In his article, Gigerenzer did observe that following the Madrid train bombings in 2004, Spaniards reduced their ridership on trains, but those rates returned to normal within a few months. Gigerenzer speculates that one reason might have been that the Spanish are more accustomed than Americans to dealing with terrorist attacks. In other words, the Madrid train bombings represented less of a pattern break than did 9/11.
Another way of thinking about this problem is to compare it with the horrific movie theater shootings in Aurora, Colorado, on July 20, 2012, in which a lone gunman shot twelve people to death and wounded fifty-eight others. As frightening as this incident was, it would not have made sense for Americans across the country, or even in Aurora, to have stopped attending films in theaters. The incident marked no new breach in security and no innovation in killing techniques. The same risk has long been present. The assailant operated alone, not as part of an international terrorist network. While there is always the chance of copy-cat attacks, it remained valid to consider the odds of being murdered in a movie theater based on the pattern of past killings in theaters or in public spaces in general. The Aurora attacks did not represent a meaningful break in the pattern of American gun violence. Like Spaniards and the Madrid train bombings, Americans have sadly become accustomed to episodes like these.
Judging probability is an excellent way of assessing risk only when we focus on the right data and recognize when the old odds no longer matter. The famed English economist John Maynard Keynes is often quoted for his snappy remark, “When the facts change, I change my mind. And what do you do, sir?” I would offer a variation of Keynes’s quip.
When the pattern breaks, I change my behavior.
How about you?
My goal in this discussion is not to disparage the work of behavioral scientists. On the contrary, their work can help us challenge the assumptions we have too long taken for granted. My aim instead is to caution us against carrying the implications of such studies too far. The experiments of behavioral scientists can help guide our thinking about how we think, as long as we remain cognizant of the gulf between labs and real life.18 And here is where I believe historians can add true value.
The Standard Works
Although history holds great potential for understanding how we think, historians typically focus their studies on how one or two particular individuals in a narrow time period thought. For example, the historian might derive deep insight into the thinking of key historical figures, such as Abraham Lincoln or John Brown. Alternatively, historians might trace a particular historical event across time, such as the slave trade or the abolition movement, scrutinizing its many causes and consequences. As a result, they might comprehend how large groups of people thought about a particular subject over time. Rarely, however, do historians attempt to investigate types of thinking across both time and space—meaning at various historic moments in various regions of the world. That is what this study of historical decision-making aimed to do.
In contrast, the subfield of political science known as international relations often examines disparate cases of conflict across time and space, but it does so with definite theories it seeks to prove. Beginning with the assumption that nations relate to each other according to fixed laws of behavior, international relations scholars aim to advance, refine, or refute existing theories. When such theories are actually grounded in richly corroborated historical sources, awareness of these theories can be highly useful to the historian because they can alert us to common patterns in international conflict as well as cooperation.
This book does not advance a theory of how states behave—at least not in the traditional sense. My argument is both generalizable and parsimonious, but it is not predictive. It does not suggest that if x and y occur, then z will result. Instead, this book makes observations about how particular cases of twentieth-century conflict unfolded. It draws modest conclusions about how certain leaders have thought about their enemies, and it does this by probing a handful of key clashes.
Fostering a sense of the enemy typically involves gathering information specifically on intentions and capabilities. By examining these two elements of power, the experts believe they can comprehend or even anticipate that adversary’s behavior. This categorization is, however, far too narrow. A more inclusive categorization focuses instead on drivers and constraints.
The first step in strategic empathy involves a cold assessment of constraints. We look first not at what the other side might want to do but at what it is able to do based on context. Capabilities are not constraints. Capabilities are what enable us to achieve our wants, but constraints are what render those capabilities useless. The worst strategic empaths think about capabilities in mainly military terms. They count missiles and tanks, factor in firepower, and dissect strategic doctrine for clues to enemy intentions. If China today builds an aircraft carrier, it must be planning to challenge America on the high seas . . . or so the thinking goes. But military capabilities, just like intentions, are often constrained by nonmilitary factors, such as financial, political, organizational, environmental, or cultural impediments to action. Even something as ineffable as the Zeitgeist can be a powerful constraint, as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi recently discovered, much to their regret. The best strategic empaths seek out the less obvious, underlying constraints on their enemy’s behavior as well as their own.
Once the underlying constraints are grasped and it is clear that the enemy actually has room to maneuver, strategic empaths then turn to exploring the enemy’s key drivers. (In reality, of course, most leaders cannot set the order in which they assess these factors. Typically that analysis occurs in tandem or in whichever order circumstances allow.) If intentions are the things we want to do, drivers are what shape those wants. We can be driven by an ideological worldview, such as communist, capitalist, or racialist dogma. We can be driven by psychological makeups, with all the myriad complexes and schema they entail. Or we could be driven by religious and cultural imperatives: to conquer the infidels, to convert the heathens, or to Russify, Francofy, or democratize the Other. Political scientists have produced a vast literature on enemy intentions. Each scholar offers an ever more nuanced explication of how states signal their intentions and how other states perceive them. Yet intentions are best anticipated, and strategic empathy is best achieved, when the underlying drivers are clearly understood.
