A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind (32 page)

Just as the pattern-break heuristic can aid analysts contemplating the future, it can also assist historians examining the past. As I noted in the section on Gustav Stresemann, historians still debate the Foreign Minister’s true objectives. Similar debates are common among most other historians struggling to comprehend why their particular subjects acted as they did. For the scholar and the policymaker alike, such disagreements are common because leaders frequently behave in complex, sometimes seemingly contradictory ways. Experts can then point to evidence to support competing interpretations of that leader’s intentions. If we instead concentrate on behaviors at meaningful pattern breaks, we may come closer to exposing a historical figure’s deeper aims.

All of this raises the question of whether individuals possess fixed or fluid motivations. This turns out to be a nontrivial problem, one that dates back at least to ancient Greece.

Most people know the fable of the scorpion and the frog. A scorpion asks a frog for a ride across the lake, but halfway across the water the scorpion strikes. As both are drowning, the frog asks the scorpion why he stung him, knowing it meant that both of them would die. The scorpion responds that he couldn’t help himself. It was just his nature. The original tale probably traces back to Aesop, who related the same parable through a farmer and a viper, but the moral was the same. Some people just can’t change their wicked ways.

The scorpion story would be a tremendously depressing commentary on human nature if it were not offset by another of Aesop’s fables, one with a strikingly alternative lesson. In the story of Androcles and the lion, a slave in ancient Greece escapes his captors and flees into the woods. There he comes upon a roaring beast. Whereas others might have fled in terror, Androcles overcomes his initial fear and approaches the animal. He discovers that the lion has a painful thorn caught in its bleeding paw. Once he removes the thorn and binds the wound, the lion is not only grateful, he develops a genuine warmth for the human. Later, both the lion and the slave are captured. As punishment, Androcles is thrown into the arena, where the hungry lion is sent to devour him while the emperor and crowds look on in savage expectation. But when the lion rushes toward his prey, he recognizes Androcles. Rather than tearing him apart, the lion licks Androcles’s hand in friendship. The moral Aesop had in mind had to do with gratitude. But the story conveys another equally important lesson. Sometimes our enemies are not enemies by nature but because of conditions external to themselves. They can be transformed into allies simply by a change in circumstance.

These two tales can easily serve as metaphors for a recurring debate within foreign policy circles. Leaders are frequently confronted by aggressive states. They must then devise strategies for dealing with them. It would be just as foolish to assume that all opponents are potential allies as it would be to think that all are implacable foes. One of the most crucial tasks of statecraft is to distinguish the scorpions who cannot change from the lions who can. It is here that pattern breaks can help.

Strategic empathy might seem useful only for getting the better of your opponent. Certainly that was its value to the leaders I described throughout this book. But strategic empathy can be used just as effectively to avoid or ameliorate conflicts. It can be a means not for outmaneuvering the enemy but instead for making amends. Obviously, some enemies cannot be accommodated. Some differences can never be bridged, but many can. Understanding what truly drives others to act as they do is a necessary ingredient for resolving most conflicts where force is not desired. It is, in truth, an essential first step toward constructing a lasting peace.

Afterword

Fitting In: Some Thoughts on Scholarship, Sources, and Methods

WARNING: THIS AFTERWORD IS
intended for academics. I want to describe to them how this book fits in with the existing literature on decision-making and prediction as well as to explain how the findings from related fields have informed my own work. The title is slightly tongue-in-cheek, since fitting in is something I have never done well. Because this book does not resemble a traditional work of history, I need to explain my particular methodological approach and the sources I employ. If you are not an academic, you might want to avoid this afterword altogether. Alternatively, if you are not a scholar but you suffer from severe insomnia, then please read on. This chapter might just be the cure you’ve been searching for.

Skeptics and Signals

Though most of us long to know the future, especially in troubled times, lately behavioral scientists have been shattering our crystal balls. The noted psychologist Philip Tetlock has been widely cited for revealing that the more renowned the expert, the more likely his predictions will be false.
¹
The Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert tells us that we cannot even predict what will bring us joy, since our expectations are almost always off.
²
And the gleefully irreverent market trader Nassim Taleb argues that the massive impact of black swans—improbable
but surprisingly frequent anomalies—makes most efforts at prediction fruitless.
³
Most notable of all, the economist Dan Ariely has exposed the flawed models for predicting our behavior in everything from the products we buy to the daily choices we make.
⁴
Of course, they’re all right. We are abysmal at prediction. But the skeptics have missed a crucial point: we have no other choice.

National leaders are always in need of thoughtful approaches to prediction, especially when lives are on the line in matters of war and peace. We therefore need to have some sense of what scholars from a range of disciplines have learned about predictions in general and enemy assessments in particular. One of the most recent observers to find fault with the prediction business is Nate Silver, the election guru whose work I described in
chapter 9
.
⁵
Silver is only the latest thinker to tackle the question of how we can enhance our predictive prowess. Much of this work has involved, in one form or another, the question of discerning signals amid noise. Writing in 1973, the economist Michael Spence asked how an employer can distinguish potential good employees from bad ones before hiring anyone.
⁶
Spence proposed that good and bad employees signal to employers by dint of their educational credentials. More recently, the sociologist Diego Gambetta has used signaling theory to understand criminal networks.
⁷
Gambetta observes, for example, that a mafia must be especially prudent before including members into its organization. If candidates are not carefully vetted, the mafia might enlist an undercover police officer. By asking new recruits to commit a murder, the mafia imposes a substantial cost upon the undercover agent, who, presumably, would be unwilling to pay that price. A genuine would-be mobster, in contrast, can signal his commitment with a single shot. In Colombia, youth gangs have even been known to require that prospective members first kill one of their closest relatives to prove their sincerity. Imposing high costs upon ourselves is one way of signaling what we value.

