To Dare Even More Boldly: Conclusion (Part 3 of 3); The End of the Pythia and the Beginning of Political Risk Analysis
“Make a pledge and Mischief Is Nigh’ as a Branch of the Political Risk Analysis Typology
Along with ‘nothing in excess,’ ‘make a pledge and mischief is nigh’ is the other major sub-heading to branch off from ‘know thyself’ in the political risk elemental typology. To put it in modern terms, it was the Pythia’s way of warning those who encountered her terrible presence to check, and forever re-check, the assumptions upon which they based the decisions they made in their lives. As we have seen, throughout history this admonition has an eternal, timeless quality that political risk analysts and policy-makers alike must always keep in mind.
This means avoiding common logical fallacies beyond all else. Both Robert E. Lee’s storied Army of Northern Virginia and the Vietnam War decision-makers in the Johnson administration fell prey to the ‘losing gambler in Vegas’ syndrome. This amounts to the eighth modern political risk commandment.
Having invested so much in victory at Gettysburg and Indochina, respectively, both groups of decision-makers adopted the utterly illogical rationale that because there were so many poker chips already on the table, they had to keep playing come what may. In both cases, the results were utter, predictable disaster.
The problem for both Lee and LBJ was that they never stopped to wonder why they had yet to be successful; rather than see that their failure had enduring structural causes, they in essence merely decided that they had been unlucky, in policy terms. Vegas-style, they assumed that their luck would somehow even out if they just kept committing more troops and wherewithal to the battle at hand.
Tragically, nether Lee nor Johnson was able to focus on the analytical reasons for his failure: The North had an advantage in terms of both men and a strong defensive position at Gettysburg, and Ho Chi Minh had the magic elixir of domestic political legitimacy that the South Vietnamese government painfully lacked. It was not ‘luck’ that explained the failures of the South at Gettysburg and the US intervention in Vietnam; rather, there were all-too-real analytical reasons for them, obstacles that were never sufficiently scrutinised, let alone overcome.
The danger is that both analysts and policy-makers end up doing the wrong things over and over again. Successful policy initiatives are not merely a matter of will. Rather, warnings should start flashing when political risk analysts say (as I heard with frightening regularity over the Iraq War) that so much has already been committed to a specific policy that has failed up until now that we simply must keep on with it. This is the moment when political risk analysts take off their thinking caps and instead indulge in wish fulfilment, a form of policy voodoo that almost always has disastrous consequences.
Our ninth commandment in the study of the rules of the road governing political risk analysis—also hovering under the ‘make a pledge and mischief is nigh’ typological sub-heading—is to avoid another logical trap, the ‘promised land’ fallacy. The able (but almost always wrong) father of the modern German navy, Alfred von Tirpitz, managed to convince his excitable kaiser that at a single stroke—by directly challenging the vaunted British Royal Navy for dominance—Berlin could force London into cowed acceptance of Germany’s party with the British Empire, Wilhelm’s most fervent strategic dream.
The simplicity of this one-shot strategy proved as beguiling as it was wrong-headed. Alarmed by the crash German naval build-up, the British responded in kind, making it impossible for von Tirpitz to catch up. At the same time, by appearing overtly warlike and directly threatening British dominance, the Germans unwittingly made an enemy of Britain, an enmity that spelled their ruin in the Great War.
Likewise, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s somewhat half-hearted efforts—oddly combining a generally cautious foreign policy with blood-curdling statements—did not lead to the success of his ‘wars of national liberation’ strategy. Instead, the over-blown rhetoric regarding his strategy merely steeled American and Western resolve against the Soviets without beginning to prove to be the decisive strategic game-changer the Soviet leader had so confidently predicted.
Political risk analysts and policy-makers who adopt the promised land fallacy should be viewed with deep analytical suspicion, as rarely is one strategic move capable of decisively altering a country’s global position. Simply too many political, economic, military, and cultural elements go into determining a country’s strategic place in the world for any one factor to overturn the need to account for the complexity in political risk analysis.
Instead, as was surely the case with Khrushchev, followers of the promised land strategy are more likely betraying signs of their own psychological desperation as they grasp for an easy (often non-existent) way out of their usually unfavourable strategic position. This fallacy is another example of the illogical snake oil that invariably leads to poor analysis and should be avoided like the plague by any first-rate political risk analyst.
The tenth and final commandment necessary for mastering political risk (also grouped under the ‘make a pledge and mischief is nigh’ sub-heading) is to remember the historical adage that however good the analysis, random, unforeseen, and devastating events can humble it (and its authors) at a moment’s notice, changing everything.
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan—a man whose aristocratic friends and way of life had been blotted out in an instant in the carnage of the Great War—was acutely aware of this butterfly effect in international relations. Trying to protect Britain’s sliding structural position as a great power, and convinced that the well-meaning but unaware Kennedy administration was unintentionally creating damning new facts on the ground over nuclear policy—whose unforeseen consequences would thoughtlessly (but definitively) harm Britain’s global credibility—Macmillan had the analytical foresight to mitigate the Skybolt nuclear crisis.
