Prediction is pointless...

Foreign affairs are my thing.  Some people are into baseball statistics, and some are into college football standings.  Some -- like me -- are into politics like that, but even that breaks down into subgroups of aficionados: campaign mavens, economic wonks, taxation nerds, and -- again like me -- foreign affairs junkies.

Today, The New York Times has a story on the leadership of North Korea.  It reminds me of the stories from Moscow in the the Cold War, when the highest order of foreign correspondent was the Kremlinologist, who owned that combination of wit and curiosity, cultural knowledge and people skills to penetrate the opaque Soviet system that was a mystery often even to the Soviet people themselves.  Some were celebrated in their time, like Walter Duranty, only to be embarrassed later.  Others have held up.  Don Oberdorfer, who in Moscow in the 1980s, I think was one of the, if not the, last of the Kremlinologists.  As I remember it, he covered the serial deaths of the last Soviet leaders leading to the death of the calcified USSR itself, by among other things, noticing the amount of limousine traffic in the night and how many lights remained on in government office buildings.

Oberdorfer is now a professor of journalism (lucky students), and he ironically spent most of his time in Japan covering Asia, especially the Korea story.  Pity he's not there now...

What's going to happen in North Korea?  And what will happen in Cuba?  How to react, edging those countries to positive places without either resorting to the heavy handed lecturing of the old Cold War America, but not standing idly by in a critical moment?  And what do you do if the whole thing goes to Hell in a handbasket?  (Imagine a nuclear-armed North Korea, riven by famine, ruled by out of touch apparatchiks and generals, facing a general breakdown of public order.  Scary.)  

That's what's so cool about foreign policy to me: the genius of figuring out a culture and where it wants to go, figuring out how that culture and its desires will interact with ours, and how to maneuver to make all that happen in a positive way...

But, and here's the deal, the instant you think you've got it all worked out -- you're the master chess player, the world at your mercy -- something pops up.  Swine Flu in Mexico, war in Chad, revolution in some other country you hadn't paid any attention to ... though if you had, you would have seen it coming.  Really, prediction is often pointless, or as the old punchline goes, God laughs...

(Modified 4/28/09)