International Security

Fredrik Logevall is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs and professor of history at Harvard Kennedy School, based at the Belfer Center. An expert on the history of international affairs, he was until recently a professor of history at Cornell University. He is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (Random House, 2012). In 2014, Logevall served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

"It has been nearly thirty years since I received my PhD. At that time, I was convinced that systematic scholarly research could uncover and verify timeless truths about international politics and foreign policy, and that once those discoveries had been made, a grateful policy community would quickly absorb them and adopt the right prescriptions. With the passage of time, I've gained both a greater respect for the limits of what social science can accomplish and a greater appreciation for the imperviousness of the policy community to reasoned discourse, especially in the United States. Even if scholars were able to produce more convincing analyses—itself a debatable proposition—overcoming the entrenched interests that shape what policy makers choose to do is not easy."

"...[T]he academic study of international affairs will be impoverished if the relevant academic disciplines continue to turn inward, to focus on narrow issues that are primarily of interest only to other scholars, and to become even less interested in communicating to policymakers, the broader public, or the bulk of our students (the vast majority of whom do not want to be social scientists themselves). Accordingly, our goal should be to encourage a diverse, engaged community of scholars that is still committed to a free exchange of ideas and to high standards of both rigor and relevance."

Whatever the reason for this discrepancy, Zenko has opened a needed dialogue. We had elevated a few high-profile women in our minds to believe that the gender barriers had been broken. But Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice do not make an establishment....And Zenko made it clear that the arenas where future Susan Rices are cultivated — think tanks and academia — are still weighted in favor of the boys. In addition, it is those think tanks and universities where media finds their "talking heads" and other commentators.

At the very least, Congress should reconsider its position of "once approved, always approved."

The collapse earlier this month of the government's case against an alleged terrorist sleeper cell in Detroit is just another example of the Justice Department's failed "arrest by headlines" philosophy in the war on terror.

No expert in the academic or intelligence community can predict the future, but they should at least be able to accurately analyze and quickly update their beliefs to craft effective policy. Too often, experts not only forget what they used to believe, but also see little connection between explaining the past and predicting the future. A two-year case study of fifteen Korean experts examines their initial predictions about security on the Korean Peninsula and demonstrates how a Bayesian approach helped them first to empirically analyze their theories, and then to successfully update them based on events that actually transpired.