In a world defined by scarcity, there will always be a bountiful harvest of bad predictions about the future. This is true for both foreign policy and Foreign Policy alike. In January 1989, East Germany’s leader, Erich Honecker, declared that the Berlin Wall would still be standing in “50 or even 100 years.” He turned out to be off by 49 to 99 years; the wall crumbled 10 months after his statement.
No one writing in the pages of this magazine has been as consequentially wrong as Honecker. Nonetheless, even a cursory perusal of Foreign Policy’s archives reveals some serious errors in foresight. One article in the Winter 1999-2000 issue by the Russia expert Daniel Treisman claimed that Boris Yeltsin’s successor as president of Russia would “find himself blocked in by the realities of Russia’s political game, pushed back toward a set of policies and a style of governing that closely resemble Yeltsin’s.” In retrospect, this seems like a poor description of Vladimir Putin’s style of governance. This is less Treisman’s fault than a consequence of the ever present danger of believing the status quo will persist.