Another economist who focused on asymmetric information, George Akerlof, examined the market for used cars. In 1970, he suggested that because used-car buyers have no easy means of knowing the quality of a particular car, they will pay only what they believe to be the price of an average used car of a given model and year. As a result, owners of high-quality used cars (ones that were barely driven and well-maintained)
will refuse to sell because they will not get the price they deserve, thereby reducing the overall average quality of used cars on the market. Although assessing enemy behavior and buying used cars are dramatically different realms, Akerlof’s notions do suggest the dangers that result from assuming that the seller (or the enemy) is of low quality. In
chapter 8
we saw what happens when statesmen and their advisers project negative qualities onto their opponents without an accurate understanding of the other side.

One obvious difference between these studies in economics and sociology on the one hand and the history of international relations on the other is that much of the time foreign leaders do not want to signal their true commitments. The strategic empath must therefore locate ways of identifying an adversary’s drivers amidst conflicting signals. Nevertheless, the idea of costs is useful. At meaningful pattern breaks, statesmen make choices with significant costs to themselves and with likely long-term implications. These actions can be valuable signals to foreign statesmen, even though they are unintentionally transmitted.
⁸

The natural sciences have also aided our understanding of prediction through the development of information theory. John Archibald Wheeler, the physicist who coined the term “black hole,” is also famous for crafting the catchphrase “it from bit.” Wheeler was a leading light in the development of nuclear fission, having studied under Niels Bohr and later having taught Richard Feynman. When Wheeler uttered his pithy slogan in 1989, he intended to imply that all matter as well as energy, the whole of our universe, emerged from information. The bit is a particle that cannot be split. Everything, in the end, reduces to information. But it was Claude Shannon, father of information theory in computer science, who truly brought about the information turn in scientific study.

Shannon recognized that not all information is created equal. To test this, he pulled a Raymond Chandler detective novel from his bookcase and read a random passage to his wife: “A small oblong reading lamp on the—.” He asked Betty to guess which word came next. She failed to guess correctly at first, but once he told her that the first letter was
d
, the rest was easy. It was more than mere pattern recognition that mattered here. Shannon wanted to show that the information that counted most came before the missing letters, whereas the letters that
followed the
d
in
desk
were of lesser value. For Shannon, information equaled surprise. The binary digits, or “bits,” as they came to be known, that mattered in any message were the ones that gave us something new or unexpected.
⁹
It was a valuable insight, and one with applicability across fields. The historical cases in this book bore this out. Each case examined the particular bits of surprising information on which leaders focused and why that focus helped or hindered them.

Evolutionary biology, specifically regarding the literature on theory of mind, is equally important for historians of decision-making. The classic experiment on theory of mind involves researchers who placed a candy in front of two little girls. We’ll call them Sally and Jane. The researchers then covered the candy with a box so it could not be seen. While Jane exited the room, the researchers removed the candy from under the box and hid it elsewhere, while leaving the box in place. When Jane returned, they asked Sally where Jane thinks the candy is located. Below the age of four most children think that Jane, the girl who did not see the candy being removed, will somehow know that the candy is no longer under the box. Most children believe that everyone else knows what they themselves know. It turns out that only after children reach the age of four do they discover that each of us has a distinct perspective on the world, shaped by access to different information. Before that age, children do not possess “theory of mind.” They cannot imagine that someone else does not possess the same knowledge or perspective that they themselves do.

Compelling as they are, these theories have real limits when it comes to understanding the kinds of complex decisions that statesmen face. Although the theory of mind shows how we develop a kind of mental empathy—the ability to see things from another’s point of view—this work was initially centered on primates and very small children. That said, there does exist work of relevance to statecraft. In a paper by Alison Gopnik and others, for example, researchers describe the differences between two common ways in which we predict the actions of others.
¹⁰
Most people, it seems, assume that past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior. If someone lied in the past, for example, that person can be expected to lie again. But others take a different view. Some people place greater weight on the current context. They do not discount past behavior, but they ask how the present context is likely to
affect another’s actions. In my own study of statecraft, I find that the leaders who succeeded most at anticipating enemy actions incorporated analysis of both prior patterns and current context, but they heavily weighted the information gleaned at certain moments.

One other scientific contribution bears indirectly, though significantly, on this book. Ray Kurzweil, the scientist who developed speech recognition software (and who is now the Director of Engineering at Google), has advanced a theory of how our brains function. In his 2012 book,
How to Create a Mind
, Kurzweil proposes the pattern recognition theory of mind to explain how the neocortex functions.
¹¹
Kurzweil points out that the primary purpose of our brains is in fact to predict the future through pattern recognition. Whether we are trying to anticipate threats, locate food sources, catch a ball, or catch a train, our brains are constantly performing complex calculations of probability.