We know that politicians are reluctant to admit they were wrong, but what about those of us who study world politics, comment on current events, and sometimes offer advice on what we think should be done? We are all fallible, so anyone who offers forecasts and recommendations is going to get things wrong on occasion. If a pundit is unlucky (or perhaps just committed to a lot of dubious beliefs about world politics), then their advice might have serious negative consequences if important officials embrace it. When that happens, what should they do?
In my last column, I suggested that U.S. President Donald Trump, the United States as a whole, and the rest of the world would all be better off if Trump just admitted that he’d made a big mistake when he started a war with Iran. But what about the people who laid the groundwork for that error by repeatedly calling for war and suggesting that it would be quick, cheap, and have enormous positive benefits? My goal is not to embarrass them further—events are doing that already with no help from me—but to consider the different ways that one might react after getting an important strategic issue wrong.
We know that politicians are reluctant to admit they were wrong, but what about those of us who study world politics, comment on current events, and sometimes offer advice on what we think should be done? We are all fallible, so anyone who offers forecasts and recommendations is going to get things wrong on occasion. If a pundit is unlucky (or perhaps just committed to a lot of dubious beliefs about world politics), then their advice might have serious negative consequences if important officials embrace it. When that happens, what should they do?
In my last column, I suggested that U.S. President Donald Trump, the United States as a whole, and the rest of the world would all be better off if Trump just admitted that he’d made a big mistake when he started a war with Iran. But what about the people who laid the groundwork for that error by repeatedly calling for war and suggesting that it would be quick, cheap, and have enormous positive benefits? My goal is not to embarrass them further—events are doing that already with no help from me—but to consider the different ways that one might react after getting an important strategic issue wrong.
Of course, the most straightforward response to being proven wrong is to admit the error openly and try to learn from it. I’ve tried to do that on several occasions in the past, but I leave it to readers to judge how successful I’ve been in acknowledging mistakes. I’m not alone in this regard: for example, journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote a lengthy account of how he’d been wrong to support the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the former managing editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, eventually offered up something of a mea culpa for the outlet’s coverage of the campaign for war, as well. So did Anne-Marie Slaughter, a prominent “liberal hawk” who later admitted that she should have paid more attention to those of us who had warned that the invasion was unnecessary and unwise.
Admitting one’s errors has many virtues: It preserves your integrity, helps others learn from your mistakes, and can even make you more respected precisely because it shows that you’re both honest and realistic. Given these benefits, it’s a mite puzzling that more pundits and political analysts don’t go this route when events don’t conform to their expectations. Instead, they rely on one or more of my top five ways to not be blamed for giving bad advice.
1: “It’s Not My Fault; I Was Misled.”
If you made a mistake that can’t be concealed but don’t want to admit you screwed up, an obvious tactic is to blame it on bad information provided by others. The classic example is the many people who blamed their support for the invasion of Iraq on faulty intelligence, such as the claim that Iraq had lots of weapons of mass destruction and was actively pursuing nuclear weapons. This popular line of defense is usually disingenuous, however, as there was considerable evidence that the prewar intelligence on Iraq was being cooked to justify the war. If you chose to believe it, that’s on you. I haven’t seen anyone making similar claims about the war with Iran yet, but I suspect it’s only a matter of time.
2: “My Brilliant Plan Wasn’t Implemented Correctly.”
Another common way to dodge responsibility is to claim that one’s recommendations were in fact correct, but the people in charge failed to execute them properly. This alibi has a long pedigree, as reflected in U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s rueful observation that “victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan.” Indeed, most defeats are followed by a search for scapegoats, with those who supported the war offering up their pet theories for how it could have been won. And because it rests on unprovable counterfactuals—i.e., the claim that a smarter commander, different strategy, or slightly better luck would have led to success—there is no way to disprove it completely. No wonder this alibi is so popular.
3: “History Will Vindicate Me.”
Another time-honored technique for evading responsibility is to claim that what looks like a debacle today will eventually be hailed as a stroke of genius. As with the second method above, such assertions are popular because it’s hard to disprove them: If you wait long enough, conditions will eventually improve and then the architects of disaster can claim credit and insist that they were right all along. The present regime in Iran won’t last forever, for instance, and if it evolves in a more congenial direction in the future, then the people who clamored for the present war (if any are still around), will undoubtedly argue that it would never have happened had we not taken their advice.
A variation on this theme is to argue that no matter how bad things might be today, they would have been even worse if we had done nothing. You see this line of argument in the recurring refrain that absent the present war, Iran would have (eventually) obtained a nuclear weapon. Never mind that U.S. intelligences agencies have repeatedly concluded that Tehran hasn’t had an active nuclear weapons program for two decades, that its path to a bomb had been severely truncated by the nuclear deal that Trump abandoned back in 2018, or that, for 30 years, Israeli leaders have warned that Iran was about to get a bomb and have yet to be right.
4: “I Wasn’t Wrong; We Just Need to Fight Harder!”
If you argued for war and it didn’t go well, you can also stick to your guns (literally), double down, and insist that all we need to do is escalate, remain resolved, and stay the course. This is how Russian President Vladimir Putin reacted when the initial invasion of Ukraine failed, and it’s what prowar columnists like Bret Stephens keep saying about Iran today. A corollary is the claim that even if the initial decision for war was ill-advised, our credibility is now at stake, and we must do whatever it takes to win. Those who adopt this line of thinking typically rely on the same arguments they used to justify the initial decision for war, claiming that admitting defeat would be disastrous, that the enemy is on the ropes, and that just a little more time and a bit more pressure will yield a glorious victory. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how forever wars happen.
5: “Never Complain, Never Explain, Never Mention It Again.”
Lastly, pundits with egg on their faces can follow the advice often attributed to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli: “Never complain, never explain.” Instead of owning one’s mistakes or offering up some contrived excuse, one can also simply pretend it never happened, ignore all critics pouncing on one’s gaffe, and just move on. If you have a safe sinecure at some prominent think tank or publication (or even tenure at a nice university), then there is little need to acknowledge what you got wrong or spend too much time fretting about it. To be sure, blithely refusing to acknowledge one’s past errors is not an especially admirable position, and it doesn’t help the rest of us figure out how a big mistake got made. But given how short the public memory is these days, counting on collective amnesia can help error-prone commentators (and former officials) retain their status and influence no matter how well their advice worked out.
Despite its imperfections, I still believe a robust “marketplace of ideas”—where competing views can be freely voiced—is superior to an enforced orthodoxy of thought. For this reason, I want lots of different people thinking hard about foreign policy and presenting their ideas for us to consider. That process will work better, however, if we can also judge the quality of these contributions over time and identify who tends to offer accurate and useful advice and whose prescriptions tend to make things worse. Even if error-prone pundits are reluctant to admit their mistakes, this list can help you see through the dust-kicking operations that people use to safeguard their reputations after they are wrong and help you decide whose advice to embrace.
As for my advice to those of you who are also in the business of prescribing what your country’s foreign policy ought to be, I recommend owning up to one’s mistakes. In the wise words of Mark Twain: “Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
