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Our confidence in a point of view should wax or wane with its predictive success and failures, the exact amounts hinging on the aggressiveness of forecasters’ ex ante theoretical wagers and on our willingness to give weight to forecasters’ ex post explanations for unexpected results. Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment THE END OF THE COLD WAR took practically everyone (including, it deserves to be recalled, the Soviets) by surprise. The essential facts surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union are well-known and uncontroversial, but their meaning for international relations theory is not. Some scholars have argued that the end of the Cold War poses a number of important epistemological problems for mainstream international relations; others responded initially by minimizing the theoretical importance of the event, and eventually by developing ex ante explanations that retrofit the Soviet collapse into one theoretical framework or another. The topic became the theme of a very important debate that stretched throughout the 1990s, one that had implications for the ultimate wisdom of employingascientificapproachtointernationalpolitics .Aswithmostcontroversies in the field, the major issues remain unresolved. At the very least, it would appear that the widespread failure to anticipate the most significant systemic event in the last fifty years of global politics should serve as a warning to all social scientists who predict the future. After all, there is no shortage of literature from the 1970s and 80s that got the outcome completelybackwards .1 Overthecourseoftheprecedingthreedecades,international relations had undergone a fundamental shift in its identity, moving from the humanities into the social sciences, and its scholars took pride in the progress being made in their sophisticated, scientific understanding of politics. The sudden end of bipolarity was a rude awakening, a reminder that there are limits to what can be learned. In a scathing indictment of the field, John Lewis Gaddis argued that “no approach to the study of international relations claiming both foresight and 3 On Predicting International Affairs 58 Chapter 3 competence should have failed to see it coming. None actually did so, though, and that fact ought to raise questions about the methods we have developed for trying to understand world politics.”2 Neorealism, the dominant unified theory of international relations, bore the brunt of the criticism.3 While scholars of that school sought to reconcile the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union with their core proposition that states value survival above all else, constructivists of various stripes have broadly interpreted the Cold War’s end as evidence of the importance of ideas and norms in international politics.4 Many constructivists felt that the collapse of bipolarity could herald not only systemic transformation, but also an essential change in the way international politics operated. Neorealists, theoretically conservative by nature, were generally disinclined to grant the possibility of fundamental systemic change. As Kenneth Waltz had argued, “through all the changes of boundaries , of social, economic and political form, of economic and military activity, the substance and style of international politics remains strikingly constant.”5 The concept of such change is at the heart of modern debates between rationalist and constructivist approaches to international politics.6 “On the most fundamental level,” Fischer has pointed out, “neorealism and [constructivism] clash over the age-old question of whether human affairs are defined by continuity or change.”7 Whereas mainstream theory tends to treat state motivations and behavior as constants due to the immutable structure of the system, constructivism allows for the possibility that a state in 2014 might act completely differently from one in 1914 because the dominant beliefs of the “micro-foundations” of states—people—could have changed. Hardly anyone from either school of thought, however, saw the end of the Cold War on the horizon. Analysts of international politics also missed the manner in which that war would end: peacefully, “quietly,” with hardly a shot being fired.8 Asimpossibleasitwouldhaveseemedjustadecadebefore,themightySoviet military-industrial colossus imploded, an event that no one with any knowledge of history would have expected. Paul Kennedy spoke for the vast majority when he argued that there was “nothing in the character or tradition of the Russian state to suggest that it could ever accept imperial decline gracefully.”9 War, or at least the threat of war, was long considered by many to be almost a necessary condition for important political change.10 Broad systemic change had simply never occurred without a fight. Perhaps this aspect of the Cold War’s demise was in fact impossible to predict using the rule book with which many scholars...

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