Semi-Competence as a Limited Virtue; False Competence as Absolute Vice Part II: Cybernetic Boogaloo
Daniel Drezner links to yours truly and expands on some of the themes addressed in the post on Obama and Putin.
Stephens’s attempt at an answer gets to the crucial distinction between foreign policy outputs and foreign policy outcomes that Spoiler Alerts has harped on in the past. When hawks talk about taking action in Syria, they tend to focus on their desired outcomes: checking Russian and Iranian power, ousting Assad, defeating the Islamic State and ending the slow-motion humanitarian disaster. These are attractive goals that the current administration is not pursuing. Hawks sound very good when they talk about foreign policy outcomes in Syria.
Indeed, this is a basic problem of analysis. Although it is made worse, perhaps, by the problem that the Obama administration’s behavior might be better described as condition-driven rather than goal-driven. The Obama administration, as Nick Prime and I argued, “determined” (more like fought it out within the cabinet, but that’s another story) a certain set of parameters and bounds to guide its decisionmaking. This may seem semantic, but let’s look at the outcomes Drezner lists.
- Checking Russian and Iranian power.
- Ousting Assad.
- Defeating the Islamic State.
- Ending the slow-moving humanitarian disaster.
Notice that, save the “checking Russian and Iranian power” outcome, all of the other outcomes are discrete in nature. Assad is either ousted or not ousted. The Islamic State is either defeated or not defeated. The slow-moving humanitarian disaster is either ended or not ended. Granted, success conditions for 3–4 are pretty hazy. But as long as we can acknowledge that the outcome at least theoretically could be described as either met or not met, it’s a discrete outcome. As far as I can tell, the best way to simply describe the Obama administration’s desired outcome is in terms of an condition: we will not be drawn into a wider Middle Eastern war in Iraq/Syria. This basic condition could be elaborated a bit:
- They want to maintain this goal while being perceived to have done something.
- They want to pass off the burden to the unlucky dude or dudette that is elected next year.
- They don’t want green eggs and ham, Sam-I-Am
….you feel me.
What makes this complex to evaluate in terms of inputs and outputs is that it isn’t quite something that can be understood in terms of f(policy) → outcome. Rather, the O administration is trying to maintain its desired condition, a continuous process not unlike one that a thermostat performs. If the temperature gets too hot, the thermostat autocorrects back to the desired setting. If it gets too low, the thermostat autocorrects back to the desired setting, and so on. This is also why Obama has found it so difficult to project conventional ideas of leadership and authority; as soon as the “temperature” temporally goes down something brings it back up again. It’s hard for many to see a method in the madness.
Of course, you might also point out that this goal-perception is both vague and inherently circular. It requires the administration to continuously react to a variety of events that might force it to become more involved, sometimes at the price of executing patently absurd actions. Obama’s critics are right in the sense that he has a basic and rather simplistic aim (as opposed to the complexity and nuance of Syria/Ukraine/Iraq, etc), seems more oriented around the reduction of political uncertainty than anything else, and has an at best highly selective view of the alternatives.
And to this, I say, “gee, you just rediscovered a decades-old finding in political science.” Yes, dear reader, in truth I have borrowed the “thermostat” metaphor from an elder statesman. In 1974, John Steinbruner famously developed it as part of his “cybernetic theory of decision.” This is a nice chart of how Steinbruner envisioned the problem, taken from a site summarizing his work.
So, this chart explains in a nutshell why I have often found existing explanations for strategic behavior unconvincing. Many believe that strategy involves being on the left side of the chart. However, in reality, the empirical behavior of many governments is a bit more tilted toward the right side. This is not to say that the best or only way to describe Obama is as a homeostatic loop that maintains his own internal goals and coherence at all costs. I myself agree with the person who made the chart that “cognitive” and “cybernetic” ought not to be regarded as identical paradigms of theorizing about behavior.
But, pedantism aside, Steinbruner captured something very true. Most state behavior does not have a discrete value of “success/not success.” Much state behavior is about maintaining a desired condition rather than strategizing a series of steps to the goal. And finally, much state behavior is far more crude and simplistic than most people would like to imagine. That was true when Steinbruner wrote the book in 1974, and it’s true now.
The biggest problem with Drezner’s “hawks” is not just that they are disinterested in the process of matching actions to their discrete goals. It’s that they lack basic understanding of how the administration perceives its own goals and how that perception is translated into day-to-day behavior. Perhaps, as per the thrust of the rest of Drezner’s argument, trying to maintain a basic condition is the most that the US is capable of. All of the other outcomes make some rather heroic assumptions about the ability of the US to find a sequence of steps to engineer outcomes decisively. Obama has a basic, if selfish, goal. Whatever its flaws it is far less complex and makes much less assumptions than those of his opponents — who are decidedly to the left of the Steinbruner chart.