International relations has a long tradition of scholarship on recognizing enemy intentions. As this discipline is frequently concerned with how states manage threats in foreign affairs, it has developed numerous studies dealing specifically with the failure to predict correctly. More often than not, states are caught off-guard when prior trends are broken. Blame then falls first upon the spies. A body of literature on intelligence failures has recently cropped up. These studies deal in part with assessing enemy intentions, but they are largely America-centric, spurred by the failures to predict the 9/11 attacks and to correctly estimate the presence of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. These works include Richard Betts’s Enemies of Intelligence,19 Robert Jervis’s Why Intelligence Fails,20 and Joshua Rovner’s Fixing the Facts.21 One work focused primarily on assessing military threats is Daryl Press’s Calculating Credibility, in which the author argues, unconvincingly in my view, that leaders do not concern themselves with an enemy’s past behavior when determining the extent of that enemy’s likely threat.22 A more recent study of assessing enemy intentions that expands its scope to cover statecraft as well as intelligence agencies is the doctoral dissertation and now book by Keren Yarhi-Milo, Knowing the Adversary.23 That author concludes: “Decision-makers’ own explicit or implicit theories or beliefs about how the world operates and their expectations significantly affect both the selection and interpretation of signals.”24 In other words, our beliefs affect how we think.
A Sense of the Enemy is not part of this political science canon. Rather than focusing only on failu
re, it also studies success. Instead of positing theories, it seeks explanations for why events unfolded as they did. It moves beyond the America-centric or Anglocentric story by concentrating on German, Russian, Indian, and Vietnamese leaders as well as American statesmen. And it aims not primarily to improve intelligence work but instead to understand how one aspect of statecraft contributes to shaping historical outcomes.
In addition to the many political scientists who have tackled the problem of enemy assessment, most notable among them being Alexander George,25 historians have also specifically sought explanations for how opponents understand each other. In Knowing One’s Enemies: Intelligence Assessments Before the Two World Wars,26 a cast of distinguished historians investigates the faulty intelligence estimates within all combatants prior to war. Again, this work centers on the intelligence assessments rather than the statesmen. It focuses on failures, not successes, and it does not ask the question: What enabled statesmen to think like their enemies?
In 1986, the editor of Knowing One’s Enemies teamed up with another Harvard scholar, Richard Neustadt, to assist policymakers with a book called Thinking in Time. The authors drew upon recent American history at the highest levels of decision-making, mainly over four decades from Roosevelt to Reagan. By examining a series of case studies and analyzing what went right and wrong—but mostly what went wrong—they hoped to provide sensible guidelines that would help dedicated public servants to perform better. Their conclusions could hardly be faulted: challenge your assumptions, be wary of historical analogies, distinguish what is certain from what is presumed, and read as much history as you can. Within their narratives, they also revisited the question of how we can know our enemies. They urged policymakers to engage in “placement”: the act of placing individuals in their historical context in order to determine which major events, both public and personal, shaped their worldviews. Placement, they argue, can offer clues to another person’s views, including that person’s opinions of others. Sensibly, the authors conceded that placing others in historical context cannot guarantee correct predictions about their actions. I could not agree more, but the question remains how to know which information matters.
At one point the authors give examples of the key bits of information that would have helped predict particular decision-makers’ actions during the lead-up to American escalation in Vietnam. They argue, for example, that to understand Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, “. . . It appears worth knowing that he made his way at Ford and built his reputation there from a base in statistical control.” Regarding the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, the authors observe that it helps to know that Rusk had served in the Army in World War II and that General George C. Marshall was his hero and role model. “Each piece of information from the rest of personal history,” they maintain, “enriches or enlivens guesses drawn from conjunctions of age and job.”27
The crucial phrase here is “it appears worth knowing.” It only appears worth knowing these facts in retrospect. It is far harder to know at the time which of the countless bits of data about a person’s life will be most salient in shaping his actions in a given moment. Placing others in their historical context is essential to learning about them, but it cannot reveal that person’s underlying drivers. The basic problem with Neustadt’s and May’s notion of placement is not that it suffers from “hindsight bias,” the tendency to view outcomes as inevitable and predictable. While it is unreasonable for historians to look back at events and assume that their outcomes were foreseeable, it is perfectly legitimate for scholars to analyze what occurred and identify which information would have been useful at the time, regardless of the ultimate outcome. The real problem with “placement” is that as a guide for policymakers it is too diffuse. It leaves one with too much information and no guide to identifying the right chunk.
