The power of positive thinking?

Prime Minister Abe Shinzō Abe spoke with Jonathan Tepperman, managing editor of Foreign Affairs this month in an interview published under the heading "Japan Is Back."

The interview is fairly comprehensive, discussing Abenomics and Japan's economic problems, history issues, territorial disputes, the constitution, and security policy. Tepperman was not shy about confronting Abe, especially when it comes to Japan's imperial past.

The interview provides another glimpse at how foreign policy narratives coalesce. Reflecting on his first term as prime minister and discussing what he is doing differently this time, Abe said, "I have...started to use social media networks like Facebook. Oftentimes, the legacy media only partially quote what politicians say. This has prevented the public from understanding my true intentions. So I am now sending messages through Facebook and other networks directly to the public."

In other words, Abe is sensitive to the need to control the narrative at home and abroad. The narrative that Abe is trying to establish is that no problem is so daunting that Japan cannot overcome it. While he does not  say that "Japan is back" in this interview, that was the title of the speech he gave at CSIS in Washington, DC in February. As in that speech, the challenge for Abe is to acknowledge that his country faces serious difficulties — how else could he justify his program? — but then to show that Japan is more than capable of overcoming them. As Abe says, "I know that the current situation is difficult, and the world economy will have ups and downs. But that is the mandate I was given, and we are elbowing our way through."

Of course, in propagating this narrative, Abe has help from the "legacy media" around the world. For example, the cover of The Economist this week features a soaring Abe — garbed in Superman's tights — flanked by fighter jets.

Abe is determined to project an air of inevitability about his policies. Of course, in monetary policy, projecting an air of certainty may signal the credibility of the Bank of Japan's commitment to a higher rate of inflation, so perhaps there's something to Abe's positive thinking. As The Economist writes in its briefing, "Promoters of Abenomics say that changing perceptions will create a virtuous circle. Bigger company profits will engender wage rises, which will boost consumption, which will lead to renewed business investment, which will lead to profits."

But one must be sensitive to the fact that this is all an exercise in narrative formation. Though Abe has promised to "elbow through," he has not in fact done so yet. As Michael Cucek shows, there are competing narratives even for the first quarter GDP figures that are being hailed as early indicators of the government's success. There are still blanks the government must fill in when it comes to its growth strategy. The demographic challenge continues to loom, and will not be elbowed through so easily, unless Abe is sitting on a plan for mass immigration. The point is not that there aren't encouraging signs or that Abe isn't in a favorable position to make progress, but rather that the "Japan is back" narrative requires minimizing or ignoring the challenges.

There is a bigger question of what exactly it means that Japan is "back." Will it be more assertive diplomatically or militarily? Will it spend more on its military? Will it remove the remaining restraints on its use of force at home and abroad? Abe gave some hints in his CSIS speech — "A rules-promoter, a commons' guardian, and an effective ally and partner to the U.S. and other democracies, MUST Japan be" — but it is still unclear what Abe's restored Japan would do differently, especially given that the Obama administration, "pivot" notwithstanding, has been exceedingly cautious in Asia. In other words, no matter how successful Abe's economic program, Japan will still be hemmed in by an ally that seems primarily interested in regional stability, by neighbors that distrust an assertive Japan, and not least by the Japanese public, which is not entirely keen on lifting all restraints on Japanese security policy.

These concerns, taken together with lingering questions about Japan's economy and whether Abenomics can produce sustainable growth, suggest caution is still in order.

Cognitive biases and the rise of China

Harvard's Alastair Iain Johnston has a must-read article in the Spring issue of International Security in which he dissects the spread of a meme of China's "new assertiveness" spread among policy analysts, the media, and scholars in the US in 2010. (Available for free as a pdf, at least for the time being.)

As Paul Pillar notes, Johnston not only raises questions about whether China's foreign policy has become more assertive since the 2008-2009 financial crisis, citing numerous examples of continuity, but he provides an important examination of how foreign-policy narratives form in the twenty-first century. By using memetics — the process by which an idea or belief spreads from mind to mind — Johnston provides a new way of thinking about how conventional wisdom forms. As Johnston notes, the media has played an agenda-setting role before, but with the emergence of the blog and the rise of Twitter as a medium for the exchange of serious ideas, foreign-policy discourse, especially in the US, seems qualitatively and quantitatively different, not just moving faster but also occurring in much greater volume than ever before.

After all, not too long ago to receive the latest conventional wisdom on foreign policy you had to wait for the latest issue of, say, Foreign Affairs to arrive in the mail, with a steady diet of newspaper op-eds and weekly magazine articles to tide you over. Now in the time between issues of Foreign Affairs you can read daily the fifteen blogs at the website of the Council on Foreign Relations (which publishes Foreign Affairs), not to mention the fifteen blogs at Foreign Policy's website and numerous other blogs hosted by think-tanks and publications, and the Twitter feeds of the contributors to these blogs and magazines. This all amounts to what Johnston calls a "discursive tidal wave."

Johnston talks about first-mover advantages and herding when it comes to the formation of prevailing narratives in foreign-policy discourse, but there is another, related problem Johnston doesn't explicitly mention but more or less illustrates in his essay. Namely, with so much data streaming past our eyes, the dangers from the cognitive biases are surely heightened. As Daniel Kahneman writes in Thinking, Fast and Slow, the human mind is "a machine for jumping to conclusions." Presumably the more information analysts must sift through, the more they're likely to fall victim to confirmation biases, the halo effect, the availability heuristic, and other mental shortcuts that can lead to erroneous conclusions. Human beings did not need to invent the Internet to struggle with these biases — and one can easily argue that policymakers have always fallen prey to them — but the Internet is uniquely suited to encourage Kahneman's "fast thinking" (intuitive thinking in the face of uncertainty).

Johnston's article, then, is a note of caution to be sensitive to how foreign-policy narratives form today, a warning to analysts to not take shortcuts but instead to use careful scientific reasoning before reaching conclusions and, in the case of China, to be sensitive to history, to avoid making inferences from a small sample size, and to be clear about what they think is driving China's behavior. There probably isn't much that can be done about the state of foreign-policy discourse today, but one can hope that the high-speed, high-volume discourse is at least more amenable to self-correction than the older discourse.

(For other comments on this essay see Daniel Drezner and Graham Webster. Drezner's comment that Johnston falls victim to ahistoricism himself is probably right — I would have liked to see a bit more discussion of how conventional wisdom formed in US foreign policy in the past, beyond a handful of references to media studies articles on the media's role as agenda setter.)