The Cardinal Sins of Diplomatic Political Analysis.

• Author: Smith, Raymond

Editor's note: Dr. Smith's 2011 book, The Craft of Political Analysis for Diplomats offered suggestions for doing political analysis better, from the viewpoint of a foreign service officer who had spent most of his diplomatic career practicing the craft. In this follow-on piece, Smith expands on his original discussion with thoughts on the cardinal sins of political analysis.

The Essential Tools

An embassy political officer is responsible for analyzing a host country's domestic and foreign policies, with a view toward aiding policy-makers and advancing U.S. interests. This requires understanding the local political situation and how that may affect U.S. objectives in the country

Good analysis has to consider technique, presentation and the audience. Unlike description, it requires context, comparison and/or conceptualization. Masterful writing cannot make vapid analysis better, and clunky writing obscures quality analysis. A well-written, quality analysis must also be brief and include a careful summary. Policy-makers do not have time to read a forty-page, reputation-enhancing article in a prestigious publication. In reality, the summary is probably all the policy-maker will read of even a concise analysis. It is the best chance you have to get your most important points across. Finally, the analysis must be directed toward the audience you want to reach. This may require choosing between a broader audience and a more influential one.

The Cardinal Sins

Wikileaks had the unintended consequence of allowing the interested public to see a lot of outstanding American diplomatic political analysis. During my State Department career, I also observed some common and sometimes consequential analytical mistakes. My list of the important ones includes making predictions, mistakes in assessing risk, straight-line thinking, adjusting analysis to suit superiors, rationalizing policy decisions, asking the wrong questions, failing to consider contingent outcomes, and thinking like an American.

Making Predictions

Prediction has no place in political analysis. Leave that to the soothsayers. Analysis deals with probabilities. Presenting nuanced analysis to government figures can, however, be difficult. They have to make decisions. They are looking for some certainty and suspect tentativeness. What the analyst sees as nuanced, the policy-maker may see as wishy-washy.

Intelligence analysts often try to deal with this by using terms such as "high probability" or "low probability". My sense is that for practical purposes policy-makers tend to treat the former as "this is what is going to happen" and the latter as "this is not going to happen". My preference is to offer a number, or a range of numbers, in assessing outcomes. While this approach may suggest...