One Foreign Policy Crisis at a Time, Please
Our limited attention spans.
University of Illinois international relations scholar Nicholas Grossman observes,
Striking how “War Breaks Out” gets much more media attention than “Ongoing War Continues,” even if the latter is larger scale. And how Israel-Palestine gets much more attention and reaction in the West than, say, Armenia-Azerbaijan.Not necessarily saying it shouldn’t. Observation, not judgment.
To which I responded, “It is my longstanding observation that Americans can pay attention to one and only one foreign policy crisis at a time.”
It’s something I’ve noticed going back to the plethora of mini- and not-so-mini wars that broke out in the aftermath of the Cold War but also our own overlapping wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the wider region. When we invaded Iraq, it was as though we’d left Afghanistan, and only dramatic events there could recapture our attention.
Now, I’m not sure most Americans would have cared about the Armenia-Azerbaijan situation, anyway. But you’ll notice that Ukraine has moved to the back burner of the news. Oh, and more people have died in an earthquake in Afghanistan than in the Israel-Gaza war.
It’s also the case that breaking events command our attention more than longstanding ones. OTB caught on in its early days because I was one of a relative handful of bloggers in the run-up to and first few months of the Iraq War with military experience and international relations expertise. Over time, my coverage of that conflict steadily decreased. I blogged a lot about the Syrian civil war in its first few months and hardly at all since. Ditto Ukraine. I suspect that’ll be true in the case of the Israeli crisis if in fact it settles into the “long war” that Netanyahu promised.
Eventually, any crisis becomes “normal” if it continues long enough. As much as I blogged about Donald Trump from 2015 to 2017, it was hard to find anything new to say after a while.
After the first couple of years here, I developed a rule that “Known idiot says something stupid” would no longer be the regular subject of blog posts. Columnists and other bloggers who routinely put out garbage just got ignored rather than Fisked because what was the point? While there was an obvious answer with regard to Trump—he held a position of tremendous power, after all—there came a point where it was just beating a dead horse. Unless he outdid himself with outrageousness, it was just preaching to the choir to point out that he was unfit to be President.
And American domestic politics is far more interesting to the average OTB reader, at least to the degree the comment section is any indication. Regular updates on how awful things are in Syria, Ukraine, or the Gaza Strip become very niche once that becomes SNAFU.
Alas, as the events of the last 72 hours show, sometimes normal degrees of crisis burst into flames, grabbing our attention again. At least for a while.
This seems like the sort of time where North Korea will do something provocative, as well. There’s some chance they’ll be given something to go away for a while.
It sucks to be the President, if you’re actually trying to do a good job.
The cynic in me would suggest that public indifference to foreign policy is why foreign policy is generally better-run than domestic affairs. The attention of the ignorant is unhelpful. We’d be better off today if large sections of the American population would stop paying attention to politics and get back to watching The Bachelor. The ignorance of foreign policy is just a subset of the general American ignorance of everything.
@Michael Reynolds: On the other hand, too many people watching The Apprentice and not paying attention to politics was how we got the notion that Trump was a very stable genius and would make a great President.
Just sayin’.
And we get to face multiple crises without an ambassador in Israel and a depleted, unassigned senior officer corps. All because the and its voters are more interested voting for and empowering radicals than they are in governing. These specific crises were not entirely predictable but it is predictable that we will have crises. That is why we need to be prepared instead of grandstand to make sure you win the next primary.
Steve
I think part of it is attention spans but also navel-gazing. The events that tend to generate the most “engagement” tend to be those with a nexus to US politics, especially partisanship, ideology, and culture wars. That dynamic doesn’t exist for events in small countries in the Caucusas that few Americans have heard of.
You may remember that one of my long-standing critiques here is how OTB is really “Inside the Beltway.” I get that focusing on domestic politics drives a lot of engagement (see the reasons above), and it can be fun to join the scrum in debates that are largely meaningless and forgotten with the next news cycle. But it’s also like eating dessert for every meal. It’s one reason why I really enjoy Steven’s more academic posts where the discussion and debates don’t devolve into the same partisan arguments – it’s content that really isn’t found anywhere else.
To be clear, I’m not telling you how to run your blog, and I’m still a regular here and greatly appreciate what you do, but I will register my preference for more of that kind of higher-level content and less outrage du jour.
Generally speaking, a good chunk of Americans are almost pathologically incurious about the rest of the world. They struggle to find many of these places on a map. Of course they are going to struggle with paying attention if they DNGAF.
As a third-culture kid, I’ve always found it sort of baffling and pretty embarrassing.
I wouldn’t confuse indifference with deference.
This is just such an incredibly complex situation to wade into.
Israel has been an apartheid oppressor forever and Palestine has every right to revolt.
But Hamas is not the Palestine people, it is a terrorist organization.
And Israel has every right to defend itself against terrorism.
Add onto that the complete lack of knowledge of who is supporting Hamas, and why in the world Israel didn’t see this coming…
Yeah…no…have at it kids.
@Michael Reynolds: Yes, quite. “More democracy” is a nice slogan but bad governance. (although a similar thing holds true in investing, retail investors do rather worse if they are active, rather much worse… in many things for the average non-specialists no matter the subject, less is often more (better)).
@Lounsbury:
There are certain things amateurs imagine they understand as well as professionals. Politics, finance, cooking and my occupation: writing. Everyone who can make toast imagines they could handle a shift in a busy restaurant kitchen. Nope. And absolutely everyone thinks they can write a book. Nope. About 1 in 10 people who try are admitted to Harvard Law School. Maybe 1 out of 1000 aspiring writers ever publish. But unlike foreign policy, ignorance of cooking or writing rarely results in people being killed.
@Michael Reynolds:
You underestimate my culinary skills…
@Michael Reynolds: “Everyone who can make toast imagines they could handle a shift in a busy restaurant kitchen. ”
Nah, people aren’t THAT delusional. Working a line is obviously hard work.
They think they can own and run a restaurant…
@Michael Reynolds:
I firmly believe that everyone has a book inside them. Most of the time it’s a terrible, awful thing, the equivalent of a misshapen fetus that is missing a brain.
I am not certain whether it is good for the person to get it out. In theory you would want that monstrosity out of yourself, but too often it just encourages people to try again.
Back when I worked for Amazon, we were doing usability testing on some feature in the book space. I added the following to the post-testing ”chat” questions: “how’s your book coming?”
And we discovered that our entire user sample was people who were writing books, except for one woman who said that she was reading some popular book but was thinking about abandoning it because it was too formulaic.
@wr:
You don’t need to only be able to make toast to be mistaken about being able to own and run a restaurant. Portland is chockablock full of Cordon Bleu culinary school graduates who’ve gone banko several times and are “working at X until I can find a place for my next concept restaurant.”
@Michael Reynolds:
I wrote a book about my cat in 4th or 5th grade. At the time, everyone told me it was a fantastic book and that I was a great author.
Sadly for the literary world, I never had a chance to write another book.
@Andy:
What matters is this: what did the cat think of the book?
@Andy:
It’s never too late. Surely you still have a cat.
@Michael Reynolds:
Since the advent of Kindle Direct Publishing, that number may no longer be true says an author of 30 books there.