Methods and Sources
I did not begin this study with a hypothesis about pattern breaks. I started only with a question: What produces strategic empathy? When leaders do get it right, is their success random—a product of pure luck—or could there be a signal amidst the noise? After analyzing in depth the cases described in this book, I found one such signal: an enemy’s underlying drivers and constraints became apparent at times of pattern breaks.
All decision-makers need heuristics for cutting through the excessive amount of data about their opponents to distinguish what moves them to act. This book focuses on pattern breaks as a heuristic for exposing hidden drivers. It is not intended primarily as a guidebook to policymakers, though if it could be of use to them, that can only be to the good. It is instead a study of history, yet it differs from standard histories in two main ways.
The first unorthodox aspect of this book is that, unlike traditional diplomatic histories, this study strives to incorporate the useful, recent findings in decision-making gleaned by other fields, especially those from cognitive neuroscience, information theory, and psychology. Like many historians, I am skeptical of sweeping generalizations drawn from limited data. Yet we cannot allow skepticism to produce obscurantism. We simply know much more today about how the mind works than we did in the 1980s when Neustadt and May were writing. If one goal of historians is to understand how their subjects were thinking—and that is certainly a major goal of this book—then we have a responsibility to be informed by advances in knowledge of the decision-making process. Naturally, we can only be informed by this knowledge; we cannot apply it indiscriminately to the figures we want to understand. Since we cannot place Hitler or Stalin inside an fMRI machine any more than we could place them on the psychologist’s proverbial couch, we dare not draw definitive conclusions about how those figures thought. But what we can do is to use the historian’s craft of combing the extant records, diaries, memoirs, and private and official papers and combine those concrete insights with an understanding of how most people process information. Again, we can never reach total certainty about how historical actors thought, but we can sometimes get pretty close. The rest is left to our own judgment about what is reasonable and likely.
This is, in fact, the approach taken by Christopher R. Browning in his thoughtful historical study of Holocaust murderers, Ordinary Men. In attempting to understand how these seemingly average individuals came to act as cold-blooded killers of innocent Jewish men, women, and children, Browning cautiously applies insights drawn from psychology. Most notably, he considers the lessons from two separate and equally shocking experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, both of which explored questions of conformity and deference to authority. Yet Browning remains judicious in his application of these findings and modest in his conclusions. Here is how Browning explains both the limits and benefits of psychology to history:
Was the massacre at Józefów a kind of radical Milgram experiment that took place in a Polish forest with real killers and victims rather than in a social psychology laboratory with naïve subjects and actor/victims? Are the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101 explained by Milgram’s observations and conclusions? There are some difficulties in explaining Józefów as a case of deference to authority, for none of Milgram’s experimental variations exactly paralleled the historical situation at Józefów, and the relevant differences constitute too many variables to draw firm conclusions in any scientific sense. Nonetheless, many of Milgram’s insights find graphic confirmation in the behavior and testimony of the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101.28
I believe that precisely this type of cautious yet open-minded approach is not only sensible but invaluable for studies of decision-making. Today, the historian has the benefit of more than just psychology for understanding how people think. In the twenty years since Browning wrote Ordinary Men, we have made astonishing advances in cognitive neuroscience and other related fields, all of which have expanded our knowledge of how the human brain functions.
The second curious aspect of this book is that it combines two forms of scholarship: original, primary-source historical research and i
nterpretive essays reflecting how historical actors thought about their enemies. To accomplish this, the book draws on a wide range of English, German, Russian, and Vietnamese primary sources, many of which are published archival records, as well as the substantial secondary literature on relevant topics. Like all historians, I plumb the extant record, watch for corroborating evidence, try to ascertain causes and verify claims. But I also apply a conceptual framework to my analysis by focusing on the effects of pattern breaks on the way that leaders thought.
For the chapter on Gandhi’s assessments of the British I draw heavily on the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. I also use memoirs of one close to the Mahatma during the events in question, as well as British newspaper accounts and the Hansard transcripts of debates in the House of Commons.
For the section concerning Germany in the 1920s, I use materials as diverse as Reichstag session transcriptions, records of Cabinet meetings, newspaper accounts, and the diaries and memoirs of leading decision-makers. I harness all of the standard resources available to diplomatic historians, such as the Foreign Relations of the United States series, Documents on German Foreign Policy, and British Documents on Foreign Affairs, including the more selective Confidential Print series.
For the section on Roosevelt’s and Stalin’s attempts to think like Hitler, I rely on similar sources as noted above, as well as the reports of Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles in private communication with President Roosevelt on the Welles mission in 1940 to see Hitler and Mussolini. I tapped the Franklin D. Roosevelt President’s Secretary’s Files, particularly Parts I and II, with their records of correspondence between the President and the American Ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd. I also consult the published Soviet archival documents concerning Stalin’s intelligence on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, including materials from the Stalin Digital Archive.
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