A Sense of the Enemy

by Shore, Zachary

  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.

  Before we can begin the exploration of the past century’s greatest struggles, we first need to understand a bit about how we mentalize—meaning how we all try to enter into someone else’s head—and we need to know about heuristics—the decision-making shortcuts we all employ. One powerful example of each can be found in the story of an eighteen-year-old orphan who had a chance to win a fortune. With the spotlights on and cameras rolling, the young man had to mentalize about a stranger. Riches were in reach. All he had to do was to penetrate the mind of t
he enigmatic TV host who was offering a cryptic clue.

  Slumdog Strategist

  Jamal was on the spot. He had just two options left. If he chose wisely, he would win 10 million rupees and advance to the final round. If he chose poorly, he would lose it all. The entire Indian nation was watching. The problem was that Jamal did not know the answer. He had no choice but to guess.

  In the blockbuster film Slumdog Millionaire, a young man from the Mumbai slums lands a spot on a popular game show. By an amazing run of good luck, despite his lack of formal education, Jamal is asked a series of questions to which he always knows the answers. The show’s host, however, continues to belittle Jamal’s success, demeaning him as a mere tea server from the slums. By the penultimate round the stakes have grown exceedingly high, and Jamal is stuck. Which cricketer has scored the most first-class centuries in history? His options are reduced to B or D. A commercial break allows the tension to stretch out. It also presents Jamal with a strategic conundrum.

  During the break, Jamal and the host meet in the men’s room. Jamal admits that he is clueless and will lose. To our surprise, the host encourages Jamal, telling him that if he selects the right answer, he will become the most fortunate slum dweller in India, the only person other than the host himself to have risen from extreme poverty to riches and fame. The host tells him not to lose heart. Before exiting the men’s room, the host cryptically suggests: “Perhaps it is written.” Jamal then sees that in the steam on the bathroom mirror the host has traced the letter B.

  Jamal now needs to think strategically. If he trusts the host and believes he is giving him the correct answer, he can choose B with confidence. But if he thinks there is a chance that the host could be lying, wanting him to lose, then Jamal’s situation becomes infinitely more complex. He cannot simply choose D, the cricketer Jack Hobbs, and be sure that this is correct. He must instead assess his enemy on two counts: how clever is the host, and how clever does the host think Jamal is.

  The host might be setting a trap. The correct answer might in fact be B, but the host could be psyching Jamal out, giving him the right answer but expecting that Jamal will choose D just because it is the opposite of what the host advised. Of course, if Jamal thinks that the host expects him to expect this trap, then Jamal should instead choose D. At this point, Jamal could fall into an impossibly complicated loop of “if he thinks that I think that he thinks,” ad infinitum.

  But does anyone really think this way?10 In fact, we almost never do. Instead, we all rely on heuristics—shortcuts for decision-making. Because no one can keep track of so many levels of second-guessing, heuristics help us to simplify strategic decisions with rules of thumb.

  Jamal chose D, the cricketer Jack Hobbs, and he was right. The host had fed him the wrong answer in the mirror. Obviously, we cannot know for certain what Jamal, a fictional character, used for a shortcut to reach his decision, but the film does give us a number of clues. Up to this point we have witnessed flashbacks of key moments in Jamal’s life, and they have been painful to watch. As a young boy he lost his mother to rampaging Hindu nationalists. He was nearly blinded by a cruel orphanage operator who drugged the children and scooped out their eyes with a spoon, then used them to beg for money on street corners. And his own brother separated him from the woman he loved. Given the information we have about Jamal, it is likely that he employed a simple heuristic: Trust no one.

  Like Jamal, leaders also use heuristics in the game of international affairs, even though they have vastly more to lose than in a quiz show. Sometimes national leaders formulate their heuristics as maxims: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Sometimes their heuristics are analogies: If aggressors are appeased, they will become as aggressive as Hitler after Munich. However dubious they might be, heuristics ease decision-making by simplifying the thinking process. Jamal’s experience spotlights a hidden truth: When the stakes are high, we all need shortcuts for predicting our enemy’s moves.

  While Jamal’s story gives us a hint of how we all try to strategize in high-stakes situations, that fictional tale can only take us so far. It’s time to examine a true Indian hero, upon whom the eyes of every Indian, and indeed the entire world, were fixed. Mahatma Gandhi holds special interest in a study of strategic empathy precisely because he managed to win his nation’s freedom without ever firing a single shot.

