I am fascinated by expertise and by decoding what is real expertise and what is self-aggrandizement and socially destructive.
I grew up on college campuses, the youngest son of a Religion professor. I love ideas. I love learning. And I love figuring out what is going on.
My dad had two PhDs, including one in Rhetoric, and I learned early on that smart people like my dad played games to elevate their own status. I learned early on that people do not usually say what they mean nor mean what they say. And I learned early on to hate people who abused their authority for their own aggrandizement. That behavior triggers me.
I love the field of International Relations. I’ve read dozens of the leading books in the field. I listen to lectures on YT by IR experts, who tend to be terrific showmen.
Our genes are the results of millions of years of evolution. The process does not favor the wider good, it favors the individual pursuing his own interests. When IR experts push self-aggrandizing themes against American interests, such as we are in a new cold war with China, I’m not surprised.
Playing the great game of intervening all over the world is exciting for the blob (America’s foreign policy establishment), even though it tends to undercut American interests.
If there were no International Relations experts in this country, however, the quality of life for Americans would be undiminished and American power would be undiminished. We might even be better off. The hype that fuels their careers is not usually aligned with American interests.
According to everything I know, America would have been vastly improved without the blob (foreign policy establishment) who’ve done more damage to the country than any other high-status group.
Stephen Turner argues that expertise in fields like international relations differs fundamentally from the hard sciences because it lacks a shared, stable basis of tacit knowledge that produces consistent results. In the hard sciences, experts operate within a closed system of practices and physical laws where predictions are testable and repeatable. Turner suggests that international relations functions more as a practice of persuasion and status than a mastery of a predictive engine.
The track record of international relations expertise remains dubious because the field deals with open systems and human agency. Turner notes that for expertise to be genuine, it must be based on a “tacit” mastery that others can reliably use. When international relations experts fail to predict major geopolitical shifts, they demonstrate that their “expertise” is often just a sophisticated version of public commentary. They do not possess a secret, functional knowledge that allows them to manipulate reality the way a physicist manipulates matter.
Instead of providing objective truths, these experts often serve as what Turner calls “clerical” figures. They provide the intellectual framework that political leaders use to justify their actions. This expertise is “socially constructed” rather than “naturally discovered.” It exists because a particular group of people agrees to recognize it, not because it produces a consistent string of successful outcomes. IR experts are akin to court intellectual in earlier eras. Kings did not expect astrologers or theologians to predict events reliably. They expected them to interpret events in ways that preserved the legitimacy of the regime.
Modern foreign policy experts play a similar role. They produce narratives that maintain confidence in institutions even when the underlying events were unpredictable.
The field performs a legitimating function for democratic governments. Modern states must justify their foreign policy to domestic audiences. International relations experts provide the language that converts strategic interest into moral narrative.
Military action becomes “defending the rules based order.”
Sanctions become “upholding international norms.”
Alliance politics becomes “collective security.”
The expert therefore acts as a translator between raw power and publicly acceptable justification. Their authority rests on their ability to produce language that stabilizes the political coalition supporting the policy.
IR experts operate closer to sensemaking and journalism than to science. Their work is usually commentary. They synthesize information, draw analogies to past conflicts, and offer interpretations of political motives. This can be valuable. But it is not the same thing as possessing a predictive model.
A skilled journalist covering diplomacy may be just as accurate as a professor of international relations because both are working from the same open system of signals, rumors, and incomplete data.
Turner’s point is not that these experts are useless. It is that their authority is misdescribed. They are interpreters of political situations, not engineers of geopolitical outcomes.
The field operates through reputational cascades. Once an expert becomes associated with a prestigious institution or a major publication, other institutions treat that status as a signal of credibility. Invitations accumulate. Panels reproduce the same small circle of voices. Over time the expert’s reputation becomes self sustaining regardless of predictive performance.
This dynamic explains why the same figures often appear across decades of crises despite repeated forecasting failures.
The actors who often possess the most actionable knowledge are practitioners operating within specific institutional contexts:
Military commanders managing operational planning
Intelligence analysts with access to classified data
Regional diplomats with long personal networks
Sanctions lawyers and financial enforcement specialists
These forms of expertise are narrow and tacit. They apply to particular decisions rather than to sweeping theories about how the international system behaves.
The real expertise often lies in institutional knowledge rather than theory. A regional desk officer in the State Department may know far more about the internal factions of a particular government than any professor. An intelligence analyst who spends years reading internal communications may have far more reliable intuitions about elite behavior than a think tank fellow writing op-eds.
This knowledge does not travel well into broad theories about the international system. When such practitioners appear on television they often sound less impressive than theorists because their knowledge is specific and hedged.
The irony is that the public face of international relations expertise tends to be the broadest and least testable version of the field. Television panels and think-tank reports deal with the largest questions where predictive power is weakest.
So the question “How expert is an international relations expert?” may have a simple answer.
They are often experts in the politics of sensemaking, presentation and interpretation rather than experts in forecasting geopolitical reality.
The public often wants interpreters more than forecasters. Geopolitical events are frightening and complex. Audiences want narratives that make the world intelligible. A confident explanation delivered immediately after an event is more psychologically satisfying than a cautious admission of uncertainty. International relations experts succeed because they fill this psychological demand. They convert chaotic events into stories that feel structured and meaningful.
Seen this way, the international relations expert is not primarily a scientist or even a forecaster. The role is closer to that of a professional interpreter of power. Their expertise lies in translating messy geopolitical reality into narratives that political coalitions and audiences can use to orient themselves.
Turner might say that international relations experts claim a level of authority that their results do not justify. They use the language of science to gain the prestige of science, but they cannot provide the reliability. In his view, the “knowledge” in such fields is often just a set of shared prejudices among an elite class. These prejudices allow them to form alliances and exclude dissenting voices, but they do not help them see the future any better than an informed layperson.
In many academic and professional circles, a successful track record of prediction is treated as secondary to the ability to provide sophisticated explanation. Jeffrey Alexander’s work on purification rituals helps explain why this is the case. When an international relations expert fails to predict a crisis, the failure is not seen as a debunking of their expertise but as a moment requiring a ritual of purification. The expert uses a set of “auxiliary hypotheses” to explain the failure away—arguing that the event was a “black swan,” that the data was flawed, or that their advice was not followed closely enough. These rituals serve to cleanse the expert’s reputation and reaffirm the sacred status of the institution they represent.
The incentive structure of the field works against prediction. International relations experts operate in an environment where the cost of being wrong is extremely low and the cost of being outside the consensus is extremely high. A failed prediction rarely ends a career. A violation of elite consensus often does. That produces a rational strategy for experts. They cluster around positions that protect coalition standing rather than positions that maximize accuracy.
Philip Tetlock’s long study of expert forecasting showed this pattern clearly. The experts who appeared most frequently in media and policy circles were not the most accurate forecasters. In fact, the most confident and ideologically coherent experts tended to perform worse. Tetlock’s famous distinction between “hedgehogs” and “foxes” captures this. Hedgehogs tell a grand story that flatters their coalition’s worldview. Foxes hedge and update. Hedgehogs dominate television and think-tank panels because they produce clearer narratives for political coalitions.
International relations expertise is less about predictions than it is about retrospective storytelling. The field excels at constructing narratives that make chaotic events appear inevitable after they occur. Once an event happens, experts rapidly produce frameworks explaining why it was structurally determined. The collapse of the Soviet Union is the classic case. Almost no mainstream experts predicted its timing or rapidity. Afterward, shelves of books appeared explaining why it had been historically inevitable. The explanatory frameworks multiplied without resolving the predictive failure.
