Carmen Medina is the CIA’s former Deputy Director of Intelligence and a member of The Cipher Brief network of experts. Her unique insights will be featured regularly on TCB.
Having started my professional career in 1978, I've seen my fair share of international affairs and bust-ups—everything from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 to the Great Recession of 2008. As a CIA analyst, your goal is to divorce yourself from all personal bias and opinion. This, of course, is impossible; all of us, no matter how well-trained or professional, hold values that color how we process information in the first place. I bend toward optimism; sometimes that helped, like when I believed in the 1980s that black majority rule in South Africa would occur sooner rather than later and without a bloody conflagration. My optimism tricked me, however, when I thought sanity would prevail in Yugoslavia before it devolved into civil war.
But at its best, a career as a CIA analyst should enhance your ability to see the world more clearly for what it is. Over the years, I've amassed a list of guidelines I turn to again and again to understand how humans and governments interact. Let me share a few of the ones that have provided the most utility.
There are no good guys. Sad but true and brought home to me most recently by the last few years in Syria. I'm not even clear any more as to what the term “good guys” is supposed to describe. Do we mean actors who will consistently do the bidding of the U.S. in a particular region of the world? Good luck with that! Do we mean individuals who will stand up for democracy and individual freedom even when those concepts don't particularly work in their cultural context? That won't last long.
Sometimes there are not-as-bad guys. Some individuals are more consistent or trustworthy than others. And some leaders are more effective, although it's important to note that LEADERSHIP is a value-neutral concept. Effective leadership skills can take a group in a good direction...or in a disastrous one. I was discussing this concept recently with a friend who offered this useful distinction: Strong leaders get us into a mess; weak leaders let others get us into a mess.
Great powers aren't what they used to be, if they ever were. The temptation remains strong to use the resources of one nation-state to fix the problems of another. After all, the opinion-shapers argue, that's what great powers do. I'm trying to remember the last time this strategy worked. World War Two? Perhaps the great success of the West, particularly the United States, in helping Germany and Japan relaunch after WWII led us all to assume this type of nation-building would be the rule and not, as it has turned out, the exception.
Here I am revealing one of the great weaknesses of the analytic process; the tendency to view most foreign policy goals as unobtainable. Policymakers are equipped with a different mental model. Given a 10 percent chance to accomplish the incredible, such as lasting peace in the Middle East, a foreign policy team may decide it's a gamble worth taking. Our democratic process provides them the mandate to do so, and it's the analysts' responsibility to support their decision-making as best they can.
Sometimes the best you can do is just kick the can down the road. It's a pejorative term one hears often: Government X doesn't have an answer so they're just kicking the can down the road. But perhaps we should reconsider our lowly opinion of can-kicking. Keeping a problematic situation on simmer can actually be a good thing, particularly given that the passage of time probably has solved more problems than any national security team. Over the years, I watched many artful can-kickers deal with issues such as Namibia, Angola, and Colombia. The trick is actually to keep the can on the pavement and away from the ditch.
Everything stays the same until it changes. This is nothing but a restatement of Isaac Newton's First Law of Motion, to wit: “Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.” I couldn't say it better.
Whether you're dealing with the seemingly never-ending tenure of an authoritarian ruler or the tenth year of an insurgency, it takes tons of energy to actually change the trajectory. My arbitrary rule was to take the time that I thought any given situation could last and multiply it by a factor of 8. I just made that number up, but I found it to be a useful rule of thumb. It's a tough spot to be the analyst on an account when the dynamic finally shifts because of “forces impressed upon it.” It's hard to identify those forces ahead of time and just as hard to persuade policymakers of their significance.
Speaking of policymakers, they often underestimate how much energy is required to create different realities and overestimate their ability to control the new trajectory. Even the current poster child for strong leadership, Russian President Vladimir Putin, having found Ukraine to be a harder problem than he imagined, is now trying to shape events in Syria. Good luck with that!
