Description
Prediction has long been considered the gold standard for scientific inquiry—indeed, Karl Popper famously distinguished scientific inquiry from pseudoscience by the former’s ability to produce falsifiable predictions and the latter’s all-encompassing explanatory mutations. But while social sciences like International Relations (IR) have paid ample attention to predictions’ weight, relevance, and evaluation, far less attention has been paid to the quality of unpredictability and its strategic consequences. This absence is all the more glaring due to US President Donald Trump’s stated foreign policy doctrine of unpredictability, which seeks to exploit Trump’s personal erratic behaviour for strategic gain in international negotiations. While some pundits have dismissed this doctrine as a post hoc rationalization, this article takes seriously the possibility of a foreign policy based on unpredictability and seeks to unravel its possible implications. Rather than viewing unpredictability as inherently amorphous, this article seeks to typologize the phenomenon according to whether poor predictive capacity is due to a limited number of iterations, insufficient models built on incomplete historical data, or a larger metaphysical uncertainty as to the universe of possible outcomes. In its final section, it re-examines Trump’s invocations of unpredictability as an explanation for his foreign policy decision-making. Though Trump does not clarify what type of unpredictability he is referring to in the aggregate, this article argues each potential interpretation implies a different strategic scenario, with important implications for other states’ behaviour.
