The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2015

22 JANUARY FEBRUARY 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL they have gured out it is a great way to get us o topic and away from the syllabus, at least for a while. How wonderful it is to have a fresh crop every year for whom our stories are new and excit- ing, if increasingly out of the misty past. The Academic Approach To understand where the practitioner ts in, we need to understand the world in which we now live. Scholars of politi- cal science and international relations chronically lament that the very nature of their disciplines has disconnected them from, and made them irrelevant to, the practice of policymaking and implementation. ey cite the dearth of academics from those disciplines recruited by presidential administrations compared to their colleagues in economics. On the one hand, there is increased emphasis on quantitative analysis and grand strate- gies and, on the other, the demise of diplomatic history and area studies. ese trends are self-reinforcing as tenured faculty work with, hire and promote the next generation of like-minded scholars. Diplomatic history, notably as practiced by the late Ernst May of Harvard, can illuminate patterns and lessons that can be usefully and pragmatically applied going forward. Regret- tably, diplomatic history has fallen out of favor in the academic world, perhaps in part a re ection of the ahistorical nature of Americans. Few new diplomatic historians are being produced, hired and tenured, as history is increasingly written by journal- ists. Similarly, regional studies departments and contemporary area studies majors have been eclipsed by anthropologists and linguists. L. Carl Brown of Princeton’s Near East Studies Department has voiced a lament similar to Professor May’s. Even qualitative analysts feel embattled. Diplomatic historians and regionalists have been replaced by the theoreticians of international relations, whose warring factions compete for space and their share of footnotes in each other’s works and the works of graduate students. Quantitative analysis seeks to apply the standards and rigors of science to the study of politics, to reduce events to numbers, matrices and problem sets. Quantitative analysis excludes that which cannot be quanti ed. Like Sgt. Friday of “Dragnet,” these theoreticians work assiduously to stick with “just the facts, ma’am.” One top senior’s thesis I read used regression analysis to pre- dict the length of stay of enemy combatants at Guantanamo. e research was impressive, the manipulation of the data masterful, and the quality of analysis superb and worthy of recognition. Yet it took 125 pages of data to conclude that detainees from friendly countries are released sooner than those from less friendly coun- tries, irrespective of threat indices, and that those from Yemen have close to no chance of ever seeing Sanaa again. e study may help inform the debate on release policies, but it was noticeably devoid of policy recommendations itself. Given the ideological polemics that have surrounded the question of Guantanamo, this is commendable and may enhance the cred- ibility of the thesis, but it deferred to others to determine policy options. A tool dependent on access to credible and su cient data, and su cient time for analysis, is of marginal direct utility to the policymaker. Grand strategies seek determinative patterns to events. Sev- eral years ago, John Waterbury, a Princeton University professor, reviewed, with a large measure of humor, the waves of theoreti- cal fashions and fads he had watched sweep over academia dur- ing his career. Each of these approaches had merit, and a solid understanding of each provides useful skills and frameworks in assessing policy options. If storytelling is all trees, these are criti- cal e orts to understand the forest. However, neither mastery of data manipulation nor the current “ism”—particularly when divorced from history or regional context—gets to the day-to-day dynamics of diplomacy, of the decision-making and decision- implementing processes, or the skills necessary to be e ective. ey are of limited utility in framing options for Afghanistan, developing an assistance strategy or prepping the Seventh Floor for a deputies’ meeting. Teaching Across the Divide ere is a lack of clarity whether diplomacy is the process, the tool or means of the process, or discreet events. e term is used interchangeably with foreign policy, international a airs, global Neither mastery of data manipulation nor the current “ism”—particularly when divorced from history or regional context—gets to the day-to-day dynamics of diplomacy.