At the Nassau Conference of December 1962, the ageing representative of a bygone era managed to gently tutor the embodiment of a new one on the likely doleful consequences of unforeseen events and to head off a crisis that could have ended the ‘special relationship’ between the two great powers. As is so often the case, Macmillan’s strategic foresight was born of his own biography: Unforeseen events in his life, both large and small, had shown him in a personal way that they could analytically change everything.
Likewise, the epic story of Deng Xiaoping, paramount leader of China and the architect of its astonishing economic and strategic rise, is in many ways the history of modern China itself. After (just) surviving the murderous purges of his political rival Mao Zedong, Deng turned China completely around around in the course of a generation, taking it from the madness of the Cultural Revolution to great power status in seemingly an instant.
Complementing his economic reforms, Deng crafted a restrained, subtle foreign policy designed to keep China out of geopolitical trouble as it put all its energies into the economic growth strategy that became the envy of the modern world. Deng was a first-class strategic and analytical thinker, and his carefully calibrated foreign policy has surely been crowned with success. Yet with today’s increasing tensions between a more aggressive China and its fearful neighbours in the East China and South China Seas, Deng’s successful foreign policy strategy is in many ways at the mercy of events that neither Beijing nor anyone else can control.
Regionally, the current strategic configuration in East Asia resembles nothing so much as Europe in 1914, hardly a confidence-inspiring reality, as locked-in alliances operate on what amounts to a military hair-trigger. As we have seen, a single drunken sea captain could unwittingly bring the temple down on all of Deng’s masterful strategic handiwork.
Thus, the old ethical realist imperative of humility in the face of uncontrollable events must be the response of any first-rate political risk analyst. However good you are at mimicking the Pythia, and however far-sighted your strategic analysis has proven (as with Deng), there is never a moment to rest on your laurels. The relentless forward surge of history, of new events that can confound old analytical truisms, requires that analysts always remain intellectually supple and endlessly restless with the best of their handiwork.
So the answer to the Pythia’s challenge is this. If it proves possible for a heroic figure to hew to these ten daunting commandments—a modern-day intellectual Labour of Hercules—then over the medium-term, and only for a time, the future can indeed be foretold in certain specific cases. There are so many caveats and pitfalls to even this limited statement that for any aspiring political risk analyst, it is best to begin thinking about mastering geopolitics were this book ends—dwelling on the importance of humility.
Saying this, we should not under-sell what can be intellectually accomplished either. My own political risk firm called the ‘shocking’ Brexit referendum correctly, just as I analytically knew that the Iraq War was doomed to failure, and that the recent December 2016 Italian referendum on political reform was heading towards a decisive defeat. It is not merely luck that some firms have a far better ‘call record’ of prediction for their clients than others. As is true in baseball, over a period of time the best teams win the most games in political risk analysis.
Political risk analysis is not an exact science, and even the best analysts in the world can be wrong. But it should not be disparaged for this lack perfection. For in all its wondrous artistry, from the days of the Pythia until now, the world’s best political risk analysts add a tremendous amount of value for any business or government looking to understand the world. In other words, there is reason all those Greeks for all those centuries sacrificed herds of sheep at the foot of Mount Parnassus.
The End of the Pythia and the Beginning of Political Risk Analysis
As every able political risk analyst knows, eventually history changes all things. Ironically, the world’s first political risk firm was undone by structural changes in global politics, as Rome supplanted Greece as the ordering power in the Mediterranean and the Empire itself transitioned from paganism to sponsoring Christianity.
Eventually, these global changes spelled the end for even the first and most long-lived political risk firm. Late in the reign of the Roman Emperor Theodosius I, in 390 AD, militant Christina monks—emboldened by the emperor’s decision a decade earlier to end official state support for polytheist regions and customs—stormed and destroyed the complex at Delphi, after over 1,100 years of worship.
The last Pythia, a position that without doubt had been the most powerful held by a woman in the classical world, fled in terror in the face of these anti-pagan zealots. The first successful political risk consulting firm tumbled into the beautiful, poignant state of disrepair that we see today.
Yet her record remains, as does the suddenly trendy modern iteration of what she attempted to do so long ago—using special advantages (then spiritual, now intellectual) to divine the future of the world for her anxious clients.
Just as in ancient Greece, where no event of consequence was undertaken without consulting the Pythia, today the world’s leading businesses and governments tread carefully to the major political risk firms to get the best independent, outside advice they can find on managing the vagaries of the world, avoiding its pitfalls, and creatively taking advantage of global circumstances. In other words, little has really changed.
However, unlike the Pythia’s dependence on hallucinogenic gases, we have uncovered in this book the rich, unique historical seam for mastering political risk analysis across the ages, allowing us through our Ten Commandments to creatively update the Pythia’s ground-breaking work.
In traveling far from home, as Sir Francis Drake bid us to do in the swashbuckling, mesmerising prayer that opened this book, our journey through history has been bountifully rewarded. For yes, within limits, the future can be foretold through the use of political risk analysis. Truly venturing far from our intellectual shore, in daring more boldly, we have come to see the stars.