Jeffrey A Friedman
Biographic Data
| ID | 4096772 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeffrey A Friedman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeffrey A |
| FAMILY NAME | Friedman |
| SIGNATURE | FRIEDMAN J A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Dartmouth College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 129 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Strategy Is Only Partly an Illusion: “Relative Foresight” as an Objective Standard for Evaluating Foreign Policy Competence
Foreign policymakers must grapple with complexity, uncertainty, and subjectivity. These challenges raise the possibility that “strategy is an illusion”: that there is no reliable method for assessing skill at managing international politics. By contrast, we show that researchers can objectively evaluate a critical component of foreign policy competence using a standard we call “relative foresight,” defined as decision-makers’ ability to anticipat…
The Myth of a Bipartisan Golden Age for U.S. Foreign Policy: The Truman-Eisenhower Consensus Remains
Scholars and practitioners of U.S. foreign policy commonly describe the early Cold War as a lost golden age of bipartisan consensus. This article uses public opinion data, congressional voting patterns, and party platform statements to refute this conventional wisdom. In fact, the core internationalist principles that enjoyed bipartisan agreement during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations retain widespread approval from Democrats and Republ…
Defining Rationality in Security Studies: Expected Utility, Theory-Driven Reasoning, and the Vietnam War
Issue-Image Trade-Offs and the Politics of Foreign Policy: How Leaders Use Foreign Policy Positions to Shape Their Personal Images
This article explains how leaders can use foreign policy issues to shape their personal images. It argues, in particular, that presidents and presidential candidates can use hawkish foreign policies to craft valuable impressions of leadership strength. This dynamic can give leaders incentives to take foreign policy positions that are more hawkish than what voters actually want. The article documents the causal foundations of this argument with a …
Progressive Grand Strategy: A Synthesis and Critique
This article evaluates emerging progressive ideas about US grand strategy. Progressives’ distinctive analytic premise is that structural inequality undermines America's national interests. To combat this problem, progressives recommend retrenching US primacy in a manner that resembles the grand strategy of restraint. However, progressives also seek to build a more democratic international order that can facilitate new forms of global collective a…
Is US grand strategy dead? The political foundations of deep engagement after Donald Trump
International Relations scholars frequently warn that the American political system has become too fractured to sustain a coherent grand strategy. This perception generally rests on two premises: that President Donald Trump led an unprecedented assault on established principles of US foreign policy, and that Democrats and Republicans have become so polarized that they can no longer agree on a common vision for global leadership. By contrast, this…
War and Chance: Assessing Uncertainty in International Politics
Priorities for Preventive Action: Explaining Americans’ Divergent Reactions to 100 Public Risks
Why do Americans’ priorities for combating risks like terrorism, climate change, and violent crime often seem so uncorrelated with the dangers that those risks objectively present? Many scholars believe the answer to this question is that heuristics, biases, and ignorance cause voters to misperceive risk magnitudes. By contrast, this article argues that Americans’ risk priorities primarily reflect judgments about the extent to which some victims …
Analytic Confidence and Political Decision‐Making: Theoretical Principles and Experimental Evidence From National Security Professionals
When making decisions under uncertainty, it is important to distinguish between the probability that a judgment is true and the confidence analysts possess in drawing their conclusions. Yet analysts and decision‐makers often struggle to define “confidence” in this context, and many ways that scholars use this term do not necessarily facilitate decision‐making under uncertainty. To help resolve this confusion, we argue for disaggregating analytic …
The Value of Precision in Probability Assessment: Evidence from a Large-Scale Geopolitical Forecasting Tournament
Scholars, practitioners, and pundits often leave their assessments of uncertainty vague when debating foreign policy, arguing that clearer probability estimates would provide arbitrary detail instead of useful insight. We provide the first systematic test of this claim using a data set containing 888,328 geopolitical forecasts. We find that coarsening numeric probability assessments in a manner consistent with common qualitative expressions—inclu…
Behavioral Consequences of Probabilistic Precision: Experimental Evidence from National Security Professionals
