Fact-based journalism that sparks the Canadian conversation

Articles Business Environment Health Politics Arts & Culture Society

Special Series Hope You’re Well For the Love of the Game Living Rooms In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration Terra Cognita More special series >

For the Love of the Game

In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration

More special series >

Events The Walrus Talks The Walrus Video Room The Walrus Leadership Roundtables The Walrus Leadership Forums Article Club

The Walrus Video Room

The Walrus Leadership Roundtables

The Walrus Leadership Forums

Subscribe Renew your subscription Change your address Magazine Issues Newsletters Podcasts

Renew your subscription

The Walrus Lab Hire The Walrus Lab Amazon First Novel Award

Amazon First Novel Award

I’ve Spent Years Covering Wars. I’ve Learned Nobody Knows Anything

World leaders are no better at predicting the future than the rest of us—and may even be worse

Like most journalists, I came up local: student council, city hall, bigger city hall, Parliament. I didn’t do much journalism outside Canada for a long time, mostly because there seemed to be no way in but also because global affairs felt like the preserve of superbly educated people who understood the world’s exquisite subtleties.

When I started covering international relations more frequently, I began to realize that people who specialize in global affairs—decision makers, journalists, academics—aren’t necessarily finer thinkers just because their theatre is bigger and its stakes are higher.

Partly, this is because it’s just as easy to fake it, to surf, to bullshit at the highest levels, as it is at the corner store. In fact, it may be easier. You’ll be recognized the next time you poke your head into the corner store and reminded of what you got wrong yesterday, whereas you could flit forever from one visiting fellowship to the next without being reminded that you were wrong on Iraq or Brexit or whether United States president Donald Trump would make it. The food is usually better too.

Secondly, international relations is a bluffer’s game because the way the world works can’t be known: it’s a too complex system with too many variables. Even brilliant thinkers and conscientious students can’t get everything right—or even most things. The too easy belief that we understand things is what cognitive psychologists call the illusion of explanatory depth and, I think, what Hayek called the pretense of knowledge.

The more time I spent in drawing rooms and trouble spots, the more I found people who didn’t have the faintest idea what would happen next.

I come bearing anecdotes.

Conrad Black used to have something called the Hollinger Senior International Advisory Board, a loose committee of world leaders who’d gather annually for a day to discuss the state of the world. I mean, Henry Kissinger was on it, and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and William F. Buckley, Zbigniew Brzezinski, George Will, Lord Carrington, and, for a time before this particular story takes place, Margaret Thatcher.

The centre of gravity was well to the right but not monolithically so. They were well compensated and the workload wasn’t onerous. They made no decisions, but presumably, in a room like that, there’d be insight into unfolding events that would help a history buff run an international business.

By 2001, it had occurred to Black that there was room at these meetings for a second level of observers who could watch the advisory board work. He invited people from the Southam newspaper chain he then controlled, the future Postmedia chain. This outer-circle guest list included National Post editor Ken Whyte, Ottawa bureau chief Bob Fife, and me. Perhaps we could ingest some exhaled wisdom.

In June 2001, we sat in a big room at Blair House, near the White House in Washington, DC, in stiff-backed chairs against the walls, while the real heavyweights discussed great matters around a central table. At one point, the chat got hung up on a misunderstanding of a detail of the European Union’s admittedly confusing organizational structure. My EU education was then recent. I asked Ken Whyte whether I could jump in to clear things up. “I don’t think we’re supposed to talk,” Ken said.

The guest speaker for lunch was Donald Rumsfeld, then in his fifth month as President George W. Bush’s secretary of defence. Most of the questions were about Iraq. Lord Black asked what the response should be if Iraq developed a “deliverable nuclear capability.”

At one point, Rumsfeld noticed a little digital recorder perched on a fireplace mantel over his shoulder. “What’s this?” he said, his mood darkening immediately. A uniformed young military officer rushed in from outside the door and said, “Sir, that’s ours.” Rumsfeld was quickly mollified.

What stood out to me later was that all this happened three months before the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. The 9/11 pilots, we would learn later, had already completed flight training on American soil. No part of the looming calamity, or the decades of upheaval that would follow, was reflected in the remarks of Kissinger, Buckley, Will, Giscard, or Lord Carrington that day. How could they be?

To the extent Iraq eventually figured in the response to 9/11, it would prove to be a calamitous distraction that chastened future presidential administrations and emboldened their enemies. At least that’s how I read it. You might disagree. Even with hindsight, I’m not entirely sure I’m right.

One of Black’s hobbies in those days was trying to toughen me on the question of Jean Chrétien’s fitness to be Canada’s prime minister. I was a lead political writer at the paper he’d founded, the National Post, and I was soft on Chrétien. This was permitted, but Black........

© The Walrus