Friday, January 18, 2013

“Big Bets and Black Swans”

Brookings Institution

 by: Sagar Rijal


 With the nation’s capital gearing up for President Obama’s inauguration celebration, the pundit class is busy prognosticating on his second term agenda. The ongoing issues in domestic politics – the recriminations on the fiscal cliff deal, the necessary but elusive grand budget compromise, gun control regulations – are certain to carry over from the dying days of the first term and engage the majority of the President’s time. However, a variety of ongoing and new challenges beyond the nation’s borders seem poised to demand a greater share of his attention as well.
To mark the transition, the Brookings Institution unveiled its latest publication, Big Bets and Black Swans: A Presidential Briefing Book at a public discussion event on Thursday. In that book a number of Brookings fellows offer memos on what they view as the most salient foreign policy opportunities and challenges for the President to tackle and look out for in his second term. In the discussion moderated by NBC News’s David Gregory, two panels of authors held forth on their views on the “big bets and black swans” on the U.S. foreign policy.
Every new presidential term is greeted by the clichéd “unprecedented challenges.” The director of Foreign Policy at Brookings, Ambassador Martin Indyk did not deviate from the norm. Introducing the panel discussion, Indyk used a phrase – “a plastic moment” – to emphasize that the President faces a challenging and unsettled but ultimately malleable global arena as he enters his second term in office. The discussants enumerated the “big bets,” or opportunities and issues that are sure to be on the table: satisfactorily resolving the Iranian nuclear issue; constructive engagement with China to nudge it towards a more responsible role as a regional and global player; helping to prevent the possible implosion of the Euro debt crisis, among others. David Gregory wondered if there was enough “bandwidth” in the administration, given the plethora of domestic issues to deal with, to handle all of these myriad foreign policy challenges successfully.  Robert Kagan responded that the decision to confront any of these issues, especially Iran, is not a function of choice but of necessity.
On the other hand, unexpected and unanticipated new developments might totally blind-side the administration, grabbing its attention and sapping its capacity. These so-called “black swans” – low probability but high impact events – are by definition unpredictable. Yet another panel of Brookings analysts took a stab at speculating some possibilities: disorderly breakdown of the Eurozone; accelerating climate change in the form of more catastrophic weather events, collapse of the Palestinian Authority, and even a possible revolution in Saudi Arabia leading to the fall of the House of Saud. The “black swans” seem improbable; but that is precisely the point: to analyze and plan for those highly improbable and yet impactful foreign policy crises.
The discussion thus was informative enough in its survey of possible foreign policy direction. But whether the President and his administration heed the myriad recommendations will only be known long after the inauguration parades have passed.

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For further information on the Foreign Policy at Brookings project and to download Big Bets and Black Swans: A Presidential Briefing Book, go to this link: http://www.brookings.edu/research/interactives/2013/big-bets-black-swans

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~Sagar Rijal, ABD, is spending the final semester of his graduate assistantship doing research for his dissertation in Washington, D.C. Every week he will attend meetings, seminars, or presentations at think tanks and develop a column for the Bulletin community.