The paper’s coverage of Nazi Germany may have been naïve, but their coverage of the Soviet Union was shameful
The “nothing ever happens” people seem to be, sadly, correct about Iran thus far, although one hopes that the brutal Islamic Republic might still be overthrown. It’s hard to know what to think, and at times like this we all turn to the experts to give their analysis of what might happen and what might follow.
Foreign policy expertise is hard work, because it requires both a specific knowledge of the national culture and the relative strength of personalities. Because there are so many factors involved, analysts frequently get things completely wrong, the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles being the notorious examples. The art of “superforecasting” came about because US foreign policy experts turned out to be disastrously wedded to preconceived ideas; the success of superforecasters suggests that people with less specialist knowledge but a better control of their biases do a more accurate job of predicting events.
