Breaking the Grip of Foreign Policy Groupthink

If we are to have any chance of breaking out of that cycle, it is imperative first of all that we recognize and call out the groupthink and conformism that plague our foreign policy debates.

Jessica Chen Weiss talks about the pitfalls of groupthink on China policy in a recent interview with John Glaser:

I was really struck over the last several months talking with a couple of different people who work in think tanks who confided to me that they didn’t feel safe expressing anything but the, you know, at least as hawkish of an opinion as others in the room or other organizations. They didn’t feel safe saying what they really thought. because it would potentially jeopardize their access to future meetings and even their job security. They’re not operating in an environment of academic freedom and tenure that I have had the privilege to here at Cornell.

And so I think it really is corrosive for the quality of our democratic debate when you have what is really self-censorship and reflexive positioning where people say what is politically rather than analytically correct. It makes it very hard to raise questions about the course that we’re on. I’m not saying that those sorts of questions are always spot on, but the very act of engaging with them, I think, makes for better decision-making….I think there is a recognition that we need a more lively debate, but the structural incentives just aren’t really there and need to be created. It’s challenging. It means that the conversations, even outside of the public spotlight, are as often political as they are intellectually rigorous when you have this kind of positioning and you have an artificial narrowing of the debate and discussion. And many assumptions that may be pretty foundational, such as “what are China’s intentions?”, don’t get the same kind of rigorous assessment that they really deserve.

The pressures that Weiss describes are an important part of the reflexive hawkishness and conformism that make the foreign policy establishment so hostile to dissenting and unconventional views. The debate remains narrow because anyone that strays beyond the limits faces backlash and adverse professional consequences, and so most professionals will tend to stay within the set boundaries. Because so much of this is done through self-censorship of the sort that Weiss mentions, it will often go unnoticed, but it is happening all the same.