The same pattern appeared after the Arab Spring, the fall of Kabul in 2021, and the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022. In each case the expert class quickly reorganized the narrative to explain why the outcome made sense all along.
The field confuses explanation with prediction. International relations scholarship is built around explanatory frameworks such as realism, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism. These theories are very good at producing interpretations of events. They are much weaker at producing time bound forecasts. When a war happens, each framework can explain it after the fact. Realists say the balance of power shifted. Liberals say institutions failed. Constructivists say identities hardened.
Because each theory can interpret almost any outcome, the theories rarely face decisive tests. This makes the field rhetorically productive but empirically weak. A model that explains everything predicts nothing.
The importance of prediction varies depending on whether one views international relations through a scientific or a social lens:
The Scientific vs. Social Divide
The Scientific Ideal: Some scholars argue that if a field cannot predict, it is not a science. They advocate for prediction registration to make theories falsifiable. In this view, accuracy is the only objective metric for expertise.
The Social Reality: In practice, most international relations expertise is valued for its ability to provide a “narrative arc” that helps a coalition coordinate its actions. As long as the expert’s explanations resonate with the interests and values of their alliance, their failure to predict specific events is often forgiven or ignored.
Why Track Records are Discounted
The Polyphony of Predictions: Because there are so many experts making so many different claims, there is almost always someone who got it right. This “polyphony” allows institutions to swap out one expert for another while maintaining the overall prestige of the “expert class.”
The Complexity Clause: Experts often argue that the international system is too complex for precise prediction. They shift the goalposts from “predicting what will happen” to “explaining why it happened after the fact.” This creates a situation where the expert is never truly wrong; they are simply providing a more nuanced interpretation of a chaotic reality.
The prestige hierarchy of the field rewards generality over accuracy. A scholar who writes a narrow but accurate forecast about a specific country rarely becomes famous. The figures who gain status tend to offer sweeping models about the “international system.” The larger the scope, the less testable the claim becomes. Grand theory therefore becomes a rational strategy for status accumulation.
This is why figures who make confident claims about “the coming multipolar order” or “the decline of liberal hegemony” dominate conferences and media panels. The claims are big enough that they cannot easily be falsified.
The Role of Performance
For many, the “track record” that matters is not a history of correct forecasts but a history of successful performance within the halls of power. If an expert can consistently provide the intellectual ammunition an alliance needs to win a domestic political battle or justify a foreign intervention, they have fulfilled their primary social function. Their “expertise” is validated by their influence and their standing within the coalition, not by their ability to see the future.This suggests that for the public and the political elite, the “truth” of an expert’s claim is less important than its “utility” for the alliance. A prediction that fails but supports the group’s goals is often more valuable than a correct prediction that undermines the group’s moral or strategic position.
The job of the expert is partly theatrical. What Turner calls “clerical expertise” is closely tied to performance. The expert must project confidence, mastery of jargon, and access to elite networks. Think-tank fellowships, conference invitations, and media appearances signal credibility more than predictive accuracy. An international relations expert is often evaluated through cues such as:
Institutional affiliation
Media presence
Ability to speak fluently in policy language
Connections to officials and diplomats
These are status signals. They tell audiences that the expert belongs to the governing class. Whether their model of the world works is secondary.
The boundary between IR scholarship and policy advocacy is extremely porous. Many international relations experts move constantly between universities, think tanks, government positions, and media platforms. The incentives of those environments are not the same as those of science. Policy environments reward usefulness. Media environments reward clarity and confidence. Academic environments reward theoretical sophistication. None of these incentives strongly reward accurate forecasting.
An expert therefore succeeds by mastering the rhetoric appropriate to each arena rather than by maintaining a measurable predictive record.
David Pinsof argues that human reasoning functions as a tool for alliance management rather than a disinterested search for truth. When international relations experts offer their assessments, they do not just describe reality. They signal their membership in a specific coalition. Deferring to an expert is an act of alliance. It marks the follower as a member of the “responsible” or “informed” group. This explains why a poor track record rarely results in a loss of status. The value of the expert lies in their ability to provide the “coalition glue” that holds a particular elite circle together.
Pinsof suggests that moral and intellectual claims often serve as “propaganda for our side.” In the context of international relations, experts use complex jargon and historical analogies to create a sense of inevitability around their preferred policies. If an expert at a major think tank or a national newspaper makes a prediction that fails, they rarely face consequences because their primary job is not accuracy. Their job is to manage the rhetoric that justifies the current power structure. They help their allies coordinate their stories so they can act as a unified front against common enemies.
The “expertise” in these fields often functions through what Pinsof calls the “pretense of objectivity.” By framing their partisan or institutional preferences as “expert consensus,” these figures make it socially costly for others to disagree. To challenge the expert is to risk being labeled as uneducated or a threat to the global order. This creates a feedback loop where the status of the expert is protected by the very people who rely on that expert to justify their own authority.
This symmetry between Turner and Pinsof reveals that international relations expertise is a social achievement. Turner identifies that the knowledge is not “hard” because it lacks a functional tacit core. Pinsof identifies the motive behind maintaining the illusion. The expert provides the “purification rituals” that turn raw political interests into high-minded principles. That process is far more valuable to a political alliance than a correct prediction of a future war or a sudden coup.
The “open war” between Pakistan and Afghanistan in early 2026 provides a vivid example of how international relations experts deploy purification rituals to maintain their status. Despite years of predictions that the Taliban would serve as a stabilizing “proxy” for Islamabad or that diplomatic ceasefires brokered by Qatar and Turkey would hold, the current escalation into airstrikes on Kabul and Kandahar has fundamentally contradicted those assessments.
Rather than admitting the predictive failure of their models, the expert class uses Jeffrey Alexander’s logic of purification to “cleanse” their reputations through several distinct narratives.
The “Proxy-Gone-Rogue” Narrative
Experts often frame the 2026 clashes as a sudden, unpredictable betrayal by the Taliban. This ritual preserves the experts’ original claim that supporting the Taliban was a rational, strategic move. By labeling the Taliban as “ungrateful” or “uncontrollable,” the expert suggests that the theory of proxy management was correct, but the subject failed to live up to its rational role. This moves the failure from the expert’s intellect to the actor’s morality.
The “Distraction” Defense
A common auxiliary hypothesis currently circulating in think tanks is that the conflict is merely a “spillover” or “distraction” from the broader U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran. This ritual allows experts to ignore the specific local failures of their South Asia policy by subsuming them into a larger, more “unpredictable” global crisis. It implies that the expert’s regional model would have worked if not for this “external” interference, thus keeping their core expertise “pure.”
The “Incomplete Data” Ritual
Following the airstrikes on Bagram and Jalalabad, many analysts are calling for “more intelligence” and “better monitoring.” Turner would argue this is a classic “clerical” move. By claiming the failure was due to a lack of data, the expert reaffirms that the field is a science—it just needs more funding and better “sensors.” This transforms a failure of understanding into a plea for more resources, reinforcing the institution’s necessity.
Alliance Theory and the “Responsible” Narrative
David Pinsof’s theory helps us see that these rituals are not meant to convince the skeptics, but to coordinate the “informed” alliance. When experts at organizations like Chatham House or CSIS provide these explanations, they are giving political leaders a “safe” script to follow.
Internal Cohesion: The alliance members (politicians, media figures, and academics) use these rituals to signal that they are still part of the “responsible” group that understands the “complexity” of the situation.
