YOU'RE ONLY WRONG IF YOU HAVE OPINIONS:

I have a confession to make: I have been wrong quite a lot lately. I believed Vladimir Putin was pursuing a coercive bluff and would not invade Ukraine. I did not think Xi Jinping's China would be so foolish as to crack down on Hong Kong. Donald Trump serving out his full four-year term shocked me as much as his election did. Uber struck me as an impractical fad that would never work out, and, in 2010, when a friend excitedly showed me an iPad he had purchased, I thought he had wasted his money. I also believed the Philadelphia Eagles' 2018 Super Bowl victory was the start of a decades-long football dynasty.

Maybe I am just especially bad at understanding how the world works, an interpretation my daughters might favor. I doubt, however, that this is the whole story. While I am humble enough to admit mistakes, I am immodest enough to think I am smart, thoughtful, and careful in my analyses. And there have been times when I have been right about important questions. I have long pushed back against two popular predictions that have surfaced regularly since I began my academic career: first, that the world is at a nuclear tipping point and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty regime is close to collapse, and second, that the dollar is about to lose its leading position as a reserve currency. The number of nuclear weapons states has stayed the same since I first heard this warning 30 years ago, and the dollar is strong and more central to the international economy than ever. While I am not sure what my batting average is, I confess I am more likely to highlight when I am right than linger on my misjudgments, be it in the classroom, casual conversation, or scholarly footnotes. [...]

My hunch is that, if rigorously examined, even the most impressive policy prognosticator gets many things wrong. This shouldn't surprise us. The social and political world are enormously complicated, context and circumstances are crucial yet ever-changing, and rarely does a new crisis or political event precisely resemble any that came before it. Our models and theories about the world are extremely sensitive to their underlying assumptions, which are more often posited than proven. Ex ante, decision-makers face radical uncertainty about an unknowable future. Most foreign policy problems are what former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called "51/49" challenges, meaning that it was virtually a coin flip as to how they would turn out. Kissinger knows of what he speaks, as Marino Auffant demonstrates in his article, "Oil for Atoms." The secretary of state's efforts to keep the Western alliance unified during the 1970s energy crisis revealed a number of difficult, cross-cutting issues for actors with divergent interests. In a similar vein, Kathleen M. Vogel and Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley highlight the extraordinary complexity and uncertainty surrounding big data and the threat of China hacking biomedical data. Nadiya Kostyuk and Erik Gartzke explain why the widely predicted cyber attacks that many feared Russia would launch against Ukraine have not materialized. Sahr Muhammedally and Dan Mahanty describe the moral and strategic dilemmas behind the effort to avoid civilian casualties during war.

In an ideal world, we would all acknowledge that this business is hard and confess our sins as loudly as our triumphs, less for an accounting or truth squad and more because it is useful to assess the assumptions about the world that go into our predictions (and it is good for our students to understand that we are imperfect, not omniscient). Epistemological modesty is an underrated virtue. And as a community, this would also cause us to be more skeptical of anyone who offers a simple, all-encompassing explanation for how the world works and never admits when they are wrong, a psychological profile more appropriate for cult leaders and authoritarian dictators than famous international relations professors.

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