The cause of fear was simple. There is no way the estimate writer could possibly be both right and certain as to his correctness. Neither could the senior level "decider" personnel.
That is the horrid, brutal truth about policy choices. They are never certainly correct, no matter how carefully they are researched, staffed, and refined. There is, in fact, as we all should know, nothing more inherently risky in life than making a choice, a decision. Particularly if that decision involves something of greater, more lasting import than what to eat tonight, which sneakers to buy, or, even whether or not to accept a date.
There are three bases for the risk residing in decisions.
The first is that every choice made limits the number of future options. The result is a cone. At the top, the number of possible options is wide. Each decision, each specific option selected, results in the cone becoming ever more narrow. Finally, at the bottom tip, the options are effectively reduced to zero or, best case, one.
The second reason decision making is so darn risky is that both the direction and the magnitude of the response(s) to the choice cannot be accurately predicted. This is the necessary consequence of the reaction being essentially non-linear in nature. This means that there is no direct, predictable linkage or proportionality between the input (the decision) and the output (the reaction(s) by the target of the decision and others.) The relation between course of action and response(s) to that course is what math types call a "chaotic" or "emergent" system.
(A parenthetical note: One can be certain that a coercive decision, a course of action intended to apply pressure on the target will result in enhanced opposition to the desired result. To put it simply, pressure consolidates long before it fragments. The analogy between the process of turning loose snow into an ice ball and the effect of coercion on a target is precise.)
The third reason is the nature of human group dynamics. This is a universal, running from the smallest, most informal groups to the largest, most complex. All human groups are self-organizing systems which means they are all emergent in nature. Self-organizing systems are dynamically stable, ever changing, and remarkably immune to external pressure.
(Don't believe the old Geekmo? Check it out for--and on--yourself. Presuming you are alive, your body, your mind, your personality are all self-organizing emergent, dynamically stable systems which can resist an extraordinary amount of external threat and assault--at least by a virus and other icky little critters even if not fast moving pieces of metal.)
The three features of the context surrounding each and every policy choice, each and every "proposed US course of action" conspire, no, combine, to assure that the Law of Unintended Consequences will be invoked to greater or lesser extent. That's right, each and every option chosen will call in the Unintended Consequences in all their many forms and furies.
"Prove it, Geek!"
Well, bucko, the Geekmeister can try. Fortunately this is not a court of law and proof beyond a reasonable doubt is not required. History abounds in examples, indeed it can be argued fairly that most of the dismal history of the human race is the record of the Law of Unintended Consequences being applied and the effects of its application. The Geek will confine his examples to a few from recent US foreign policy.
When the US blithely announced the "Open Door" policy regarding China, it (inadvertently or not) established a cone of options regarding its relations with the emergent Japanese Empire. This high spirited action of attempting to provide a level playing ground so that all countries could plunder China equally rather than allowing only one to do so cast the US in the role of special protector of the territorial integrity and governmental sovereignty of an enormous land mass filled with people who owed no particular allegiance to a rapidly transforming governmental system which was both in the process of self-organization and establishing existential or at least functional legitimacy.
The Open Door was intended to be a sort of warning shot across the bows of both Germany and Japan. The latter was still in the process of self-organization following the Meiji Restoration, which meant it was in the full bloom of new nationalism and its concomitant, militarism. The American course of action increasingly was seen in Tokyo as an attempt to limit the "natural growth" of the new Empire.
The Naval Arms Limitation Treaty of the Twenties was not so much the "step toward peace" that it was touted to be as another course of action which both limited the cone of options and stimulated the Japanese to a non-linear reaction. The reaction was to exploit the categories of warship not covered by the Treaty, submarines and aircraft carriers, as well as to cheerfully violate on a wholesale scale the provisions of a later agreement barring fortification of Pacific Ocean possessions.
The unforeseen (but eminently foreseeable) rise of National Socialism in Germany coupled with the Great Depression and the triumph of the Army in internal Japanese politics to provoke the Japanese multi-step invasion of China. The US had few "courses of action" available to it.
The course of action selected was a continuous ramp-up of economic sanctions. Starting with chopsticks and ending with a total embargo on the sale of scrap metal and refined petroleum products, the sanction regime was truly (to use SecState Clinton's term) "crippling." This left the Japanese with few responses possible.
Tokyo had precisely two choices at the bottom of the cone: A humiliating capitulation to US policy demands or war. They chose war hoping that the US, being preoccupied with the greater threat presented by Nazi Germany and stunned by the naval attacks on Pearl Harbor and the invasion of the Philippines, would accept an accomplished feat.
