A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind (2 page)

In a twenty-first century marked by mind-boggling amounts of accessible data, we naturally assume that pattern recognition is supreme. When sophisticated algorithms met super-fast computing, and when network analysis joined with social science, we dramatically expanded our predictive power over individuals as well as masses. Today whole industries have arisen on the backs of pattern spotters. Nearly every major corporation hopes to transform mass consumer behavior into profit streams. Amazon can suggest the books we might enjoy. Netflix does the same for films. And Pandora predicts what songs we’ll like to hear. These types of predictions of our preferences rely on pattern recognition. What many people may not realize is that, although these preference predictions seem targeted specifically at you and me, they are largely based on analysis of how vast numbers of people similar to us have previously behaved. As impressive as these algorithms are, there remains a limit to their magic.

Quantitative analysis fails us when statesmen are the subject. Knowing what past dictators have done in similar situations, for example, cannot shed much light on what the current autocrat may do. Each case of international conflict and every ruler is sufficiently unique to make analogical reasoning a dangerous endeavor.
⁷
Left to consider only the past behavior of a particular ruler, foreign leaders are caught in a quandary. Most of the time, the record of actions is mixed—full of seemingly conflicting behavior, out of which opposing interpretations can easily be drawn. In other words, if one seeks evidence of malignant or benign intentions, both can usually be found. This is why fixating on the patterns in enemy behavior can easily lead us in circles. We need to be aware of prior patterns, but we also need a better heuristic for making sense of what drives the other side.

Consider two historical examples that make this point. Throughout the 1930s, some British and French officials concluded it was best not to confront Hitler because they believed in his repeated assurances of peace. They observed his pattern of conciliatory behavior after each new demand, and they assumed he could therefore be appeased. In contrast, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, some American officials, such as
Air Force General Curtis LeMay, insisted that war with the Soviet Union was inevitable based on evidence of prior Soviet aggression. For that reason, LeMay strenuously argued for a full-scale attack on Cuba. Both sets of officials advocated policies based on patterns they perceived—patterns drawn from a selected sampling of data—and both sets of officials were wrong. If these policymakers had focused on a different sampling of data, they could have located the opposite patterns in their enemies’ behavior. Winston Churchill, for example, saw in Hitler’s behavior a pattern of insatiable aggression, whereas President John F. Kennedy saw evidence of Nikita Khrushchev’s reluctance for war. Had statesmen in the 1930s correctly read Hitler, many lives might have been saved. Had statesmen in 1962 forced a direct confrontation with the Soviets, in the age of nuclear weapons, many more lives might have been lost. Reading the enemy right is clearly a priceless skill, and leaders cannot afford to ground their assessments in a select sampling of past behavior. Instead, they must understand what makes the current enemy tick. But how can we know in the moment which patterns reveal the enemy’s true motives?

Leaders are better served not by straining to perceive patterns of behavior but by focusing their attention on behaviors at pattern breaks. It is at these moments when statesmen typically reveal their underlying drivers—those goals that are most important to them. These episodes can also expose much about a leader’s character, showing the kind of measures he is willing to employ.

What Are Pattern Breaks?

Pattern breaks are merely deviations from the routine. These deviations can involve sudden spikes in violence, sharp reversals of policy, unexpected alterations in relations, or any substantial disruption from the norm. There are two main types of pattern breaks: pattern-break events and pattern-break behaviors. The behaviors provide valuable information about an enemy but only under certain conditions.

Naturally, pattern breaks frequently occur. Most are meaningless, but some are meaningful. To distinguish one from the other we must focus on costs. Henry Kissinger, the American National Security Adviser who negotiated with the North Vietnamese over an end to the war, offered an excellent example of a meaningless pattern break.
In his reflections on those negotiations, Kissinger explained how Hanoi invariably lectured America in its pronouncements, always insisting that the United States “must” do this or that. At one point Hanoi suddenly used a different word, declaring that the United States “should” meet a particular demand. Kissinger and his team thought they were on the brink of a major breakthrough. It proved a fleeting fancy. The next communication returned to the usual insistent language.
⁸
This momentary word change cost Hanoi nothing. In theory it could have marked a shift in Hanoi’s attitude, but it revealed nothing about Hanoi’s underlying intentions.

In contrast to Kissinger’s experience, consider the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986 for a brief example of a meaningful pattern break. Although it took him more than two weeks to issue a public announcement, Gorbachev did disclose the true horror of what had occurred. Prior to that moment, Soviet leaders had typically denied any weaknesses in their economy or their society, invariably extolling the superiority of communism. By admitting that the nuclear disaster had occurred, and by inviting American medical experts into the Soviet Union to assist in caring for the sick, Gorbachev openly acknowledged certain failings of the Soviet system. He thereby risked incurring the enmity of the old-school hardliners within his regime. This was a pattern-break behavior, and it revealed much about the Soviet Premier. When he first came to power, Gorbachev initiated the reforms dubbed
Glasnost
and
Perestroika
(an openness to free speech and a rebuilding of the economy). For those outside observers who doubted the sincerity of these reforms, Gorbachev’s behavior during Chernobyl indicated that he was a truly different leader from those who had preceded him. Chernobyl itself was a pattern-break event, and Gorbachev’s behavior surrounding it revealed much about his underlying intentions.
⁹

We must first be able to recognize patterns before we can spot a pattern break. When no breaks are apparent, we may have no better option than to assume that the enemy’s future behavior will resemble his past. I call that the “continuity heuristic,” and I will say more about it in
chapter 8
. It is a method with many flaws, though at times it is all we have to go on. Sometimes, however, there is a better way, a way that leaders have employed to good effect and one that can be just as valuable today.