National security is one of many fields where experts make vague probability assessments when evaluating high-stakes decisions. This practice has always been controversial, and it is often justified on the grounds that making probability assessments too precise could bias analysts or decision makers. Yet these claims have rarely been submitted to rigorous testing. In this paper, we specify behavioral concerns about probabilistic precision into fa…
Using Power Laws to Estimate Conflict Size
Casualty counts are often controversial, and thorough research can only go so far in resolving such debates—there will almost always be missing data, and thus, a need to draw inferences about how comprehensively violence has been recorded. This article addresses that challenge by developing an estimation strategy based on the observation that violent events are generally distributed according to power laws, a pattern that structures expectations …
Testing the Surge: Why Did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007
Why did violence decline in Iraq in 2007? Many policymakers and scholars credit the “surge,” or the program of U.S. reinforcements and doctrinal changes that began in January 2007. Others cite the voluntary insurgent stand-downs of the Sunni Awakening or say that the violence had simply run its course with the end of a wave of sectarian cleansing; still others credit an interaction between the surge and the Awakening. The difference matters for p…
Civil War Intervention and the Problem of Iraq1: Civil War Intervention and the Problem of Iraq
Outside intervention in civil warfare is important for humanitarian, theoretical, and practical policy reasons—since 2006, much of the debate over the war in Iraq has turned on the danger of external intervention if the United States were to withdraw. Yet, the literature on intervention has been compartmented in ways that have made it theoretically incomplete and unsuitable as a guide to policy. We therefore integrate and expand upon the theoreti…
Manpower and Counterinsurgency: Empirical Foundations for Theory and Doctrine
How does manpower affect counterinsurgency? Important debates about counterinsurgency theory, military doctrine, force planning, and ongoing military operations revolve around assumptions about the role manpower plays in determining counterinsurgency outcomes. But these assumptions have not, by and large, been subjected to large-n analysis. This paper helps serve that role by examining new data on counterinsurgents’ deployments across 171 campaig…
Testing the Surge: Why Did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007
Why did violence decline in Iraq in 2007? Many policymakers and scholars credit the “surge,” or the program of U.S. reinforcements and doctrinal changes that began in January 2007. Others cite the voluntary insurgent stand-downs of the Sunni Awakening or say that the violence had simply run its course with the end of a wave of sectarian cleansing; still others credit an interaction between the surge and the Awakening. The difference matters for p…
Behavioral Consequences of Probabilistic Precision: Experimental Evidence from National Security Professionals
National security is one of many fields where experts make vague probability assessments when evaluating high-stakes decisions. This practice has always been controversial, and it is often justified on the grounds that making probability assessments too precise could bias analysts or decision makers. Yet these claims have rarely been submitted to rigorous testing. In this paper, we specify behavioral concerns about probabilistic precision into fa…
Priorities for Preventive Action: Explaining Americans’ Divergent Reactions to 100 Public Risks
Why do Americans’ priorities for combating risks like terrorism, climate change, and violent crime often seem so uncorrelated with the dangers that those risks objectively present? Many scholars believe the answer to this question is that heuristics, biases, and ignorance cause voters to misperceive risk magnitudes. By contrast, this article argues that Americans’ risk priorities primarily reflect judgments about the extent to which some victims …
Manpower and Counterinsurgency: Empirical Foundations for Theory and Doctrine
How does manpower affect counterinsurgency? Important debates about counterinsurgency theory, military doctrine, force planning, and ongoing military operations revolve around assumptions about the role manpower plays in determining counterinsurgency outcomes. But these assumptions have not, by and large, been subjected to large-n analysis. This paper helps serve that role by examining new data on counterinsurgents’ deployments across 171 campaig…
The Value of Precision in Probability Assessment: Evidence from a Large-Scale Geopolitical Forecasting Tournament
Scholars, practitioners, and pundits often leave their assessments of uncertainty vague when debating foreign policy, arguing that clearer probability estimates would provide arbitrary detail instead of useful insight. We provide the first systematic test of this claim using a data set containing 888,328 geopolitical forecasts. We find that coarsening numeric probability assessments in a manner consistent with common qualitative expressions—inclu…
