5. What value do international-relations scholars provide that foreign-policy practitioners do not?

Francis Fukuyama: I think that IR specialists are less helpful than comparativists with good local knowledge of specific countries, like Thomas Barfield on Afghanistan.  That is the big hole that could be filled by academic specialists.  The IR people add value only marginally, unless they are also very knowledgeable about particular regions.

Joseph S. Nye: Scholars have the luxury of time to think. I found that when I was in policy positions, I had little time to think, and I drew upon intellectual capital that had been formed before I became a practitioner. But scholars have to do a better job of making their ideas accessible to busy practitioners.

Kenneth Waltz: We have a broader and longer perspective and by and large a better sense of history.

John Mearsheimer: Unlike practitioners, scholars have time to think long and hard about the big issues of the day and they have tenure, which allows them to make controversial arguments and not risk losing their jobs.

James Fearon: The major decisions in U.S. foreign policy are made by an incredibly small number of people, who are influenced -- a lot or a little depending on the case -- by information and arguments produced by an incredibly large number of people.  The latter set includes myriad foreign policy practitioners, journalists, Congressional staffers, think tank analysts, and some international relations scholars.

International relations scholars can provide either data -- facts -- that are unknown to the policy community and that can change thinking, or in some cases theoretical arguments or frameworks that can have indirect effects on shaping policy debates.  In addition, many of the players in this ecosystem, including the small number at the top who make the big decisions, have been influenced at one time or another by courses or reading work by international relations scholars.

Alexander Wendt: Well, educating future generations about world politics for one, but beyond that scholars a) have the luxury of being able to step back from events to see the longer run, b) provide an independent standpoint outside the government for criticizing foreign policy, and c) sometimes they can come up with new ideas or ways of thinking that in principle could change world politics.

Robert Keohane: A long-term historical and systemic perspective, questioning the conventional wisdom that may be difficult or costly for practitioners to question, an outsider's reflective and critical analysis, attention to the systematic use of evidence. We do not have the ability to make point-level predictions in a meaningful way, in my view.

Martha Finnemore: Scholars can more easily take a long-term and big-picture perspective on world events. They can be helpful in identifying trends and patterns that may be hard to see in the often-frenetic world of policymaking. The challenge is to turn big-picture thoughts into useful recommendations. 

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita: Analytic rigor and methods for testing alternative tactical and strategic responses to issues as distinct from seat-of-the-pants guess work by practitioners. Fortunately practitioners are increasingly taking advantage of academically-developed analytic methods to improve the quality of pre-decision making assessments.

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