What We Talk About When We Talk About the ‘Blob’

I was watching this conversation between Bob Wright and Tom Wright, and I found it to be very frustrating. The discussion about the meaning and definition of the “Blob” could have been productive, but I don’t think it was. The conversation kept coming back to the question of diversity of views among foreign policy professionals. Bob Wright acknowledged that every group or school of thought has some diversity of views. Not all restrainers agree on everything, and not all Blobsters have identical views on all questions. Tom Wright took this as proof that the “Blob” moniker didn’t reflect the reality of think tanks and the foreign policy establishment, where there are at least some dissenting views. This was frustrating because there doesn’t have to be total unanimity on every single issue for there to be a “Blob” with a narrow range of views, a propensity for groupthink, and a preference for hawkishness and “do somethingism.”

Two enforcers of foreign policy orthodoxy might have a vigorous debate about applying sanctions to a particular country, but they would join together to condemn the person saying that sanctions are unjust and wrong. There may be room to argue over adding new security commitments, but if you want to prune some you will find there is no room left. There are core assumptions about the U.S. role in the world that have to be accepted if you are going to be accepted, and if you question or reject those assumptions you will receive no hearing. This seems undeniable and obvious.

Would-be defenders of the “Blob” frequently appeal to the presence of a relative handful of less hawkish scholars at various think tanks to claim that the general claim about the institutions and their biases isn’t true, but that is not a serious defense. For every one Micah Zenko, for example, there are two dozen reliable hegemonists that have never seen an intervention they couldn’t support. Using this as proof of a diversity of views would be like pointing to the existence of some small Hutterite or Mennonite community in pre-revolutionary Russia and then claiming that it is proof that Russia did not have an established church at the time. It is true that these communities existed, but it doesn’t disprove the larger claim.

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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.