Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy: A Study in Weberian Activism

Abstract

It has always been true that foreign policy debates tend to proceed on a weak evidentiary base, with clever quips or stirring oratory regularly trumping sound analysis. According to Thucydides, for example, the Athenian assembly that endorsed the Sicilian expedition during the second Peloponnesian War had only the haziest conception of the adversaries’ capabilities. 1 Contemporary politics is distinctive not in the sloganeering quality of political discourse, but in the divergence between the quality of information available to society as a whole and the quality of information used in making decisions. For example, it was clear to any open-minded observer by the time of the Congressional vote in 2002 that implications of collaboration between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda lacked any basis in reliable evidence. By the time the Bush Administration initiated war in 2003, claims about Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons capabilities were also partially debunked and increasingly dubious. Still, the war went forward, and many Americans continued to believe the Bush Administration’s false claims even after the Administration itself had abandoned them. Many political scientists—like many Americans—were deeply dismayed by this situation, and in the fall of 2004 a group of us determined to try to do something about it. We saw two obvious options. One was to address the substantive issue directly, participating in the election campaign as citizens according to the logic that a new presidential administration would at least not repeat the policies of the Bush team. But anybody could do that, and our marginal contribution could only be modest. We decided