Volume 98, Issue 5, September 2022

While much of foreign policy analysis seeks to replicate successes, this special issue asks whether it might make more sense to examine how to avoid catastrophic failure. In their introduction, the guest editors outline the goals of the special issue and explore whether a Hippocratic oath for international affairs would be enough.

This article draws lessons from the Munich crisis of 1938, the Suez crisis and war of 1956 and the Iraq war of 2003. While failure was over-determined in these situations, there are many everyday crises that actors who understand ‘how not to run international affairs’ stop from turning into disasters.

This article examines sanctions imposed on Iraq between the two Gulf wars and on Iran from 2018. In both cases sanctions imposed crippling costs but the primary goals weren't achieved. Drezner warns against sanctioning states not articulating clear and consistent demands, as well as weak linkages between scholars and policy-makers.

The WTO has become an almost perfect example of how not to negotiate. This article outlines the breakdown in the organization, then examines the bargaining failures responsible for this. It concludes by sharing the main ‘dos’ and ‘don'ts’ for trade negotiation.

When learning from financial crises, whether we adopt a long-term or short-term perspective matters. The response to financial crisis in 1931, 1997 and 2008 initially looked successful but immediate responses, driven by the sense that past mistakes needed to be avoided, set the stage for the next crisis.

EU policy-makers should learn lessons from key policy failures during the eurozone crisis and the COVID–19 pandemic. The mistakes were a result of delayed action and a gap between research and policy. If comprehensive reforms can't be made, policy-makers should find a middle ground between supranationalism and intergovernmentalism in crisis situations.

The narrative on US decline and China's rise is currently too focused on hard measures like GDP. Whether and how a hegemon declines is shaped by the strategic choices that both the challenger and the hegemon make. Nine possible futures over the next two decades are posited, dependent on the policy choices that leaders make at home.

Chinese elites expect to replace the US as the leading global power by 2049. How should the US respond? Two prevalent historical analogies are misleading: a Thucydides trap about power transition and a new Cold War. More promising is the cautionary narrative of sleepwalking into the First World War.

Debates on China's rise often focus on the continuity of the United States' hegemony and the liberal global order and ignore regional actors. Instead, this article suggests that as China rises it will first aim to secure regional primacy, by examining China's relations with India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Is foreign interference in domestic politics as effective and cheap as anticipated in current policy debates? This article draws on the Soviet assistance to the Chinese Communists from the 1920s to the 1940s to point to its short-term benefits and hidden costs, including unreliable proxies and problems for future relations.

This article questions why the West hasn't learned from failed interventions since the end of the Cold War. It argues that in the wake of the failure of ‘easy wars’ policy-makers turn to automated weapons. The lesson that technology cannot conquer the ‘fog of war’ to create costless victory is never learned.

Political reconciliation is a widely accepted narrative used by mediators as a guideline for action in all regions of the world. Yet the article draws on the case of Rwanda to show that reconciliation is not an unequivocal goal that mediators should pursue whatever the circumstances.

Based on the errors committed by policy-makers in learning from the past, the article identifies four ‘how not tos’ when learning from history. It then explores the extent to which these inform contemporary debates that view US–China relations through the lens of the Cold War.

This article identifies the four key dimensions of how scholars engage in policy and public debates. Paying careful attention to these can help avoid common pitfalls when ‘bridging the gap’. These four factors are applied to two case-studies: theory and policy in the US on ‘Democratic Peace’ and the ‘cult of relevance’ problem for scholars trying to contribute to peace-building in post-conflict states.