Civil War Intervention and the Problem of Iraq1: Civil War Intervention and the Problem of Iraq
Outside intervention in civil warfare is important for humanitarian, theoretical, and practical policy reasons—since 2006, much of the debate over the war in Iraq has turned on the danger of external intervention if the United States were to withdraw. Yet, the literature on intervention has been compartmented in ways that have made it theoretically incomplete and unsuitable as a guide to policy. We therefore integrate and expand upon the theoreti…
Using Power Laws to Estimate Conflict Size
Casualty counts are often controversial, and thorough research can only go so far in resolving such debates—there will almost always be missing data, and thus, a need to draw inferences about how comprehensively violence has been recorded. This article addresses that challenge by developing an estimation strategy based on the observation that violent events are generally distributed according to power laws, a pattern that structures expectations …
Issue-Image Trade-Offs and the Politics of Foreign Policy: How Leaders Use Foreign Policy Positions to Shape Their Personal Images
This article explains how leaders can use foreign policy issues to shape their personal images. It argues, in particular, that presidents and presidential candidates can use hawkish foreign policies to craft valuable impressions of leadership strength. This dynamic can give leaders incentives to take foreign policy positions that are more hawkish than what voters actually want. The article documents the causal foundations of this argument with a …
Analytic Confidence and Political Decision‐Making: Theoretical Principles and Experimental Evidence From National Security Professionals
When making decisions under uncertainty, it is important to distinguish between the probability that a judgment is true and the confidence analysts possess in drawing their conclusions. Yet analysts and decision‐makers often struggle to define “confidence” in this context, and many ways that scholars use this term do not necessarily facilitate decision‐making under uncertainty. To help resolve this confusion, we argue for disaggregating analytic …
Is US grand strategy dead? The political foundations of deep engagement after Donald Trump
International Relations scholars frequently warn that the American political system has become too fractured to sustain a coherent grand strategy. This perception generally rests on two premises: that President Donald Trump led an unprecedented assault on established principles of US foreign policy, and that Democrats and Republicans have become so polarized that they can no longer agree on a common vision for global leadership. By contrast, this…
Manpower and Counterinsurgency: Empirical Foundations for Theory and Doctrine
How does manpower affect counterinsurgency? Important debates about counterinsurgency theory, military doctrine, force planning, and ongoing military operations revolve around assumptions about the role manpower plays in determining counterinsurgency outcomes. But these assumptions have not, by and large, been subjected to large-n analysis. This paper helps serve that role by examining new data on counterinsurgents’ deployments across 171 campaig…
Testing the Surge: Why Did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007
Why did violence decline in Iraq in 2007? Many policymakers and scholars credit the “surge,” or the program of U.S. reinforcements and doctrinal changes that began in January 2007. Others cite the voluntary insurgent stand-downs of the Sunni Awakening or say that the violence had simply run its course with the end of a wave of sectarian cleansing; still others credit an interaction between the surge and the Awakening. The difference matters for p…
Civil War Intervention and the Problem of Iraq1: Civil War Intervention and the Problem of Iraq
Outside intervention in civil warfare is important for humanitarian, theoretical, and practical policy reasons—since 2006, much of the debate over the war in Iraq has turned on the danger of external intervention if the United States were to withdraw. Yet, the literature on intervention has been compartmented in ways that have made it theoretically incomplete and unsuitable as a guide to policy. We therefore integrate and expand upon the theoreti…
Using Power Laws to Estimate Conflict Size
Casualty counts are often controversial, and thorough research can only go so far in resolving such debates—there will almost always be missing data, and thus, a need to draw inferences about how comprehensively violence has been recorded. This article addresses that challenge by developing an estimation strategy based on the observation that violent events are generally distributed according to power laws, a pattern that structures expectations …
Behavioral Consequences of Probabilistic Precision: Experimental Evidence from National Security Professionals
