We Don't Tend to Expect Unexpected Events...

In my WPR column this week, I take some time off to think of the children, and of radical uncertainty in foreign affairs:

In retrospect, we can identify the structural factors that motivated the century's great clashes and set the framework of national competition, but this is different than being able to predict specific events. In fact, from the vantage point of 1909, what is striking is just how unpredictable the past century worth of foreign affairs is. Much less could anyone have predicted how its international and foreign policy concerns would affect and shape the lives of individuals. And yet, what we think of as the international phenomena of the past century -- including war, pandemic, genocide, revolution, economic collapse and reconstruction, and cultural renaissance -- help constitute a very substantial part of how we would understand the contours of an individual's life who had lived in that time...

It is almost too trite to point out that foreign policy professionals from around the world would agree in principle that the next 80 years should ideally be better than the past 80. Every analyst, diplomat, soldier and policymaker hopes to make a better world for his or her children. Unfortunately, this common hope cannot, in and of itself, solve most international disputes. People continue to disagree about both what constitutes a better world and how we should divide its fruits.