Hard Interests, Soft Illusions: Southeast Asia and American Power

5. Professional Expertise

143 5 PROFESSIONAL EXPERTISE “We never really stopped to analyze....” —Asda Jayanama, former Thai Ambassador Members of the foreign policy community in Southeast Asia explain their beliefs about American power by drawing on their professional expertise as a source of evidence and interpretive schema. Professional expertise can thus be thought of as a set of cues that influence beliefs. Foreign policy professionals have good reasons to attend to such cues, reasons that go beyond self-interest or political expedience . The idea that professional advisers modify their advice according to what they perceive their clients or superiors want to hear enjoys considerable currency. However, it is difficult to pin down this process, and evidence that powerholders have sometimes found it necessary to ignore or manipulate the advice they receive suggests that professional experts do not always stick to what is politically expedient.1 When it comes to foundational foreign policy beliefs about the United States and the role it plays in the region, foreign policy professionals in Southeast Asia are rarely faced with this kind of dilemma. This is neither a serendipitous coincidence nor the consequence of an unusual willingness to forgo self-interest on the part of Southeast Asian policymakers. Rather, the lack of tension between professional expertise and political expedience can be traced to conditions that obscure the political nature of policymaker perspectives. The first of these conditions is the defeat and silencing of the political left (or right, in the case of Vietnam) since the 1960s or earlier, which made 1. Jervis 2010, 131–136; Kolko 2004. 144 Chapter 5 possible a redrawing of political categories to place defeated political claimants as illegitimate, leaving the victors an apparently uncontested national canvas onto which to write their own platform. However, this is clearly not the full story. In the Philippines and Thailand, there has been debate about the wisdom of the U.S. alliance, yet much of what is taken as “professional expertise ” is not identified as politically driven. Perhaps the most important reason for this sense of depoliticized expertise is that the mechanisms for generating and reproducing professional knowledge, although politically anchored, involve processes that are more obviously consensual, persuasive, and social than political. One departure point for examining these processes is to examine the metacognitive statements of foreign policy professionals: the reasons they give for espousing a particular belief. Their statements often point to the importance of social mechanisms of learning,such as absorbing received wisdom in professional circles. Several respondents conceded that they had never seriously considered, let alone evaluated, competing beliefs. This mode of learning is not necessarily irrational at all—it is likely to be an efficient way of arriving at a functional set of beliefs, as “prevailing wisdom” can be a proxy for actual wisdom.2 However, this process of learning by authority and social exposure is not the same as actively reasoning, weighing up competing claims, and attempting to marshal evidence for and against contending propositions.Other influences on beliefs identified by respondents included the information environment within which they operated and their own personal affective ties and attitudes. A second approach to understanding how “professional expertise” functions to favor certain beliefs is through a survey of the epistemic environment. This chapter thus looks at the information most available to foreign policy professionals to assess the frequency and prominence of either negative or positive information about the United States. Is it the case, as some respondents claimed, that the information environment they are exposed to exhibits a pro-U.S. bias? Examining the epistemic environment also allows one to develop a picture of what constitutes acceptable modes of reasoning. How are beliefs generated and tested? What kind of procedures for gathering and evaluating evidence are considered appropriate? Several indicators suggest that acceptable modes of reasoning in foreign policy circles have strong belief-confirming biases. Reasoning processes are less often designed to test the accuracy of a proposition than to validate it. 2. Preslin and Wood 2005. professional expertise 145 professional Beliefs Given the worldwide controversy overAmerican foreign policy in the years between 2002 and 2008, it is not surprising that many members of the foreign policy community criticized the United States in this period.Statements by leaders in Southeast Asia on American actions such as its war on Iraq ranged from the warmly supportive , in the case of Singapore, to frank condemnation, in the case of Malaysia and Indonesia. Elite...