National security is one of many fields where experts make vague probability assessments when evaluating high-stakes decisions. This practice has always been controversial, and it is often justified on the grounds that making probability assessments too precise could bias analysts or decision makers. Yet these claims have rarely been submitted to rigorous testing. In this paper, we specify behavioral concerns about probabilistic precision into fa…
Analytic Confidence and Political Decision‐Making: Theoretical Principles and Experimental Evidence From National Security Professionals
When making decisions under uncertainty, it is important to distinguish between the probability that a judgment is true and the confidence analysts possess in drawing their conclusions. Yet analysts and decision‐makers often struggle to define “confidence” in this context, and many ways that scholars use this term do not necessarily facilitate decision‐making under uncertainty. To help resolve this confusion, we argue for disaggregating analytic …
The Value of Precision in Probability Assessment: Evidence from a Large-Scale Geopolitical Forecasting Tournament
Scholars, practitioners, and pundits often leave their assessments of uncertainty vague when debating foreign policy, arguing that clearer probability estimates would provide arbitrary detail instead of useful insight. We provide the first systematic test of this claim using a data set containing 888,328 geopolitical forecasts. We find that coarsening numeric probability assessments in a manner consistent with common qualitative expressions—inclu…
War and Chance: Assessing Uncertainty in International Politics
Priorities for Preventive Action: Explaining Americans’ Divergent Reactions to 100 Public Risks
Why do Americans’ priorities for combating risks like terrorism, climate change, and violent crime often seem so uncorrelated with the dangers that those risks objectively present? Many scholars believe the answer to this question is that heuristics, biases, and ignorance cause voters to misperceive risk magnitudes. By contrast, this article argues that Americans’ risk priorities primarily reflect judgments about the extent to which some victims …
Progressive Grand Strategy: A Synthesis and Critique
This article evaluates emerging progressive ideas about US grand strategy. Progressives’ distinctive analytic premise is that structural inequality undermines America's national interests. To combat this problem, progressives recommend retrenching US primacy in a manner that resembles the grand strategy of restraint. However, progressives also seek to build a more democratic international order that can facilitate new forms of global collective a…
Is US grand strategy dead? The political foundations of deep engagement after Donald Trump
International Relations scholars frequently warn that the American political system has become too fractured to sustain a coherent grand strategy. This perception generally rests on two premises: that President Donald Trump led an unprecedented assault on established principles of US foreign policy, and that Democrats and Republicans have become so polarized that they can no longer agree on a common vision for global leadership. By contrast, this…
Issue-Image Trade-Offs and the Politics of Foreign Policy: How Leaders Use Foreign Policy Positions to Shape Their Personal Images
This article explains how leaders can use foreign policy issues to shape their personal images. It argues, in particular, that presidents and presidential candidates can use hawkish foreign policies to craft valuable impressions of leadership strength. This dynamic can give leaders incentives to take foreign policy positions that are more hawkish than what voters actually want. The article documents the causal foundations of this argument with a …
Strategy Is Only Partly an Illusion: “Relative Foresight” as an Objective Standard for Evaluating Foreign Policy Competence
Foreign policymakers must grapple with complexity, uncertainty, and subjectivity. These challenges raise the possibility that “strategy is an illusion”: that there is no reliable method for assessing skill at managing international politics. By contrast, we show that researchers can objectively evaluate a critical component of foreign policy competence using a standard we call “relative foresight,” defined as decision-makers’ ability to anticipat…
The Myth of a Bipartisan Golden Age for U.S. Foreign Policy: The Truman-Eisenhower Consensus Remains
Scholars and practitioners of U.S. foreign policy commonly describe the early Cold War as a lost golden age of bipartisan consensus. This article uses public opinion data, congressional voting patterns, and party platform statements to refute this conventional wisdom. In fact, the core internationalist principles that enjoyed bipartisan agreement during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations retain widespread approval from Democrats and Republ…
Defining Rationality in Security Studies: Expected Utility, Theory-Driven Reasoning, and the Vietnam War
Political science (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Economics (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Political economy (5 works)