Exclusion of Critics: Anyone who points out that the experts have been consistently wrong is labeled a “populist” or “uninformed.” The ritual of purification defines the boundaries of the coalition: to be “in,” you must accept the expert’s explanation for the failure.
The symmetry here is that the expert’s role is not to be right, but to be a chronicler of the alliance’s worldview. The 2026 border war is not treated as “proof” that the experts don’t know what they are talking about; it is treated as a “challenge” that only they are qualified to interpret.
The US-Israeli strikes on Iran that began on February 28, 2026, have triggered a textbook application of purification rituals by the foreign policy establishment. Despite months of experts arguing that “deterrence” was holding or that the “Geneva round” of talks in early February showed “progress” and “guiding principles,” the sudden escalation into a campaign to “annihilate” the Iranian navy and target the Supreme Leader’s compound has left those previous predictions in tatters.
Rather than a moment of institutional reckoning, the media coverage reveals a swift process of narrative realignment to keep the expert class “pure.”
The “Failure of Diplomacy” Scapegoat
Many experts are currently framing the war as a result of “Iranian intransigence” during the February talks. This ritual shifts the failure from the expert’s own inability to read the situation to the “irrationality” of the target. By claiming the US and Israel had “no other choice,” the experts purify their own failed diplomatic models by transforming them into a necessary precursor for war. The “progress” they once touted is now characterized as a “final test” that Iran failed, preserving the expert’s image as a rational, patient actor.
The “Decapitation” Logic
With reports of the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, experts are performing a ritual of “strategic pivots.” Instead of answering for why their previous containment strategies failed, they have moved immediately to planning “leadership transitions.” This focus on the future prevents a post-mortem of the past. Organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and Chatham House are already issuing briefings on “After Khamenei,” which functions as a distraction ritual. It signals that the experts are still in control of the “narrative arc,” even if they missed the timing and scale of the war itself.
Alliance Theory: Coding the “Regime Change” Narrative
David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory helps decode the current media’s “regime change” rhetoric. President Trump’s call for Iranians to “take over your government” is being supported by experts who now argue that “defeat abroad does not translate to weakness at home.”
Coalition Coordination: The expert’s job right now is to provide the “coalition glue” for a widening Sunni Arab alignment against Tehran. By framing the strikes as an “unprecedented campaign” to dismantle “pillars of repression,” the experts help the US-led alliance maintain a high moral ground.
The “Inevitable” Outcome: Experts like those at the Institute for the Study of War emphasize technical priorities like “suppressing air defenses” and “degrading command and control.” This clinical, scientific language is a persuasion tactic. It creates a sense of professional inevitability that masks the “socially constructed” nature of the expertise. It suggests that even if the experts were wrong about the timing of the war, they are still the only ones who understand the mechanics of it.
In Stephen Turner’s view, these IR experts are acting as clerical figures for the new reality. They aren’t predicting; they are justifying. The dubious track record of the “Geneva talks” is simply washed away by the new requirement to be an expert on “regime collapse.” The expertise remains “socially recognized” because the political alliance needs these figures to turn a chaotic, violent escalation into an organized, principled “campaign.”
The podcast Decoding the Gurus provides a useful framework for analyzing the “sensemaking” claims of international relations experts. Chris Kavanagh and Matt Browne use their “Gurometer” to measure how intellectual figures—including those who claim to decode global events—often drift from rigorous analysis into guru-like behavior.
When you apply the podcast’s logic to international relations experts acting as sensemakers, several specific red flags emerge.
The Sensemaker’s Gurometer Analysis
Galaxy-Brainedness: Many IR gurus do not just explain a single conflict. They offer a “Grand Unification Theory” that links the 2026 Iran strikes, the Afghanistan border wars, and domestic social shifts into one cosmic struggle. This is what the podcast calls “elevated vagueness.” By scaling their analysis to the entire globe, they make their claims unfalsifiable.
Pseudoscientific Framing: Experts often use technical-sounding terms like “escalation ladders,” “strategic logic,” or “kinetic symmetry.” In a Decoding the Gurus analysis, this is seen as “science washing”—using the prestige of hard science to hide a lack of empirical evidence. It mirrors the way gurus in other fields use evolutionary psychology or quantum physics to sound authoritative.
The “Persecuted Truth-Teller” Narrative: IR sensemakers who operate outside mainstream institutions often claim they are the only ones telling the “real” story that the “National Security State” or “Globalists” are hiding. This cultivates a “cult-like” loyalty among followers who feel they are part of an enlightened inner circle.
Grievance Mongering: Much of the sensemaking discourse centers on why the “mainstream” experts are wrong. The podcast notes that gurus often spend more time attacking “the establishment” than they do presenting their own verifiable data. This creates a “friend/enemy” distinction that David Pinsof would recognize as coalition management.
IR Experts as “Clerical” Sensemakers
Building on Stephen Turner’s critique, the podcast’s lens suggests that these experts are not researchers but “moral entrepreneurs.” They take raw, chaotic events—like the sudden collapse of a government—and wrap them in a narrative that makes their audience feel secure or morally superior.
The sensemaking process is essentially a narrative coordination tool. The guru provides the script, and the followers use that script to identify their allies and enemies. This is why the track record of the sensemaker matters so little to their audience. The audience is not paying for accurate predictions; they are paying for a sense of belonging to a coalition that “understands what is really going on.”
The Decoding the Gurus analysis reveals that when an IR expert becomes a “sensemaking prophet,” they stop being an analyst and start being a priest for their specific political or social alliance. They use “semantic gliding”—shifting meanings of words like “democracy” or “security”—to ensure that no matter what happens on the ground, their narrative remains intact.
Grok says: The essay’s two flagship illustrations hold up strongly against unfolding events:US-Israeli strikes on Iran.
Purification rituals in play (per Alexander/Turner):Failure-of-diplomacy scapegoat: Pre-strike experts highlighted “Geneva round” progress (early February) as showing “guiding principles” and deterrence holding. Post-escalation, many pivot to “Iranian intransigence” as the trigger, portraying prior talks as a “final test” Iran failed—preserving containment models as sound in principle.
Decapitation/strategic-pivot ritual: CFR, Chatham House, and ISW briefings rapidly shifted to “After Khamenei” succession scenarios, leadership councils, and transition mechanics—distracting from predictive misses on escalation timing/scale.
Inevitable-outcome framing: Clinical language (“suppressing air defenses,” “degrading command and control”) creates professional inevitability, masking the socially constructed shift from deterrence to regime-change advocacy.
Pakistan-Afghanistan “open war” (escalated February 27, 2026): Proxy-gone-rogue narrative: Pre-escalation views often cast Taliban as stabilizing Islamabad proxy or manageable via Qatar/Turkey mediation. Post-strikes, framing emphasizes Taliban “ungratefulness” or “uncontrollability”—failure pinned on actor morality, not proxy-management theory.
Distraction/external-spillover defense: Analysts subsume South Asia failures into larger Iran crisis as “spillover” or distraction, implying regional models would hold absent global interference.
Incomplete-data plea: Calls for “more intelligence” and “better monitoring” transform understanding failure into resource request.
These cases illustrate the essay’s core: predictive failures (missed escalation despite “deterrence” or “proxy” consensus) trigger narrative realignment rather than status loss.
