The case for optimism

Fatalistic pessimism about the state of the world has become widespread, perhaps with good reason. But prolonged hopelessness, however justified, limits policymakers and commentators and should be avoided where possible.

Yet we must ensure optimism is paired with realism: there’s a fine line between unjustified optimism that (intentionally or otherwise) leads to policy inaction or downplays risks, and an open outlook that encourages debate and discussion across the full spectrum of possible outcomes—both good and bad.

Pessimism and optimism often simultaneously shape our strategic thinking, particularly on the most complex and high-stakes policy challenges.

In a 2005 Foreign Affairs article titled ‘Preventing a war over Taiwan’, Kenneth Lieberthal called for an ‘agreed framework’  over 20 to 30 years for stability across the Taiwan Strait. He argued that because political factors in Beijing and Taipei precluded peaceful resolution, a stability framework was needed to avoid conflict and create space for final status negotiations to be held a few decades down the road.

This assessment seems wildly optimistic now (mainly because it didn’t happen), even though it derived from a sober assessment of the domestic political constraints on the progress of cross-strait relations at the time.

To be sure, cross-strait relations in 2005 were marked by deep-seated political differences—not least among younger generations—but there was no reason to believe those differences would fade away in time, and indeed many reasons to believe they wouldn’t. As a leading advocate of engagement with China, Lieberthal’s faith in a future settlement was likely informed by economic and trade considerations as much as anything else.

In any case, there are few willing to make such a bold assessment today. That is partly because China’s naked aggression against Taiwan since 2005 has made any settlement far less likely, and partly because of the conceptual intertwining of pessimism and foreign policy expertise, which seem to be mutually reinforcing.

But this entanglement is limiting: maintaining a wide frame of reference entertaining all possible futures nourishes our strategic imagination and prevents us from equating strategic seriousness with a conviction to face up to, and then focus on, worst-case scenarios.

Realism equips us to make such equivalences, and has rightly gained in prominence as geopolitics has returned and the number of plausible worst-case scenarios has increased. But most issues still require several analytical tools to be properly understood.

Good strategists need to think critically about when and why they apply a particular lens to a problem, and they should want to use more than one. But if they are being honest, most foreign policy analysts and commentators would admit to, at least occasionally, prioritising their reputation over doing the work to make properly informed analytical judgements.

Analysts and observers with a sizeable reputation to maintain and a large audience to serve tend to have narrowly focused on a single country or part of the world for a long period of time, often against the backdrop of a single worldview. For their supporters, and perhaps even themselves, confidence in their ability to predict the future is directly correlated with how closed off they can appear to the ideas of others.

This is a road to nowhere for everyone.

Nobody wants to be wrong or, worse still, be proven wrong. If we let the fear of being wrong stop us from testing our arguments against those of others, we erode analytical courage by reinforcing self-belief in our areas of specialisation. This is a bad combination.

To counter this, we must make a consciously create space in our own work to express doubt, which is itself an act of analytical optimism and a precursor to being able to admit when we are wrong.

It’s hard to look back objectively on a published prediction gone wrong and think again about why and to what end you made it. But this is something that good strategists must do.

Like a tragic football fan at the end of another bad season, it’s always more comforting to look forward to next year than dwell on what made last season a failure. There’s nothing wrong with that, to a point. After all, hoping for better days keeps us interested and engaged. But, beyond hope, it is just as important to have a genuine interest in understanding where and why things went wrong previously, and to accept the possibility that your team may conceivably get even worse next year.

For strategists and football fans alike, a willingness to look backwards and forwards at the same time and focus on the positive without ignoring the negative is what ultimately makes the watching worthwhile.

This article was published by The Strategist.