Greetings, salutations, and why I’ll be wrong an awful lot

No pressure…. no pressure… it’s just the first blog post on your fancy-pants new mainstream media blogsite… just imagine that the audience is naked and you’ll do fine…. Wait, am I typing this out loud? [Yes. And now they’re all imagining you imagining them naked–ed.] Uh… right! Let’s get to it, then. Hi, my name ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

No pressure.... no pressure... it's just the first blog post on your fancy-pants new mainstream media blogsite... just imagine that the audience is naked and you'll do fine....

No pressure…. no pressure… it’s just the first blog post on your fancy-pants new mainstream media blogsite… just imagine that the audience is naked and you’ll do fine….

Wait, am I typing this out loud? [Yes. And now they’re all imagining you imagining them naked–ed.] Uh… right! Let’s get to it, then.

Hi, my name is Dan Drezner, and I’ll be your blogger at this website. Longtime readers of danieldrezner.com will know what to expect of this site. Readers coming here via the foreignpolicy.com portal might not know me as well. I therefore toyed with the idea of writing a Declaration of Principles or something like that, but that’s not really how a blog functions.

So, here’s the primary thing new readers should expect of me — I’m going to get a fair amount of stuff wrong. In the six years I’ve blogged, I already have gotten a great deal of stuff wrong.

So why do I continue to blog? Because world politics is, at best, an inexact science. Even the experts who get some big things right also get a lot of big things wrong. Many realists, for example, like to crow about how they were right about the war in Iraq — and they were. On the other hand, many of these same realists predicted that the end of the Cold War would crack up NATO and the European Union. Unfortunately, in international relations, one out of two ain’t bad.

So I’ll be wrong a lot — but hopefully I’ll be wrong in interesting and productive ways. All I ask from my readers is that when you tell me that I’m wrong in the comments, you explain why you think I’m wrong. 

Oh, and don’t say anything bad about Salma Hayek.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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