the world doesn’t understand nor want democracy. Democracy is a messy, slow, unorganized form of government that is only suited for a culture of secular humanism. Frankly, the secular humanism Bill of Rights is more important to our way of life than the rest of the Constitution which deals with mechanics and structure. When the disorganized mechanics of democracy meets theology, totalitarianism or warlordism, it is too easily hijacked and subverted to endure – no Bill of Rights can protect it.
America’s foreign policy should be guide by a different kind of exceptionalism. America’s form of government is exceptional because it does not exist anywhere else in the world. As Americans, we need to have a strong defense and wise foreign policy so we can protect our exceptionally good luck to be natives of this historical singularity. Better for America to direct its energy once again to new frontiers like inner and outer space where our secular humanist culture can be effortlessly expanded rather than to try to change the unchangeable Old World.