Haass as Living Exhibit A: Richard Haass’s real-time commentary (Substack February 20: “War of Choice, Board of Peace”; February 28: “A Questionable War of Choice” with baker’s dozen concerns; March 1 Project Syndicate: “Trump’s Risky War of Choice in Iran”; March 2: “Undisciplined”) perfectly embodies the clerical/translator role:Pre-strike hedging: Emphasized “war of choice” risks, escalation ladders, lack of congressional oversight, and parallels to Iraq/Libya disasters.
Post-strike pivot: Labels it “preventive, not preemptive,” questions means-ends match and endgame, stresses Iran “gets a vote” (two to end a war), and critiques “undisciplined” articulation (mixed regime-change vs. narrower aims).
Coalition glue: Provides respectable language for restraint advocates (“process,” “consultation,” “legitimacy”) while preserving escape hatches—if chaos ensues, blame “impulsive” deviation; if limited success, credit institutional lessons.
Hedgehogs (grand narratives like “multipolar decline” or “rules-based order erosion”) dominate panels despite weaker accuracy; foxes (hedged, probabilistic) are marginalized. 2026 events reward confident post-hoc explainers over cautious forecasters.
Galaxy-brained unification (linking Iran, Afghanistan-Pakistan, domestic shifts into cosmic struggles); science-washing (“escalation dominance,” “kinetic symmetry”); persecuted truth-teller (outsider sensemakers vs. “National Security State”); grievance mongering (attacking “establishment” failures).
That IR authority rests on performance, institutional signals, and coalition utility over predictive track record—is reinforced by 2026’s rapid narrative shifts. Expertise here is theatrical and social: projecting confidence, mastering jargon, and translating power into moralized stories. Failures trigger purification (auxiliary hypotheses: black swans, intransigence, data gaps) because the field’s value lies in stabilizing coalitions, not engineering outcomes.
In Pinsof terms, deferring to these experts is alliance signaling—joining the “responsible” group. Predictive success is secondary to providing rhetorical ammunition that flatters coalition worldviews and excludes rivals. The irony: the most visible “experts” (think-tank fellows, cable panels) offer the broadest, least testable claims, while narrow, tacit practitioners (regional desk officers, intel analysts) hold actionable knowledge but lack status signals.
The piece nails IR as sensemaking priesthood more than predictive science. The current crises serve as live laboratories for its arguments—failures don’t debunk; they prompt ritual realignment to protect prestige and coalition cohesion.
LF: The removal of the Council on Foreign Relations, international relations think tanks, and specialized IR experts would fundamentally alter the American political landscape. This change shifts the logic of governance from a managed, expert-led symmetry to a more volatile and populist form of decision-making.
Without the Council on Foreign Relations, the informal network that bridges the gap between the private sector and the State Department disappears. This organization provides a social and intellectual venue for the American establishment to form a consensus on the national interest. If this venue does not exist, the United States likely experiences more internal friction between its economic elites and its political leaders. Policy becomes less of a long-term project and more of a reaction to immediate domestic pressures.
The absence of think tanks like the Brookings Institution or the Heritage Foundation eliminates the primary source of pre-packaged policy. These institutions act as a farm system for political appointees. They allow a new administration to hit the ground running with a ready-made staff and a list of white papers. Without them, presidents would have to rely on the permanent bureaucracy or personal loyalists who may lack technical knowledge. This shift creates a government that is more amateurish but perhaps more responsive to the voters who elected it.
Foreign policy would transition from a specialized craft to a subset of domestic politics. Today, IR specialists use a specific vocabulary to justify alliances and interventions. They argue that maintaining the global order is a technical necessity. Without these specialists, the government would have to justify its actions in plain language. It would likely lead to a more isolationist or nationalist posture. The public generally views distant alliances with skepticism, and without an expert class to explain the necessity of a “liberal international order,” that skepticism would probably dictate the law of the land.
The United States might still be a superpower because of its geography and economy, but it would be a less predictable one. Expert networks provide a certain amount of stability and continuity across different presidencies. If you remove those networks, the American state behaves more like a traditional republic and less like a global manager. This lack of professional management might lead to fewer foreign entanglements, but it also increases the risk of sudden, catastrophic mistakes in a crisis.
The United States would still have a foreign policy establishment. Power centers always generate advisers. But it would look very different in structure, tone, and coordination.
The biggest change would be less elite coordination.
Institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Center for Strategic and International Studies function as meeting grounds where finance, media, academia, and government align their views. Without those hubs, the tribes of the elite would coordinate far less.
You would see more fragmented foreign policy.
Wall Street would push one strategy.
The Pentagon another.
Energy companies another.
Congressional factions another.
Today those conflicts are often smoothed over before they reach the public. Without the think tank ecosystem, the fights would be much more visible and chaotic.
Foreign policy would likely become more political and less technocratic.
Think tanks and IR specialists provide a language that frames policy choices as technical questions rather than political struggles. Words like “deterrence,” “rules based order,” “strategic stability,” and “escalation management” soften the fact that these decisions are often raw power politics.
Without that layer of expertise, presidents and legislators would argue about foreign policy much more directly in terms of national interest, prestige, revenge, trade advantage, or domestic politics.
In other words, diplomacy would sound more like nineteenth century statecraft and less like a policy seminar.
The United States would probably have shorter strategic horizons.
Foreign policy specialists spend their careers studying other countries, regions, and long term trends. Even when they are wrong, they extend the planning window beyond the next election cycle.
Without them, policy would be driven much more heavily by politicians, military commanders, and business interests reacting to immediate events.
You would likely see more abrupt swings.
Engage a country this year.
Sanction it the next.
Ignore a region for a decade and then intervene suddenly.
The recruitment pipeline into government would look very different.
Today thousands of officials rotate through think tanks, universities, and fellowships before entering government. That process socializes them into a shared worldview.
Without those institutions, the main pipelines would probably be:
career military officers
business executives
career diplomats
political operatives
That would produce a governing class with less shared intellectual framework and more competing institutional cultures.
Media coverage of foreign policy would change.
Journalists rely heavily on think tank experts for interpretation. If those experts did not exist, news coverage would rely more on politicians, intelligence leaks, or military briefings.
Public debate would likely be more blunt and partisan because there would be fewer “neutral sounding” interpreters explaining events.
International allies would find the United States harder to read.
Institutions like Foreign Affairs and think tank reports signal where elite opinion is moving. Foreign governments monitor them closely because they reveal possible future policy shifts.
Without those signals, outsiders would rely almost entirely on presidential speeches or congressional votes. American intentions would appear more erratic.
The United States would probably still pursue many of the same interests.
Great powers protect trade routes, alliances, and strategic advantages regardless of intellectual frameworks. Those incentives do not disappear.
What would disappear is the coordinating language that makes those interests appear coherent, stable, and morally justified.
Without the IR think tank ecosystem the United States would likely look less like a carefully managed “rules based order” project and more like a normal great power improvising its strategy in public.
Most of what determines American quality of life comes from domestic factors. Economic productivity. Technology. Energy supply. Internal political stability. Geography. The United States has two oceans, friendly neighbors, and vast resources. Those structural advantages do most of the work.
Whether an analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations writes a report about deterrence in the Persian Gulf or someone at the Brookings Institution writes about NATO expansion has almost no visible effect on an American family’s day to day life.
In terms of raw national power, the United States would also still be extremely strong.
Power rests mostly on things like
industrial capacity
technological leadership
military capability
demographics
geography
Those fundamentals would exist with or without a network of IR specialists.
