Foreign policy skill is mostly a value judgment—but at least one aspect of strategic competence can be measured.

What’s the issue?

It’s challenging to tell whether a leader is good at making foreign policy decisions. There is a great deal of uncertainty, complexity, subjectivity, and luck involved. International relations scholar Richard K. Betts, for example, suggests that “strategy is an illusion” and that foreign policy skill can’t be reliably measured.

In their working paper "Strategy Is Only Partly an Illusion: ‘Relative Foresight’ as an Objective Standard for Evaluating Foreign Policy Competence," HKS Professor Richard Zeckhauser and Jeffrey Friedman PhD 2013, an associate professor from Dartmouth College, show that traditional measures of foreign policy competence rely on value judgments that almost always leave room for reasonable disagreement. However, they identify one aspect of skill in strategic decision-making that can be objectively measured: “relative foresight.”
 

What does the research say?

Zeckhauser and Friedman describe relative foresight as “decision-makers’ ability to anticipate consequences of their choices as compared to alternative views based on similar information.” They say that measuring how well a policymaker predicts a given outcome, compared to others’ predictions, has the strong advantage of being objective and not relying on value judgments.

Relative foresight, the researchers say, captures only one aspect of foreign policy competence, and it can be difficult to evaluate with small samples of information. “Just as the world’s best poker players lose many hands over the course of a session, a competent foreign policy decision maker will sometimes appear to lack relative foresight as a result of bad luck rather than incompetence,” they write. “Yet, this problem can be solved by gathering more information. The more data we gather, the more reliably measures of relative foresight will track decision-makers’ true talent, just as we would expect that strong poker players are more likely to win sessions that involve a larger number of hands.”

Relative foresight—which Zeckhauser and Friedman show can be objectively measured, unlike other factors—is only one of many components in foreign policy decision making. Hence, the authors write that it may be “fair to say that strategy is mostly an illusion, at least from the standpoint of researchers who seek to advance arguments that do not inherently rely on value judgments or subjective probabilities.”