  I

  _______

  The Conscience of an Empire

  Gandhi and the British Character

  GENERAL REGINALD E. DYER thought he would teach the natives a lesson. On April 13, 1919, approximately 25,000 Punjabis assembled in the Jallianwala Bagh, a public square in Amritsar, for a festival celebration. The square, a mostly barren ground roughly 200 yards long and about as wide, had at its center a large well nearly twenty feet wide. The square was surrounded by the high walls of houses and apartments. There were just five narrow entryways to the grounds, some with locked gates, making it almost impossible to escape. Dyer positioned his troops to block the main exit. On a raised platform, the editor of an Amritsar newspaper was gesticulating, decrying the recent actions of colonial authorities. The silent crowd, absorbed in the speaker’s words, had no reason to expect what happened next.

  Dyer ordered his troops to open fire, directly into the heart of the assembled mass. As people screamed and fled to the sides of the square, Dyer directed his soldiers to aim at the walls and corners where they were concentrated. He instructed his men to continue firing until their ammunition was spent: all 1,650 rounds. The terror lasted between ten and fifteen minutes. Some died instantly; others were trampled to death in the frenzied scramble for cover. People piled atop one another, ten or twelve bodies deep, suffocating those beneath them. More than 100 others, desperate to avoid the bullets, leapt to their deaths down the well. From the rooftops and windows of the surrounding homes, residents looked down in horror.1 When the killing spree at last abated, nearly 400 were dead, including a six-week-old baby. Dyer and his troops withdrew, leaving more than 1,000 wounded to fend for themselves. Astonishingly, Dyer did not stop there. Still intent on preventing rebellion from spreading, he instituted a crawling order, requiring any Indian who passed through the street where a British schoolteacher had been attacked to slither on his belly through the muck. There were no exceptions. Over the following weeks, hundreds were beaten, tortured, arrested, and imprisoned, nearly all without trial or evidence against them.2

  Mahatma Gandhi faced a conundrum. In order to lead his nation to freedom, he had to adopt effective, long-term strategies of resistance to colonial authority. But to accomplish that, he needed to read the British correctly. Amritsar presented an opportunity. The massacre was a definite break in the pattern of British rule. Though colonial forces had often employed brutality, nothing this extreme had occurred since 1857, when British troops savagely crushed an Indian mutiny. Since then, lower levels of repression had remained the norm. But now General Dyer’s attack marked a dramatic spike in the level of violence. In its wake Gandhi had to decide whether the majority of British leaders supported or opposed General Dyer’s form of control. If it were the former—if Britain were a country governed by leaders who would not hesitate to gun down unarmed civilians in cold blood—then nonviolent disobedience had little chance to succeed.

  Amritsar and its aftermath formed a pattern break, one that revealed much about the British as an enemy. Pattern breaks are teachable moments. They are the times when one side in a conflict reveals what it values most, hinting strongly at what it plans to do. What makes the Amritsar pattern break so compelling is that Gandhi actually determined that the majority of British leaders were not, in fact, supportive of harsh repression, yet he repeatedly said the opposite.

  One popular image of Gandhi is of a man devoted to truth, simplicity, and love, a gentle soul peacefully spinning his yarn while defying an empire. And while he was indeed these things, Gandhi was also a British-trained lawyer, possessed of a clever mind and a potent dose of strategic empathy, whi
ch he had developed in part through years of immersion in British culture.3 Because he had studied British patterns of behavior, he was therefore more attuned to their behavior at pattern breaks. Although Gandhi was appalled by what Dyer had done, he soon grasped the incident’s enormous value for opposing British colonial rule, and he skillfully employed the massacre to serve multiple strategic ends. In Gandhi’s rhetoric, Amritsar became a rallying point for Indian independence, a source of Hindu–Muslim unity, and a weapon in his battle for British hearts and minds. In 1920, referring to the British response to the massacre, Mahatma Gandhi called the Empire’s representatives “dishonest and unscrupulous,” proclaiming that he could “no longer retain affection for a Government so evilly manned as it is nowadays.”4 As chief author of the Indian National Congress’s investigative report into Dyer’s actions, he labeled the massacre a crime against humanity. In speeches across India, Gandhi rallied his countrymen by demanding redress for the events in the Punjab,5 and in his 1927 autobiography, he reiterated the same scathing words, asserting that the Congress report “will enable the reader to see to what lengths the British Government is capable of going, and what inhumanities and barbarities it is capable of perpetrating in order to maintain its power.”6 Gandhi stuck to that line for as long as he could. As late as 1931, when the American journalist William Shirer asked Gandhi if he still had faith in British promises, the Mahatma replied: “I had faith in them—until 1919. But the Amritsar Massacre and the other atrocities in the Punjab changed my heart. And nothing has happened since to make me regain my faith.”7