The U.S. became the world’s dominant power before the modern think tank ecosystem really existed. During World War II the country was largely guided by politicians, military leaders, and a small number of academics rather than a large permanent policy industry.
Where the difference would show up is elite coordination and narrative coherence, not basic power.
Without the think tank and IR specialist ecosystem you would likely see
more visible fights between different elite factions
less shared language about “the international order”
more abrupt swings in policy between administrations
less ideological packaging of foreign policy decisions
But those changes do not necessarily weaken a country.
Historically many powerful states operated without large intellectual policy industries. Nineteenth century Britain, Bismarck’s Germany, and early American diplomacy were run by small circles of politicians and diplomats rather than large research networks.
There is even a plausible argument that the think tank ecosystem sometimes adds friction rather than strength.
Large expert communities can produce
groupthink
slow consensus building
status incentives to defend existing policies
reluctance to admit failure
Critics of the Iraq War debate often make this argument about the foreign policy establishment clustered around places like the American Enterprise Institute or Center for Strategic and International Studies.
From an Alliance Theory perspective, these institutions mainly help elite coalitions coordinate and legitimize decisions, not determine whether the United States is powerful.
So the real effect of removing them would likely be cultural rather than material.
American foreign policy would look rougher, more openly political, and less wrapped in expert language.
But the underlying power of the country would probably remain largely the same.
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith observes that people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices. Smith argues that while the law cannot hinder such gatherings, it should do nothing to facilitate them. He views professional associations not as benign social clubs but as mechanisms for price-fixing and the creation of monopolies that harm the consumer.
This logic applies to the foreign policy establishment, often called the blob, through the shared incentives of its members. Prestige and power in this circle come from active engagement in global affairs. If a specialist argues for restraint or non-interference, that specialist becomes less relevant to the machinery of government. There is no career advancement in suggesting that a crisis does not require American intervention. The incentive structure favors the expansion of influence, much like Smith’s tradesmen favor the expansion of their profit margins.
The blob operates as a professional guild for international relations. Just as Smith’s 18th-century tradesmen sought to limit competition and control the market, the modern foreign policy elite controls the range of acceptable debate. They share a common vocabulary and a set of assumptions about the necessity of American leadership. This consensus creates a barrier to entry for dissenting views. To remain a member in good standing, one must generally support the underlying logic of the alliance system and the global military footprint.
Perverse incentives arise when the personal interests of the professionals diverge from the interests of the public. For an IR specialist, a new conflict provides an opportunity for media appearances, consulting contracts, and high-level appointments. For the public, that same conflict involves the risk of life and the expenditure of tax dollars. That the professionals benefit from the very problems they are tasked to solve creates a permanent bias toward action.
The result is a self-perpetuating cycle of intervention. Each involvement creates new complexities that require further expertise to manage. This symmetry ensures that the demand for the services of the blob never diminishes. By framing every regional dispute as a threat to the global order, the establishment justifies its own existence and expansion. This behavior mirrors exactly what Smith feared: a group of professionals using their collective influence to prioritize their guild’s prosperity over the general welfare.
The lead-up to the Vietnam War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq provide clear examples of how this professional guild logic functions in practice. In both instances, the “blob” operated not as a neutral arbiter of facts, but as a collective interest group that viewed military intervention as the primary currency of status and relevance.
During the early 1960s, the “Best and Brightest” in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations viewed the world through the lens of containment and the domino theory. For an ambitious career official, there was no prestige in suggesting that South Vietnam was peripheral to American interests. Power belonged to those who could design sophisticated counter-insurgency programs or manage the “symmetry” of escalation. That this intervention eventually cost 58,000 American lives and fractured the domestic social fabric did not prevent the architects of the policy from maintaining their status in elite think tanks for decades afterward.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq followed a similar professional trajectory. The consensus within the D.C. establishment was so strong that it functioned as a purification ritual; anyone who questioned the existence of weapons of mass destruction or the ease of “nation-building” was cast out of the inner circle. The IR specialists and think tank fellows did not just provide information; they provided a moral and intellectual framework that made the war seem inevitable. The perverse incentive here was the promise of a “New Middle East,” a project so vast that it guaranteed decades of funding, high-level government roles, and media prominence for those who designed it.
In both cases, the cost of failure was externalized to the public and the military, while the professional rewards for the planners remained internal to the guild. When a policy fails, the blob rarely concludes that its fundamental assumptions were wrong. Instead, it argues that the failure resulted from a lack of resources, poor implementation, or a lack of “will.” This allows the guild to maintain its monopoly on expertise. They present the next crisis as a new problem that only they have the specialized knowledge to solve.
The persistent nature of these interventions suggests that the “conspiracy” Adam Smith described is not necessarily a secret plot, but a shared professional bias. The guild members believe their own rhetoric because their careers depend on it. That a stable, non-interventionist foreign policy would put most of these specialists out of work is a powerful, if often unspoken, driver of the “liberal international order.”
Carl Schmitt argues that the essence of politics is the distinction between friend and enemy. This distinction does not rely on moral, aesthetic, or economic criteria. Instead, it identifies a group that poses a concrete threat to one’s own way of life. For the foreign policy establishment, this logic is a necessity. To maintain internal cohesion and justify its massive infrastructure, the blob requires a clearly defined enemy.
A state of peace or a world without existential threats would render the specialized knowledge of the IR expert obsolete. If there is no enemy, there is no need for grand strategy, alliance shifts, or the constant management of global “logic.” Therefore, the professional guild has a vested interest in the perpetual identification of a “global adversary.” This process functions as a purification ritual for the establishment. By defining a foreign power as a unique evil—whether it was the Soviet Union, “rogue states,” or modern competitors—the blob reaffirms its own role as the protector of civilization.
Schmitt also discusses the “state of exception,” where the normal legal order is suspended to deal with a crisis. The blob thrives in this state. By framing international events as constant emergencies, the establishment can bypass traditional democratic oversight. They argue that the complexity of the “enemy” is so great that only the credentialed elite can understand and manage it. This allows the guild to operate in a realm where they are not accountable to the public but only to their peers within the think tank circuit.
The perverse incentives Adam Smith identified merge with Schmitt’s political theory here. The “friend/enemy” distinction creates a binary that punishes dissent. If you question the necessity of a specific intervention, you are not merely offering a different policy; you are coded as someone who does not understand the threat or, worse, someone who is “soft” on the enemy. This social pressure ensures that the guild remains a unified front.
The result is a self-sustaining loop. The blob identifies an enemy, which justifies its power and prestige. It then manages the conflict with that enemy in a way that ensures the “state of exception” continues indefinitely. Without a clear enemy, the entire structure of the Council on Foreign Relations and the surrounding think tanks would lose its reason for being. This is why, as soon as one threat fades, the establishment quickly works to define the next one.
Jeffrey Alexander’s work on cultural pragmatics suggests that when a society or an elite group experiences a massive failure, it undergoes a process of purification to restore its standing. For the foreign policy establishment, these purification rituals allow it to maintain authority despite a track record of catastrophic outcomes. When a policy like the Iraq War or the withdrawal from Afghanistan turns into a public crisis, the blob does not collapse. Instead, it engages in civil repair. It identifies specific individuals or technical errors to sacrifice, thereby preserving the sanctity of the institution itself.
By framing failure as a problem of poor implementation or a lack of specific resources, the establishment moves the failure from the category of the “sacred” mission to the “profane” realm of bureaucracy. They argue that the idea was right, but the execution was flawed. This linguistic shift allows the same experts to remain in power. They present themselves as the only ones with the experience to learn from the mistake. In Alexander’s terms, they re-stitch the “civil fabric” by promising that they now possess the “tacit knowledge” required to avoid the last disaster, even as they plan the next one.
