Matt Yglesias

The Relevance of Theory

David Brooks says:

Some theoreticians may still talk about Platonic concepts like realism and neoconservatism, but the actual foreign policy doctrine of the future will be hammered out in a bottom-up process as the U.S. and its allies use their varied tools to build government capacity in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, the Philippines and beyond.

I think there’s something of a category error here. The development of some kind of consensus about how to do this stuff is noteworthy, and the development of some kind of consensus that it’s important to do is also noteworthy. But this kind of operational doctrine still doesn’t constitute a foreign policy doctrine. It doesn’t, for example, tell us which countries matter or why. There’s a question of how one should go about assisting the government of Colombia in its efforts to suppress rebel groups. But there’s also a question of to what extent it’s an important US policy objective to assist the government of Colombia in these efforts. To some, it’s obvious that if “anti-American” Venezuela is providing assistance to rebels and Colombia is a “pro-American” country, then we therefore need to give Colombia maximal support. I, however, don’t think that’s obvious at all — I think we need to be more skeptical of getting drawn into regional conflicts and of the whole habit of looking at such conflicts through this kind of lens.

As Ross Douthat argues there’s a kind of enduring relevance to these Platonic concepts. It’s a bounded relevance — the real world matters, pragmatism matters — but theory matters, too. To give an example, I think people are going to wind up coming down differently on a lot of different issues based on whether or not they think it’s important for the United States to try to maintain a basically cooperative relationship with other major powers — especially China and Russia — or else whether they agree with Bob Kagan that conflict between the major powers in inevitable. Now this dispute will to some extent cross-cut concepts like “neoconservative” or “realist.” Or, rather, I expect neocons to come down on the side of conflict (because they always love conflict) and to be joined by some folks who would describe themselves as realists and others who describe themselves as liberals, while (hopefully) most liberals and most realists will come down on the side of cooperation. But however people come down on this, they’re going to ground their positions in part in theoretical considerations and it’s going to make a big difference.

Keynes observed that “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” I think much the same is true of foreign policy thinking. Anyone who protests too loudly that they’re merely guided by practical considerations is probably just too in the grips of some theory to even see that he’s been guided by its deep presuppositions.