Purity Tests and Political Reality
Kristoffer Ealy
I want to start this by being clear about something that should not be controversial but often is online: political scientists are not all experts in the same things.
Like most scholars, I have specific areas of focus. Mine are political behavior, political psychology, American government, and the First Amendment. That’s where I live intellectually — where I teach, research, and write most comfortably. And like every political scientist, I have working knowledge of foreign policy — you don’t get through a Ph.D. program without it — but that does not mean international relations is my primary specialty.
Anyone who has spent time in academia knows how this actually works. Departments don’t magically produce interchangeable experts like some sort of intellectual Costco bulk pack. Most of us have lanes. And yes, I’ve taught international relations before — but if I’m being honest, it was usually because the professor who normally taught it got sick, went on sabbatical, or the department was short on instructors that semester and started walking the halls asking, slightly panicked, “Does anyone here technically have a political science degree?” That’s not an indictment of the field. It’s just how universities actually function.
In fact, entire books have been written about how consistently bad the United States is at foreign policy once you zoom out and look past the victory speeches. Stephen Walt’s The Hell of Good Intentions is basically a book-length sigh explaining how American foreign policy elites keep repeating the same mistakes with great confidence and terrible results. With that in mind, I genuinely struggle to think of a single American president who was good at foreign policy in any holistic sense of the word — unless the standard is “made it through the term without accidentally destabilizing an entire region.”
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