The comparison to the Shakespearean line about lawyers is apt because it highlights the frustration with a class that seems to profit from the complexity and conflict it creates. In Henry VI, Part 2, the character suggesting that the first step is to kill all the lawyers is not necessarily a villain but a rebel who views the legal class as a barrier to natural justice and a source of parasitic social logic. The blob functions similarly. It uses a specialized language and a maze of institutional procedures to insulate itself from the consequences of its actions.
That the public bears the cost while the experts maintain their prestige creates a deep sense of social alienation. The blob remains a chronicler of its own history, writing the post-mortems that inevitably conclude that more expertise, more funding, and more intervention are the only solutions. This self-correction is a closed loop. It prevents any outside force from imposing accountability, as any critic is dismissed for lacking the necessary “credentials” to understand the interplay of global forces.
This dynamic ensures that the United States remains trapped in a specific global posture. The “state of exception” becomes a permanent condition because the people tasked with ending it are the very ones who benefit from its continuation. The logic of the guild is not to solve the problem, but to manage it in a way that ensures the guild’s longevity.
Stephen Turner argues that the authority of the expert is fundamentally at odds with the logic of democracy. In a republic, authority rests on the consent of the governed and the transparency of reasons. Expertise, however, relies on tacit knowledge—a type of specialized understanding that the expert claims cannot be fully explained or shared with the uninitiated. When the blob claims that foreign policy is too complex for the average citizen to grasp, they are using expertise to bypass democratic accountability.
The problem with this expert rule is that it creates a form of “private knowledge” that governs public life. Turner suggests that if the reasons for a war or an alliance cannot be translated into the common language of the public, then they are not truly “public” reasons. Instead, they are the preferences of a narrow class disguised as technical necessities. This allows the foreign policy elite to operate as a state within a state. They maintain a symmetry of power where the experts decide the direction of the country, and the public is merely expected to provide the taxes and the soldiers to carry it out.
That these experts are so often wrong does not seem to diminish their authority in the eyes of the state. This is because the state itself has become dependent on the “logic” of expertise to manage a global empire. Turner points out that the modern state needs the expert to provide a veneer of scientific rationality to what are essentially political and moral choices. By framing the expansion of the American footprint as a “technical requirement” for global stability, the blob shields politicians from the political consequences of their decisions.
The result is a thinning of the democratic process. When the most important questions of national survival—war, peace, and trade—are removed from the sphere of public debate and handed to a guild of specialists, the citizen is reduced to a spectator. The “friend/enemy” distinction is no longer a choice made by the people, but a professional determination made in a think tank. This shift undermines the very foundation of the republic, as it replaces the wisdom of the many with the self-serving consensus of the few.
The blob maintains its grip by ensuring that the “state of exception” never ends. Every year brings a new crisis that supposedly requires their unique skills. This permanent emergency justifies the ongoing suspension of normal democratic logic. By the time one intervention fails, the experts have already used their prestige to define the next necessary mission, ensuring that the public never has a moment of peace long enough to question the utility of the experts themselves.
Charles Taylor describes the buffered identity as a modern way of being where the individual feels a sense of distance from the world. This self is no longer porous or vulnerable to the spirits, communal pressures, or physical realities that once defined human life. For the elite members of the blob, this buffered state is extreme. They live in a social and intellectual vacuum where the consequences of their theories—war, economic collapse, or social displacement—are things that happen to other people in distant places.
This insulation creates a lack of empathy that is not necessarily malicious but is structurally inevitable. When a think tank fellow in Washington D.C. advocates for a “surge” in a foreign conflict, they do so from a position of total security. Their career, their social standing, and their physical safety are never at risk. The “logic” of the intervention is an intellectual exercise, a move in a high-stakes game of prestige. They are buffered from the blood and the grief that their decisions produce. This distance allows them to treat human lives as variables in a geopolitical equation.
The symmetry of this lifestyle ensures that the expert class only interacts with other experts who share the same buffered identity. They attend the same conferences, live in the same neighborhoods, and send their children to the same schools. This creates a powerful social reinforcement of their world-view. Within this circle, the “porous” reality of the suffering their policies cause is filtered out. They view the world through white papers and data points, which are much easier to manage than the messy, tragic reality of actual human history.
This lack of skin in the game is exactly what allows the guild to persist. In a more traditional society, an leader whose decisions led to disaster would face immediate and personal consequences. In the modern expert-led state, failure is just another data point to be analyzed in the next seminar. The buffered identity allows the professional to maintain a sense of moral superiority even when their actions have caused immense harm. They believe they acted on the “best available information,” and in the world of the buffered self, the quality of the process matters more than the outcome of the act.
The gap between the buffered elite and the porous public, who actually feel the impact of these policies, is a primary source of modern political tension. The public sees the harm, while the experts see a logic that simply needs more time or more resources to work. This fundamental disconnect makes it nearly impossible for the blob to ever truly “learn” from its mistakes. To learn would require a level of vulnerability that the buffered identity is designed to prevent.
Jeffrey Alexander’s concept of the purification ritual explains how the elite class remains in power by symbolically separating themselves from a failed past. In both Washington D.C. and Los Angeles, these rituals occur during transitions of power or in response to a crisis. The goal is to convince the public that the “polluted” elements of the previous era have been removed and that the current administration represents a “purified” version of the institution.
In Washington, a new presidential administration often uses its first 100 days as a purification ritual. They frame the previous administration’s foreign policy as a series of moral or technical failures. By appointing new specialists who use the same institutional vocabulary but promise different outcomes, the “blob” resets its clock. The failure of a specific war or alliance is blamed on the “old thinking” of the previous team. This allows the permanent establishment to argue that the problem was the people, not the system. The ritual of Congressional hearings and high-profile resignations serves to “wash away” the failure, allowing the same think tanks and experts to begin the next project with a clean slate.
In Los Angeles, purification rituals often center on local crises like homelessness or corruption. When Mayor Karen Bass delivers a State of the City address, she often frames her administration as a break from a past defined by “bureaucratic barriers” and “rigid thinking.” By identifying the previous era as a time of failure, she positions her own initiatives, like “Inside Safe,” as a purifying force. The ritual of clearing an encampment or consolidating city departments serves as a visible sign to the public that the city is being “cleansed” of its old inefficiencies. This process allows the political class to maintain its authority by promising that this time, the “logic” of the city’s management is different.
These rituals are essential for maintaining the “buffered identity” of the elite. If they did not have a way to symbolically distance themselves from failure, they would be held personally responsible for the harm their policies cause. Purification rituals provide a mechanism for the elite to acknowledge a disaster without admitting that their fundamental worldview is flawed. They sacrifice the “profane” implementation while keeping the “sacred” authority of their professional class intact. This is why, despite decades of policy failures, the same institutions continue to dominate the political life of both the city and the nation.
In Los Angeles, the barrier between the planning elite and the resident is most visible when the professional class imposes a specific social logic on a neighborhood that contradicts the lived experience of the people there. Stephen Turner’s critique of expert rule applies here perfectly. The city’s planners and the “blob” of local NGOs use a specialized vocabulary of harm reduction and housing-first models to justify policy. When this logic dictates that certain behaviors—like the public sexual activity or encampments you mentioned—must be permitted to avoid “marginalizing” a population, the experts are essentially declaring a state of exception.