The Japanese were wrong in their hope. But, the resulting war opened the door in China not for a universal opportunity for exploitation but for the success of the Communists of Mao. War, more than any other human interaction is an emergent system, with consequences which are totally non-linear and, thus, impossible to predict. The ChiComs were a self-organizing system existing in a resource rich environment, thus, their success was both certain and easily predicted, as some US diplomats and military personnel did (at later great personal cost.)
At war's end when the US made a set of casual, off-hand decisions, it insensibly created cones of options with respect to both the Korean peninsula and Indo-China. The US was preoccupied with the "big matters" of dividing Europe, the beginnings of the Cold War, and converting from a wartime to a peacetime economy; the margins of Asia simply were too unimportant to deserve any real attention. (Not unlike Osama bin Ladin's declaration of war on the US in the mid-Nineties.)
Had it not been for the context of the rapidly blooming bifurcate world of the Cold War, the hasty and negligent decisions regarding the division of the Korean peninsula and the repatriation of the Japanese forces in Indo-China would not have mattered. But, the context made these two courses of US action--dividing the Korean peninsula at the thirty-eighth parallel and allowing the Chinese Nationalists and British to temporarily occupy Indo-China while ignoring the de facto government in the north of Vietnam headed by Ho Chi Minh--"world historical" in effect.
Both cones rapidly narrowed until the US seemingly had no options except war. In the case of the slow slide into war in Vietnam, the US effort at coercion resulted in a non-linear increase in North Vietnamese will to resist, to accept pain, to endure, to outlast, to win.
The same narrowing cone of options, non-linear response, and self-organization can be seen in miniature in the months leading up to Operation Just Cause when the US military became the world's largest SWAT team in Panama. It can be seen in larger form with the US course of action regarding Cuba and, years later, Iran following the Islamic Revolution.
In these last two examples, Cuba and Iran, the net effects of the assorted US courses of action have not only been to limit options, but also to strengthen the adversaries. Both Cuba and Iran following their respective revolutions were self-organizing systems. Their processes of self-organization were facilitated by the US opposition. Even when the American actions were relatively low scale in impact (as in severing diplomatic relations), the consequences were non-linear in effect. Greater actions, such as sanctions, had greater but still not truly linear results.
In a very real sense, the Law of Unintended Consequences dictated what has happened in both countries. They exist in their present form in large measure because of US actions over the years.
Enough said.
The real deal is how decision makers can limit the application of the Law of Unintended Consequences. How they can choose policy options which have a less open ended, less non-linear outcome?
The very first requirement is to recognize that human systems are self-organizing. This means there are very real limits as to what can be imposed from without. The historical record demonstrates convincingly that outsiders can only effect the self-organizing features of a target population on the margins. The pace of events can be accelerated or retarded--slightly. The precise direction of self-organization can be modified--slightly. But, self-organizing systems cannot be started or stopped simply by external parties--unless the outsider is willing and able to create a desert and call it peace.
Because systems are self-organizing, it is critical to act as soon as possible while the emerging system is new, friable, and most susceptible to inducement or coercion. The only two profitable areas which can be addressed are the new leaders or the context from which the new self-organizing system draws its membership. Since each system--and each leader--is unique, there is no "one size fits all" approach or combination of approaches which will be viable. Each must be addressed in terms relevant to it and it alone whether those terms are soft or very, very robust.
The second requirement which must be met if the Law of Unintended Consequences is to be limited in its application is the narrowing of decisions. Decisions, the course of action, must be sharply focused, narrow in application, and directed toward a limited, even a very limited, goal--an achievable end, not a global one. For example, in Afghanistan the goal of killing Talib and Taliban leadership as well as that of al-Qaeda was appropriate, but the open ended notion of nation building was not.
By narrowing the focus it is possible to reduce to a manageable level the probabilistic smear of reactions. The broader the goal, the fuzzier the focus of the course of action, the more impossible it is to evaluate probable reactions--other than to say they will be bad if not worse for us.
Government leaders seem to have a pathological need to believe that the apparatus they control is somehow both all-powerful and always right. The governments of major countries have this pathology to a high degree. They are to be pitied for this delusion.
The reality is that self-organizing systems have a power far surpassing that of any government or any armed force--unless the goal is to work with the emergent system on the margins, to smooth the roughest edges, to advance favorable trajectories with the goal that the favorable ones will crowd out the unfavorable ones. That reality loops to another one, one which is particularly detested by decision makers who crave certainty (and they all do.)
The second reality is simply that events never play out according to either desires or intents. As Clausewitz correctly observed, "no plan survives first contact with the enemy," no attempt to impose external will on another nation will go according to planned intent. Dynamic stability, which is the normal course of human organizations, assures resiliency--and resistance.
There it is. The general answer to the requirement that one assess "probable reactions to a proposed US course of action." Now you are smarter than the Deep Thinkers in Beltway Land.
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