My old buddy/bête noir Dan Drezner brings me this message, Are "Wikipedia-Surfing Kissinger Wannabes" Killing the Political Risk Field?, jumping off a fulminatin’ post by one Tina Fordham, a serious, totally non-amateur political risk chick who now runs her own company, Fordham Global Foresight. Writing in the Financial Times, Tina ripped a new one for a pack of well, Wikipedia-surfing Kissinger wannabes who showed up at a Bank of America conference on political risk, particularly, it seems, with regard to the war in Ukraine, as described in another article in the FT, by Thomas Wheatley, Bank of America cuts short conference after outrage at comments on Ukraine war. Here’s Tom’s account:
Bank of America cut short an online client conference on geopolitics and apologised to attendees after some balked at what they saw as pro-Russian comments about the war in Ukraine, according to three people who attended the event.
Well, color Tina contemptuous, because she, a 25-year vet at assessing political risk, including 17 years at Citigroup, could totally see this coming:
As geopolitical risk has moved to the centre following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and predictions ensue about the conflict’s second- and third-order effects, so too has the stampede of what investors call “tourists” — neophytes wading into asset classes they know nothing about.
In the case of geopolitics, this phenomenon is possibly even more painful to observe, thanks to the misbegotten notion that political analysis is little more than formulating an opinion after a bit of Wikipedia-surfing, amplified by the rich-dude phenomenon that being good at one thing (making money) makes your opinion valuable on everything. (Do I even need to name names?)
Dan delights in Tina’s “spicy prose” and proclaims her takedown a “delicious intellectual morsel”, but then goes on to suggest that, well, it isn’t very accurate,1 since, judging from the information given in Wheatley’s article, the most “controversial” statements came from a college professor, Nicolae Petro, who, clearly, is not a member of “Team Ukraine”, but is also, says Dan, not a Wikipedia-surfin’ Kissinger wannabe.
Which is true. But I have a larger point. What’s wrong with being a Wikipedia-surfin’ Kissinger wannabe? I gotta ask, where were the “experts” when the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq? Whoopin’ the administration on, leading to 20 years of utterly misguided military interventions, resulting in a staggering waste of blood and treasure, making everything we touched worse! That’s where they were, and that’s what “expertise” has given us!
I also won’t resist pointing out that, according to, yes, Wikipedia, Citigroup was a major, major contributor to the Great Recession, blinded by greed and wallowing in subprimes to the very last, and, unsurprisingly, ended up receiving the biggest bailout of any “group” on Wall Street! Of course, Tina was in “political risk” rather than “financial risk”, so I guess her hands are clean.
I will also go on to remark that, so far as I can tell, no one, but no one in the whole affair bothered to point out that if these same experts, their egos swollen with dreams of American omnipotence, had instead actually listened to non AV fave rave Henry Kissinger (and George Kennan) and measured their desires by their strength, we would have treated Russia as a “great power” and respected her, yes, sphere of influence in eastern Europe, instead of persistently treating the Vladimir Putin as a political zero, seeking to pull the entirety of eastern Europe into our own sphere of influence. The result surely would have been less than “optimal”, but Ukraine would have been spared the massive destruction it is now enduring and which will likely cripple it for decades to come. And, even more importantly, Europe would not be once more split in half, suffering through a mini-Cold War.2 The perfect is the enemy of the good, and there is no perfect in this life.
Afterwords
I have whaled on Dan innumerable times, most extensively here, for his devotion to the military intellectual complex, aka “the Blob”, that highly educated foreign policy elite whose careers are defined by the fear of ever coloring outside the lines. A few months back, I went to an “Iraq: 20 years after” event held by the Cato Institute. Among the speakers was Jessica Matthews, long-time head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, one of the few think tanks, along with Cato, to oppose the invasion . Matthews recalled witnessing a “discussion” between a senior executive at Carnegie and a senior executive from Brookings (the two organizations are located in neighboring buildings on Massachusetts Ave). “If you don’t get on board,” the Brookings dude warned his Carnegie counterpart, “you won’t get one appointment in the next administration!” Because that’s what it’s all about! Jobs! How are you going to get the best and brightest to come to DC and work for you unless you can offer them access to the only thing that really counts in DC? That is to say, power! “You say you want to be undersecretary of state for political affairs, kid? You’ve come to the right place!”
The University of Utah is not generally recognized as a playa in DC, but it recently bought a spiffy, five-story mansion next to my condo at the corner of 18th and Q in DC, two blocks from Dupont Circle and, more to the point, less than two blocks from the American Enterprise Institute at the corner of 18th and Massachusetts, which is next to Carnegie, which is next to Brookings. Utah doesn’t have an actual “school” in DC, but the mansion will offer excellent digs for U of U interns seeking the full DC experience.
1. I guess the prose had to be extra spicy, to make up for the lack of, you know, any substance in the “morsel”.
2. A variety of “experts”—everyone from Paul Krugman to Donald Trump—have been lecturing Germany on its “folly” for buying natural gas from Russia. If the U.S. had respected Russia’s interests in eastern Europe, the “soft power” of the West could have flowed eastwards as the gas and oil flowed west.
I have been saying it for years, Alan Vanneman, “I wish you were our President”!