The elite who design these policies often possess the buffered identity Charles Taylor describes. They view the residential street not as a sanctuary for families, but as a laboratory for social theory. Because they do not live on the streets where these activities occur, they are insulated from the physical and moral disorder that results. For the resident, the street is porous; the disorder invades their home, their sense of safety, and their children’s environment. For the planner, the disorder is a data point or a necessary stage in a broader “purification” of the city’s social contract.
This creates a perverse incentive structure similar to the one Adam Smith observed. The professionals in the homelessness and urban planning industries gain prestige and funding by managing the crisis, not by solving it. If a neighborhood becomes safe and orderly, the need for the expert’s specialized intervention diminishes. Therefore, the “conspiracy” is a shared professional interest in maintaining the complexity of the problem. They argue that the situation is too nuanced for simple law enforcement, which allows them to retain control over the policy and the budget.
When the elite decide that police interference is unnecessary in the face of public indecency, they are signaling loyalty to their own guild’s ideological badges rather than to the public interest. Using David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory, we see that allowing such behavior is a way for the elite to distinguish themselves from the “unsophisticated” masses who demand order. It is a status signal. To complain about an orgy in the bushes is, in the eyes of the buffered elite, a sign that you do not understand the complex “symmetry” of modern urban life.
The result is a breakdown of the republic at the local level. The experts have replaced the common sense of the community with a private, technical language that justifies the unjustifiable. This ensures that the experts remain relevant and employed, while the public is left to deal with the consequences of a world where the law is applied based on the latest social theory rather than the protection of the citizenry.
Adam Smith’s line comes from The Wealth of Nations (1776):
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.”
Smith was talking about merchants and guilds coordinating to raise prices or block competition. The deeper point was about shared incentives. When people in the same profession gather repeatedly, they begin to develop common interests that may diverge from the broader public.
That logic maps pretty well onto what critics call the foreign policy “blob.”
The “blob” label was popularized by Ben Rhodes to describe the Washington network of think tanks, journalists, former officials, and policy specialists who circulate through institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings Institution, and Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Smith’s dynamic shows up in several ways.
First, status incentives.
Inside the foreign policy world, prestige tends to attach to large events. Wars, crises, negotiations, sanctions regimes, alliance summits. Those are the moments when experts are invited on television, write major reports, and advise governments.
Quiet restraint does not generate the same prestige.
So the professional environment subtly rewards people who are involved in action. Intervention, strategy design, crisis management. The incentives are rarely cynical or conscious. But they push the professional culture toward activism rather than restraint.
Second, career incentives.
Foreign policy professionals often move between government, think tanks, consulting firms, and media. Their expertise is tied to the importance of the international system.
If global politics becomes quieter or less interventionist, their professional relevance shrinks. When the United States is deeply engaged abroad, their expertise becomes more valuable.
Again, this does not require conspiracy. It emerges from structural incentives.
Third, shared worldview formation.
People who work in the same institutions, attend the same conferences, read the same journals like Foreign Affairs, and circulate through the same fellowships gradually converge on similar assumptions.
Examples include beliefs that
American leadership is necessary for global stability
withdrawal creates dangerous power vacuums
alliances must be actively maintained
credibility must be defended
These assumptions may sometimes be correct. But the professional environment makes them feel like obvious common sense rather than contestable ideas.
Fourth, risk distribution.
Foreign policy decisions often involve asymmetric reputational risks.
If an expert supports a hawkish policy that fails, the failure can be blamed on implementation or unforeseen events.
If an expert argues against intervention and a crisis later worsens, the blame can be personal and direct. They may be accused of weakness or naivety.
Because the reputational penalties are uneven, the professional equilibrium can drift toward caution about restraint.
This dynamic showed up in debates before the Iraq War, when many policy experts supported intervention partly out of fear of being blamed for underestimating threats.
Fifth, social belonging.
Washington foreign policy circles are small. Reputation matters enormously. Being seen as responsible, serious, and cooperative affects invitations, publications, and appointments.
People who challenge the consensus too sharply can be socially marginalized.
That does not mean dissent is impossible. But the cost is higher.
How far does Smith’s critique apply?
Partially.
The foreign policy establishment is not a literal conspiracy. Most participants sincerely believe their recommendations serve national interests.
But Smith’s insight about professional guilds developing interests that diverge from the public is clearly relevant.
The incentives of the foreign policy community reward engagement, expertise, and activism in international affairs.
Ordinary citizens often care more about domestic prosperity, stability, and avoiding costly conflicts.
When those priorities diverge, the “blob” can end up pushing policies that make sense inside its professional ecosystem but feel unnecessary or risky to the broader public.
I can’t think of any group that has done as much damage to America as the blob.
First, foreign policy communities in Washington are small and status driven. People rotate through places like the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings Institution, American Enterprise Institute, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Inside that ecosystem, the professional rewards often attach to
major crises
wars
grand strategies
high stakes diplomacy
Those moments produce TV appearances, book deals, advisory roles, and government appointments. Quiet restraint or saying “do nothing” rarely creates the same prestige.
So the structural incentive can tilt toward activism abroad. Not because people consciously want conflict, but because the career payoff environment rewards engagement with big geopolitical events.
Second, the record of some major policy decisions does fuel the criticism.
The most obvious case is the Iraq War. Many figures in the Washington policy world supported the invasion. When it turned into a long and costly war, the credibility of the foreign policy establishment took a major hit.
The same criticism appears in debates over
Afghanistan nation building after the September 11 attacks
the intervention in Libyan Civil War
long running military commitments in the Middle East
These episodes created the perception that the professional foreign policy class underestimated costs and overestimated its ability to shape outcomes.
Third, however, the “blob caused the damage” story can oversimplify how U.S. foreign policy actually works.
Think tanks and experts rarely make final decisions. Presidents, Congress, and political coalitions do.
For example
President George W. Bush decided on the Iraq invasion
President Barack Obama approved the Libya intervention
Congress repeatedly authorized and funded long wars
Experts helped justify or critique those choices, but elected leaders ultimately made them.
Fourth, foreign policy establishments also sometimes push restraint rather than intervention.
After the Iraq War experience, many analysts in places like Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and other institutions argued against large ground wars and promoted more limited strategies.
The establishment is not perfectly unified. It contains hawks, restrainers, internationalists, and realists.
Finally, the United States’ global role itself generates pressure for overseas involvement.
Large powers with worldwide alliances and military commitments face constant crises. Even without a think tank ecosystem, the United States would still confront decisions about
protecting trade routes
deterring rivals
defending allies
responding to attacks
So the deeper issue is not just the “blob.” It is the combination of
great power responsibilities
domestic political incentives
and professional status systems in Washington
Those forces together can create a bias toward activism abroad, even when the long term results are uncertain.
The frustration many Americans feel toward the foreign policy establishment reflects a real tension. The professional incentives of policy elites do not always line up with the public’s preference for stability, lower costs, and fewer foreign entanglements.
Many IR experts such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are great performers and riveting speakers unlike most academics who sound boring. Who are the great showmen in IR and what does this say about the field?
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt represent a specific breed of IR scholar: the academic-as-public-intellectual who uses a clear, combative, and often theatrical style to bridge the gap between ivory tower theory and real-world policy. While many academics bury their arguments in jargon or complex mathematical models, these showmen lean into the drama of great power competition.
The Great Showmen of International Relations
Beyond Mearsheimer and Walt, several other figures stand out for their ability to command an audience and turn abstract concepts into riveting performances.
