To Dare Even More Boldly: Conclusion (Part 2 of 3); 'Nothing in Excess' as a Second Branch of the Political Risk Typology
Branching off from the ‘know thyself’ base of the political risk elemental tree is the second basic admonition in the Pythia’s gloomy lair to do ‘nothing in excess.’ A lack of what the ancient Greeks would describe as intellectual balance lies behind many of the myths of Greek culture, where monomania in all its forms predictably leads to tragic disaster. In our more modern world, as we have seen, the same has held true for untold policy-makers, as well as for political risk analysts.
A fifth major political risk commandment (and the first under the ‘nothing in excess’ banner) is that, having discovered one motive force of history, all too often political risk analysts as well as policy-makers stop wondering whether there might be others. Intellectual balance is absolutely necessary if political risk analysis is to be truly useful to either governmental or to corporate clients. Here modern Marxists are the obvious, and worst, offenders.
Yes, it is certainly true that economic motivations and the notion of class had been shamefully under-studied before Marxism came along. But having discovered and championed a major new driver of analysis, Marxists’ subsequent lack of further intellectual curiosity has proven disastrous, both intellectually and practically, for a victimised humanity that has suffered through the doleful real-world consequences of their failure.
But rather than reconsider, Marxists made a fetish of their discovery—championing economic determinism to the exclusion of all else, closing off the possibility of seeing clearly the more complicated real world in front of them. Global political decisions and outcomes are self-evidently the result of the interaction of economic, political, sociological, historical, religious, and cultural forces, the weighting of which varies case to case. It is this bouillabaisse of factors—and not exclusively any one of them—that determines real-world policy decisions and outcomes, and that should govern the political risk analysis that flows from them.
Just as Napoleon managed to easily defeat the long-lived glittering Republic of Venice in the 1790s because it had gormlessly ceased to believe it had need of an army and navy, so his over-correction of France’s recent past—and the subsequent over-militarisation of French society—led to the great man’s doom. It should be obvious that robust economic and military attributes are both important factors in any great power’s success, and that both are essential. But as history so often illustrates, what should be obvious is so often not.
The riveting story of Napoleon should serve as a warning for all specialised studies experts who specifically focus on military, economic, or political power (or a specific region of the world), to the exclusion of everything else. At best, their myopic analysis can only provide the dots of our overall holistic painting as to how the world really works—dots that should then be interpreted by more generalist political risk analysts who can answer the more important riddle as to what the painting actually looks like. At worst, in their short-sightedness, these specialists—without realising they have only part of the answer—will attempt to universalise their parochial, limited analysis. In so doing, they can but meet their own intellectual Waterloo.
The sixth political risk commandment rests on realising that the groups and leaders under study always vary. The analytical weighting of the political risk tool box by necessity alters case by case precisely because the groups being assessed are endlessly different in our maddening, fascinating, beguiling world. It is centrally important for political risk analysts to remember the truism that not all human beings are the same.
As our striking example of the highly effective Assassins during the time of the Third Crusade makes clear, political risk analysts have a particularly hard time gaming out people they believe to be lunatics. Yet whether the group in question be the Assassins, Charles Manson’s hideous ‘Family,’ or the present-day ISIS death cult, deeming them simply bonkers is a dangerous intellectual trap.
For, to quote Shakespeare, there is almost always method to these groups’ madness, intellectually foreign and irrational as they may appear at first glance. To decide that a group is crazy all too often lets political risk analysts off the hook: Such a characterisation implicitly means that analysis is simply impossible, as the group in question is not sane enough to be explained and assessed rationally. This is almost always lazy nonsense. Analysts do not have to accept that a ‘crazy’ group’s goals will ever be met—as is the case for ISIS and was the case for Manson—to be able to study them. For while a group’s ultimate goals may be unattainable, once these goals are understood, the manner in which it goes about trying to realise them is almost always rational enough to be looked at. I don’t have to believe that ISIS’s efforts to establish a universal caliphate are achievable to be able to assess its administration of large swathes of Syria and Iraq and its strategic planning in the Middle East.
In the case of the Assassins, the intellectual failure was even more egregious. For as strange and intellectually bizarre as the Assassins’ tactics seemed to the Crusaders, they actually accomplished their primary strategic goal and decisively blunted Western efforts to retake the Holy Land. Beneath the scary (and to Western eyes unfathomable) tactic of in essence medieval suicide bombings, the Assassins were utterly rational in their understanding of the politics of their Crusader enemies.
By killing Conrad, King of Jerusalem, the Old Man of the Mountain proved to be a highly rational and utterly successful political risk analyst. Seeing that the fragile Western Crusader coalition was likely to fall apart without the glue of Conrad’s leadership to hold it together, the Assassins removed the Crusaders’ keystone, and the political edifice that was the Westerners’ alliance came tumbling down.
Far from being ‘mad,’ the Old Man of the Mountain’s highly rational strategy was crowned with success. Political risk analysts would do well to remember this salutary historical example before ever writing off the need to analyse a group as impossible owing to the fact that it is simply too crazy to do so.
If some groups seem too random to assess at all, political risk analysts also often fail at the other extreme: In the chaos of far too much daily information being thrown their way, they overlook the hidden patterns of behaviour of the highly rational chess players in their midst. This amounts to the seventh commandment of political risk analysis, also grouped under the ‘nothing in excess’ admonition of the far-away Pythia.
While many groups and political actors on the foreign policy scene never get beyond the level of using tactics to further their immediate well-being (German Chancellor Angela Merkel leaps to mind as such an example), there are chess players in our midst, foreign policy actors who engage in strategic thinking, having long-term plans in place that they methodically try to reach through the use of varied tactics along the way.
Such rare birds (Russian President Vladimir Putin is a modern-day example) are continually worth look for, as if an analyst can discover them, what they are going to do next becomes easily identifiable. The strength of chess players is that their strategic thinking allows them to have a foreign policy compass readily to hand, guiding them sure-footedly along the treacherous international relations path.
Whatever random events do occur, this intellectual advantage allows chess players to respond quickly and decisively, as they have no need (as most mortals do) to re-orient themselves to whatever specific crisis has arisen. The downside for them, however, is that if their hidden strategic patterns are discovered by a good analyst, an assessment of what they will do in the future becomes readily apparent and their future actions can be gamed out.
But identifying chess players is certainly very difficult, as the vast majority of groups and leaders looked at by political risk analysts are no more than garden-variety technicians. The story of the hapless Niccolo Machiavelli’s man-crush on the dashing dark, unscrupulous Cesare Borgia is a case in point. Beguiled by Borgia’s dark lustre, Machiavelli forgot to notice that Cesare was ultimately spectacularly unsuccessful and was actually no more than a good-looking, somewhat mediocre, tactician.
Instead, lurking right in front of the supposed supreme master of the dark arts of politics was a genuine and highly successful chess player, Pope Julius II, who easily bested both Borgia and Machiavelli in their real-world contest for power.
Julius ay have lacked Borgia’s star quality, but he more than made up for this with his systemic strategic nous and the decisive tactical moves that flowed naturally from it. While the shallow, tactical Borgia may have blinded Machiavelli, it was the methodical, hyper-rational, Julius who carried the day. Modern-day political risk analysts will find it well worth their time to hunt for these elusive, and often successful, creatures.