To summarize, meaningful pattern breaks are those episodes that expose an enemy’s underlying drivers or constraints. Those less obvious factors become apparent when an opponent behaves in a way that imposes genuine costs upon himself—costs with long-term implications. The enemy need not change his behavior at those times. He might continue on exactly as he had done before. The pattern break simply provides an opportunity for revealing what he values most. It acts as a spotlight, illuminating qualities that might otherwise be hidden. In the chapters that follow, we will witness cases of pattern-break events as well as pattern-break behaviors, and we will dig deeply into examples of meaningful pattern breaks that involved behaviors costly to the enemy in question. Above all, we will see how talented strategic empaths used those pattern breaks as teachable moments to help them gain a sharper sense of their enemy. As you encounter their stories, remember that strategic empathy is not a trait—a superior quality with which one is simply born. This might be true of empathy itself, though it is possible that empathy can be cultivated, but this would be the subject for a different book.
Strategic
empathy, on the other hand, should be thought of as a skill that you can develop and enhance. Like all skills, no matter how much you might practice, you can never achieve perfect results every time. Focusing on behaviors at pattern-break moments cannot guarantee an accurate reading of your rival’s mind, but it can certainly up the odds.

The Overview

Each chapter investigates cases of how particular statesmen struggled with strategic empathy.
Chapter 1
considers how Mahatma Gandhi read British leaders shortly after World War I, when the Indian independence movement was just about to blossom.
Chapters 2
and
3
center on German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann’s attempts to read the Russians in the 1920s. Amid the tumult of ever-changing Weimar coalitions, Stresemann remained the one steady leader of German foreign policy. His diplomatic acumen helped restore his defeated nation to a position of strength. These chapters ask how he did it.

Chapters 4 and 5 explore both Stalin’s and Roosevelt’s attempts to read Hitler in the years prior to Hitler’s invasion of Russia. The central
question is this: How did Stalin and FDR think about Hitler? To borrow a term from cognitive science, I am asking how they “mentalized” about their enemies. I explain what it means to mentalize by discussing the findings of cognitive scientists and relating their discoveries to historical subjects.
Chapters 6
and
7
turn to Vietnam. They probe the North Vietnamese leadership’s efforts to understand America in the years preceding the war’s escalation. While we know a great deal about what American leaders thought about Vietnam during the war, far less has been written on what the North Vietnamese leaders thought about the United States. Few Americans even realize that the man largely running North Vietnam just prior to and during the war was not Ho Chi Minh but rather a shadowy figure named Le Duan. These chapters try to gain a sense of how Le Duan struggled to grasp America’s drivers and constraints.

The first two of these historical cases (the chapters on Gandhi and Stresemann) provide examples of talented strategic empaths. The case of Stalin presents an example of empathic failure. In the case regarding Vietnam’s Le Duan, the record is mixed. In each case I show that understanding pattern breaks provided an essential heuristic for achieving strategic empathy.

Chapter 8
steps back from particular case studies to consider several notable efforts to assess an enemy in the twentieth century. As a useful comparison, I consider the thinking behind the opposite of the pattern-break heuristic—what I refer to as the “continuity heuristic.” By using past behavior as a guide, leaders and their advisors have often missed the mark. Finally,
chapter 9
examines a present-day trend: a troubled love affair with quantitative analysis as the basis for predicting enemy behavior.

In an afterword I briefly describe how this book fits into the existing history and political science literature on enemy assessments, while I also spotlight some of the theories and concepts from other fields, which help illuminate our task. I then discuss my basic approach: the methodology I employ for tackling the questions surrounding the history of war and peace.

Most of the cases I consider in this book involve states in militarily and economically weaker positions with respect to their chief opponents. All nations need strategic empathy, but for the weaker states in any conflict, strategic empathy can be necessary for survival. If the
United States is entering a period in which its relative power is declining, the lessons from past strategic empaths will only rise in value. And even if this were not the case, America, or any nation in the stronger position, can always profit from a clearer sense of its enemies.

The Aim

My primary aim in this book is to write a history of international conflict through an alternative lens. In essence, I am conducting a meta-exercise: to think about how leaders thought about their enemies. Historians typically try to reconstruct the past through the eyes of history’s key actors. We do this mainly by attempting to see the world as those people saw it. In the pages that follow, however, I am attempting to enter the minds of certain leaders, to see how they in turn tried to enter the minds of others.

Because this book is a work of history, it is more descriptive than prescriptive. It asks not what statesmen should have done but rather what they actually did, how they thought, and what they believed about their opponents. That said, the book has a secondary aim. This study may hold value for present-day analysts by highlighting ways of thinking about the problem of prediction.

I have still a third aim with this study. As with each of my previous books, I want to allow history to illuminate how we think. While the cognitive sciences, from psychology to behavioral economics and the like, are steadily advancing our knowledge of how the mind works, those fields suffer from a serious constraint. Their conclusions are based on carefully controlled laboratory experiments. As a result, it is much harder to say how people would behave under actual conditions. History, however, provides us with precisely that. It enables us to reconstruct how people thought and made decisions in real life, under the complex, uncontrolled, and uncontrollable conditions of their realities. This book, then, is also a study of historical decision-making.

The chapters that follow provide an alternative way of thinking about modern international affairs. Together they tell the story of how pivotal moments in history resulted from the ways that leaders identified their enemies’ underlying drivers and constraints. I do not assume that strategic empathy is the sole cause of foreign policy successes. Multiple
factors invariably combine to shape outcomes. Contingency and chance are always at play. A statesman’s strategic empathy is only one factor in success, though I argue it is often a crucial one. How leaders came to think like their opponents is a telling and too often overlooked aspect of international conflict. If we can deepen our understanding of how key figures thought, we will better comprehend why wars are fought, lost, and won. And if we could actually apply those insights, we might just take one step closer to making war no more.