Henry Kissinger: Even in his later years, Kissinger remained the ultimate showman of the “Old World” style. He used his deep, gravelly voice and deliberate pacing to create an aura of profound historical weight. His performance was one of gravitas and secret knowledge, making his audience feel they were privy to the inner sanctums of power.
Graham Allison: Known for his work on the Thucydides Trap, Allison is a master of the “high-stakes narrative.” He frame’s contemporary geopolitical tensions through the lens of ancient Greek tragedy, using compelling visual metaphors and a sense of impending doom to engage both policymakers and the public.
Ian Bremmer: As a “geopolitical entertainer,” Bremmer represents the modern, media-savvy evolution of the IR showman. He uses punchy, accessible language and a rapid-fire delivery that fits the pace of cable news and social media. His performance is less about the “tragedy” of realism and more about the “interplay” of global risks.
Robert Kaplan: While more of a journalist-scholar, Kaplan uses travelogues and vivid, often dark, descriptions of geography and “anarchy” to create a cinematic version of international relations. His lectures often feel like dispatches from a crumbling frontier, appealing to the visceral fears of his audience.
What Showmanship Says About the Field
The presence and success of these showmen reveal several things about the logic and symmetry of International Relations as a discipline.
The Power of Simple Narratives: Realism, the school most associated with Mearsheimer and Walt, lends itself to showmanship because it offers a clear, tragic, and easily digestible worldview. It is much easier to give a riveting speech about “states as billiard balls” or “the tragedy of great power politics” than it is to explain the nuances of constructivist identity formation or complex interdependence.
The Market for Clarity: The popularity of these speakers highlights a deep-seated desire among the public and policymakers for clarity in an increasingly chaotic world. That these scholars can fill auditoriums suggests a vacuum left by the more “boring” parts of the field—those focused on methodology or narrow sub-specialties.
The Academic-Policy Gap: Showmanship is often a tool used to “bridge the gap” between academia and the policy world. To get the attention of a busy senator or a distracted public, a scholar might need to be a performer. This suggests that the field of IR is not just a quest for truth, but also a competition for influence.
Theory as Performance: The success of these figures argues that IR theory is not just a neutral description of the world, but a performance that can shape how people perceive reality. When Mearsheimer speaks, he isn’t just describing realism; he is performing realism, making it feel like an inescapable law of nature through the sheer force of his delivery.
If Trump operating on his gut creates a more successful foreign policy than the other presidents since 1993, what might that do to IR and the blob?
If we assume a world where a president’s “gut” or personal intuition consistently produces better foreign policy outcomes than the collective expertise of the establishment, the impact on both International Relations (IR) as an academic field and “the Blob” (the bipartisan foreign policy establishment) would be transformative. It would represent a fundamental challenge to the logic and symmetry of how global power is understood and managed.
The Crisis of “The Blob”
The Blob relies on the idea that foreign policy is a professionalized, technical craft requiring decades of experience, historical knowledge, and institutional memory. If an outsider’s intuition consistently outperforms this apparatus, it suggests several things about the establishment:
The Expertise Trap: It might argue that what the Blob calls “expertise” is actually a form of groupthink that creates blind spots. Years of “proper” training might actually inhibit the ability to see the world as it is, rather than how the models say it should be.
Institutional Decay: It would suggest that the institutions—the State Department, the NSC, and the think tanks—are no longer functional and are instead focused on self-preservation and the maintenance of a “rules-based order” that might be more of a ghost than a reality.
A Shift to Personalism: We would see a move away from institutional diplomacy toward a more personal, transactional form of statecraft. The Blob is built on the idea of continuity; a “gut-based” policy is inherently unpredictable and tied to the individual, making the permanent bureaucracy less relevant.
The Impact on IR Theory
For academics, a successful, intuitive foreign policy would be a “black swan” event that forces a re-evaluation of core theories.
The End of Structuralism: Structural Realism, favored by figures like Mearsheimer, argues that the system dictates how states behave regardless of the leader. If one leader’s “gut” can fundamentally change the system’s outcomes, it argues that the “individual level of analysis” is far more powerful than the “system level.”
The Rise of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA): This subfield, which focuses on the psychology and decision-making of individual leaders, would likely become the dominant lens in the field. Scholars would shift from studying “state interests” to studying “leader personality,” “moral intuition,” and “cognitive biases.”
The Valuation of “Tacit Knowledge”: Scholars might begin to treat a leader’s intuition as a form of “tacit knowledge”—the kind of unarticulated, experiential wisdom that Stephen Turner discusses. This would move IR away from being a “science” of predictable laws and toward an “art” of navigation and timing.
Logic, Symmetry, and the New Reality
That a “gut” approach succeeds suggests a hidden symmetry in the world that the Blob’s logic misses. While the establishment sees a complex web of treaties and norms, the “gut” approach might see a simpler, more primal interplay of leverage and strength. This shift would likely lead to a period of intense “purification” within the field, as Jeffrey Alexander might argue, where the old “failed” ideas are cast out and a new, more charismatic form of leadership is sacralized.
If the “madman” theory or the “CEO-style” of diplomacy works, it proves that the world is less like a chess game with fixed rules and more like a high-stakes negotiation where the rules are whatever you can get the other side to agree to in the moment.
I suspect that many IR scholars view rival models as worse than astrology?
The comparison to astrology is frequent because, in the eyes of a committed theorist, a rival model is not just a different perspective; it is a fundamental misreading of reality that leads to disaster. If the “logic” of a rival school is flawed, then any success it claims is merely a coincidence or a “ghost” of actual causality.
The Clash of Incommensurable Worldviews
When a Realist like Mearsheimer looks at Liberal Internationalism, he does not see a competing academic theory. He sees a dangerous delusion. To him, the Liberal belief that international institutions or democratic spread can end war is as grounded in reality as reading tea leaves. That these “illusions” drive actual policy at the State Department is what makes the “academic-as-showman” so combative. They are not just debating; they are performing a “purification ritual” to cast out what they view as superstitious nonsense.
The Scientific Pretense: Most IR scholars want the field to be a science. When a model fails to predict a major event—like the end of the Cold War or the specific “interplay” of a modern conflict—critics argue the model is “non-falsifiable.” If a theory can explain away every failure with “bad data” or “unforeseen variables,” it loses its claim to science and enters the realm of the occult.
Tacit Knowledge vs. Formal Models: Scholars who follow the “logic” of Stephen Turner might argue that formal IR models are “worse than astrology” because they pretend to capture “tacit knowledge” in a bottle. They try to turn the “gut” of a statesman into a math equation. When the equation fails, the scholar blames the world for not following the math.
The “Blob” as a Priesthood: If you view the foreign policy establishment as a priesthood, then rival theories are heresies. Using a “Liberal” model to solve a “Realist” problem is seen as a category error that creates “symmetry” where none exists, leading to “states of exception” that the models cannot explain.
Why the Rhetoric is So Sharp
The “astrology” insult is used to de-legitimize the institutional power of the rival. In the high-stakes environment of “the Blob,” being labeled an “astrologer” is a way to argue that a scholar or advisor should be stripped of their security clearance and their influence.
That these scholars use such sharp language is a sign of the field’s internal “logic.” Since there is no laboratory to prove who is right, the “truth” is often decided by who can most effectively mock the “superstitions” of their opponents. The showmanship you see in Walt or Mearsheimer is a tool to make their “logic” feel like common sense and the opponent’s “logic” feel like a horoscope.