Fiction, foreign policy, and the tyranny of the plausible
The tyranny of the plausible governs academic publishing, policy discourse, and strategic forecasting across international relations. Fiction escapes this.
Every discussion about South Korea’s foreign policy options begins with the same unspoken constraint: what will Washington tolerate? Proposals for strategic realignment, closer ties with China, or regional multilateralism are not dismissed because they’re impossible—they’re dismissed because they’re implausible within the context of U.S. political expectations.
The range of imagined futures is narrowed not by Korea’s capabilities or diplomatic opportunity, but by the limits of what American officials, think tankers, and allied policymakers can envision without provoking discomfort. Even Korean analysts often preemptively restrict their own frameworks, knowing what kind of narratives will be funded, published, and circulated in the U.S.-led policy sphere. The result is a discipline shaped not by possibility, but by political palatability.
This is the “tyranny of the plausible”. It governs academic publishing, policy discourse, and strategic forecasting across international relations.
Fiction, by contrast, is free from this constraint. It is not obligated to conform to what is currently acceptable or institutionally convenient. That freedom gives fiction a unique strategic value—it can explore the diplomatic, security, and moral scenarios that mainstream IR simply cannot touch.
The insistence on plausibility has real costs. Strategic surprise—the kind that upends assumptions and reshapes the world—is rarely plausible before it happens. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the 9/11 attacks, the Arab Spring, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine: all were “unlikely” until they occurred.
Yet academic and policy communities often struggle to think outside a narrow band of expected outcomes. There’s little room for messy, contradictory, emotionally charged, or morally ambiguous futures. Anything too imaginative is discarded as fantasy. The problem is, international politics increasingly plays out in those discarded spaces.
Fiction allows us to step outside these constraints. It permits strategic thought experiments that would never pass peer review.
A novel doesn’t need a regression table to explore what happens if the U.S. abandons NATO, or if Taiwan declares independence and survives. It can trace the personal, institutional, and psychological fallout of such events, without needing to prove their probability. That kind of freedom is powerful—not because it replaces analysis, but because it complements it. It asks: what if your assumptions are wrong? What if the thing you’re not allowed to say turns out to matter most?
Some of the most influential works of speculative fiction operate precisely in this space. Novels like Jeffrey Lewis’ The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States (2020 Commission) have reached senior military planners and diplomats not because they are accurate forecasts, but because they explore what conventional models overlook. They invite readers to inhabit futures where chain reactions and irrational decisions drive history forward.
Academic work, for all its strengths, rarely captures the emotional and psychological elements of diplomacy and war. It rarely captures the emotional stresses of pride and fear or anger and angst. Decision-makers are treated as rational actors, states as unitary entities, and outcomes as the result of structural forces. Fiction collapses that abstraction. A war starts because a mid-level bureaucrat loses their temper. An alliance breaks because a prime minister can’t forget a personal slight. These are not anomalies. They are part of how politics actually happens. Fiction can show that without apology.
It can also move across registers in a way academic writing cannot. Where a journal article must focus on a narrow question, fiction can connect economics, identity, ideology, and memory in a single narrative. It can explore how a trade war affects a rural farmer, a diplomat’s marriage, and a student's radicalization. It can model the interaction between climate breakdown and geopolitical instability in ways that statistics struggle to convey. It brings the reader into the room, not just the dataset.
This capacity to dramatize complexity is what makes fiction subversive. It threatens the comfortable assumptions baked into institutional discourse. It doesn’t fit easily into policy brief templates or theory-building exercises. It’s not useful in the way funders like to measure. But it can make power visible in ways no white paper ever will.
That is why the most insightful international relations thinkers—especially those working under conditions of constraint—have often turned to fiction. George Orwell, Koestler, Kundera, even Kipling: all wrote about power, ideology, and global structure without confining themselves to the academic format.
More recently, practitioners and analysts have begun experimenting with speculative fiction as a way to challenge blind spots. A story about the collapse of American global leadership told through the eyes of a Ghanaian diplomat might reveal more about the structure of the global order than any bar chart ever could.
The real danger in IR today is not excessive imagination. It is imaginative poverty.
The field has become managerial, risk-averse, and hyper-specialized. Fiction breaks that. It speaks in voices the academic machine has silenced. It raises possibilities that technocratic analysis refuses to entertain. And in doing so, it helps us prepare—not for the most likely future, but for the most consequential one.
Incorporating fiction into the strategic imagination is not about predicting what comes next. It’s about resisting the illusion that only what is plausible matters. The world has never run on plausibility. It runs on contingency, narrative, fear, pride, and accident. Fiction knows this. That’s why it belongs on the desk of every policymaker and every scholar who wants to understand what happens when the impossible becomes real.