Dan Drezner points to an article in the 100th anniversary edition of the American Political Science Review looking back at international relations essays in said publication. It seems its scholars failed to predict the Russian Revolution, World War I, the failure of the League of Nations, the limits of Idealism, the factors that would lead to World War II, and the Cold War.
Social science, generally, is much better at explaining the past than predicting the future. There is, after all, much less data available on the latter. Or, as my major professor Don Snow used to say, “The future is a lot harder to predict than the past because it hasn’t happened yet.”
