Over His Skis: When Expertise Becomes Conceit 

By Will Keys

The Dunning–Kruger effect is not stupidity; it is unrecognised overreach. It afflicts the competent who stray beyond their true mastery and mistake confidence for comprehension. Classical history offers a warning in Alcibiades—brilliant, persuasive, and fatally disloyal once ambition outran judgement.

That caution applies today to Douglas MacGregor. On military theory and practice, Colonel MacGregor is formidable. His assessments of Ukraine, grounded in force ratios and logistics, have largely been sound. The trouble begins when he leaves the parade ground for geopolitics. There, he is over his skis—confident where he is not competent—particularly on the nature and reach of Deep State influence and the balance of global power. In that realm, he misreads Donald J. Trump—a man of greater political weight and strategic instinct than MacGregor allows. The error is not malice; it is the Dunning–Kruger trap itself. Like Alcibiades, the slide is from brilliance to blindness once loyalty to discipline gives way to personal certainty.

Measured against that same yardstick, Vladimir Putin presents the counterexample. He has finessed Russia away from a direct World War III confrontation while remaining steadfast to a hard strategic truth: NATO’s eastward adventurism constituted an existential threat that Russia was bound to face down. Russia’s economy—growing at roughly one per cent—is hardly exhilarating, yet it is impressive under sanctions and war pressure. More importantly, Russia is likely to emerge from the Ukrainian morass more cohesive and strategically clearer than it entered.

By contrast, much of Europe’s political class appears trapped in the Dunning–Kruger/Alcibiades loop—high confidence, shallow strategy. The leadership echelons of the European Union, and of Germany, France, United Kingdom, and Italy, have spoken loudly while thinking narrowly—substituting moral posturing for power arithmetic, and mistaking alliance rhetoric for outcomes. That is not leadership; it is conceit dressed as virtue.

In that wider sense, Donald J. Trump deserves praise. Whatever his rough edges, his strategic instincts and transactional realism cut through illusions that bedevil others. The United States is badly divided, and by my assessment a full half of the population fails the test of responsible citizenship. Even so, clarity at the top still matters. In an age of overconfidence, humility before reality remains the rarest—and most necessary—form of brilliance.

Australia, regrettably, is not immune. It has been badly served by its national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, by its leading universities, and—most of all—by its political parties, which have too often preferred orthodoxy and slogan to reasoned national interest. The result is a shallow public discourse that rewards conformity and punishes dissent, a classic breeding ground for the Dunning–Kruger illusion.

In the wake of the Islamist slaughter at Bondi Beach, there may be an awakening of common sense, but one should not hold one’s breath. If roughly fifty per cent of American voters are uninformed or wilfully ignorant, much the same can be said of Australia. Democracies do not fail first from malice; they fail from complacency—and from the quiet confidence of people who do not know how much they do not know.

By Will Keys