Anticipating the collapse? Political judgment and the debate over CIA assessments of the Soviet Union, 1975--1991

To contemporary observers, one of the most salient features of the collapse of the Soviet Union was the apparent inability of experts inside and outside the government to anticipate the collapse or even consider it as a serious possibility. This dissertation evaluates the performance of the CIA and academia by examining their assessments of the size and strength of the Soviet economy, its nuclear capabilities and intentions, and the debate over Mikhail Gorbachev and the effects of his reforms on the stability of the Soviet system.; In conducting this evaluation, the dissertation proposes that the quality of "political judgment" and its absence may explain the pattern of assessments in the Soviet case as well as assessments in international affairs more generally. Most scholarly explanations of assessment overestimate the importance of organizational and cognitive biases and reduce the art of assessment to one of procedural technique. However, common sense suggests that a faculty of judgment is necessary to determine both the ends and means of assessment as well as the nonstraightforward relationship between them.; This dissertation discovers the meaning of political judgment through a return to political philosophy in general and the thought of Aristotle in particular, and it defines political judgment as "the capacity and process by which the correct balance of universal and particular is found in a specific political issue." Political judgment is marked by a unique capacity to balance detachment and passionate engagement, and it is manifested through a process of distinguishing between and evaluating the relevance of political phenomena. The dissertation shows how most experts were surprised by the Soviet collapse or the changes under Gorbachev because of epistemologies that either rejected the classical conception of political judgment altogether or failed to preserve the reflectiveness necessary to understand the limits of totalitarian power.