A Sense of the Enemy

by Shore, Zachary

  Written in the fourteenth century, Romance of the Three Kingdoms is one of China’s best-known and beloved novels. Based on the historical scholarship of Chen Shou in the third century, the novel imagines the thoughts and feelings of characters engaged in bitter conflict following the Han dynasty’s collapse. The massive chronicle, all 800,000 words of it, embodies the principles outlined in an even older work: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. While it is tempting to focus on the cunning of Cun Ming, the story holds even greater value for what it suggests about Sima Yi. Though it does not make the point explicitly, the tale demonstrates an age-old problem in how too many leaders think.

  Sima Yi fell victim to the continuity heuristic—the belief that the best guide to someone’s future behavior is his past behavior. If an enemy has been aggressive previously, we can expect him to be aggressive again. In fact, many of us tend to use this same heuristic across a range of contexts, not just regarding leaders and their adversaries. We do this even when the cost of making the wrong decision would be dear.

  The Pattern Problem

  An example of the continuity heuristic can be seen in a surprising place. It is embedded in a story created by one of today’s leading cognitive psychologists. Daniel Kahneman has studied heuristics and biases for decades. In his best-selling book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman constructs a hypothetical example of how we all tend to rely on what he calls the “availability heuristic.” This is where we assume that the information available to us is, in fact, all the information we need to make the right decision. To illustrate his availability heuristic, he offers the following scenario.

  An academic department is planning to hire a young professor and wants to choose the one whose prospects for scientific productivity are the best. The department narrows the choice down to two candidates, Kim and Jane. Kim is a Ph.D. student and the prototypical rising star. She arrives on campus with sterling recommendations from all of her instructors. She delivers a brilliant job talk and sails through her interviews with ease. She leaves a profound impression on the faculty that she is truly gifted. There is one problem, however. Kim has no track record of scholarly publications. She has yet to publish anything. Jane, in contrast, gives a less spectacular job talk and makes a less stellar impression in her interviews. But Jane has been working as a postdoc for the past three years and has an excellent publishing record. Which candidate should the department choose?2

  Kahneman argues that to select Kim would be to fall victim to the availability heuristic. We simply do not possess enough information about her capacity to produce scholarship. Kahneman states that he would offer the job to Jane, even though Kim made the stronger impression. Jane is arguably the safer bet, whereas Kim is a gamble. Kim might produce path-breaking work, or she could just as plausibly fail to produce altogether.

  Kahneman’s availability heuristic is, of course, a very real and often disastrous mental shortcut. Yet Kahneman appears to be basing his decision to hire Jane in part on the continuity heuristic. This mental shortcut assumes that the future will resemble the past, even though conditions may well change.

  I want to alter Kahneman’s scenario slightly in order to illustrate the problem of the continuity heuristic. Instead of the academic department making a decision about a new hire, consider how it might make the decision to tenure Jane six years after she has been hired. (Six to seven years is the standard length of time after which young professors in America are tenured.) Receiving tenure virtually guarantees a scholar a job for life. Once the decision has been made, it is nearly impossible to fire that faculty member. One major purpose for granting tenure is to ensure that scholars will be free to publish any research findings that they deem true. Intellectual freedom ensures that scholars will not compromise their conclusions under political, financial, or other pressures. Naturally, tenure is a highly sought-after status within academia. If achieved, the scholar has tremendous job security. If denied, the scholar loses her job and typically must seek employment elsewhere. The stakes, therefore, are extremely high. From the standpoint of the senior faculty members, the stakes are almost as great. If they support a scholar’s bid for tenure, they will have a colleague for life. But if they get it wrong by tenuring someone who ceases to work hard, someone who abuses the benefits of job security, then the department will be stuck with that person for decades.

  One of the questions that the tenured faculty members must ask themselves when assessing a junior colleague is whether that scholar will be productive in the future. Will she continue to publish even after being tenured when the incentives have changed? To gauge this, they typically look back on that scholar’s past productivity. The tenured faculty assume that past productivity is the best, or at least a very good indicator of future productivity—just as Kahneman believed in his scenario above. Often this turns out to be accurate. Yet frequently scholars receive tenure and cease publishing altogether, or they fail to publish anything of substance. They just dry up. Therefore, what the tenured faculty members needed to know was not the scholar’s past record but rather why the scholar had been productive in the first place. Did she possess a genuine passion and capacity for her work, or was she simply publishing in order to get tenure? The pattern of past behavior does not reveal the scholar’s underlying drivers. The continuity heuristic does not tell the hiring faculty members what they need to know. And knowing another’s hidden drivers is essential to anticipating future actions, especially because future conditions are at some point certain to change.3

  This is not a book about how to make tenure decisions, and in a moment I will return to how this applies to enemy assessments. Here I will just offer a few thoughts on a different and possibly better way to assess Jane. Rather than focusing primarily on her past productivity, I would try to examine two traits: her genuine passion for her work and her resilience in the presence of severe difficulty. If Jane speaks about her work with potent enthusiasm, or if she in some way conveys a deep love of what she does, then, unless she is an outstanding actress, I would believe that her underlying driver is to continue along a productive path. Of course, as we all know, in the real world, life has a way of interfering with our best intentions. The loss of a parent, a painful divorce, a child’s illness, issues with our own physical or mental health—these things and countless more strike nearly all of us. Life has a habit of getting in the way of productivity. I would therefore try to discern Jane’s level of resilience during prior periods of pattern breaks. In previous times of great difficulty when the unexpected occurred, how quickly and how well was she able to return to productivity? Although people can and often do improve their resilience over time, I would want to know at what level she is starting. Both these traits, her passion and her resilience, might best be revealed at pattern-break moments. I believe that this method of assessment would prove more predictive of Jane’s future productivity than would her pattern of past productivity.

  All of this bears directly on the central subject of this chapter because, unfortunately, statesmen and their advisors tend to rely on the same continuity heuristic when assessing enemy intentions. They look to an enemy’s past behavior and assume that future behavior will be the same, without considering that a changed context might alter enemy actions.

  Two of the twentieth century’s most notable attempts to assess and predict an enemy’s behavior—the Crowe Memorandum of 1907 and the Kennan telegram of 1946—were grounded in at least two unwise mental shortcuts. In the first shortcut, the authors of these reports attributed a fixed nature to their opponents, believing them to be aggressive by nature—what psychologists sometimes refer to as the fundamental attribution error.4 When policy analysts convince themselves that an enemy has unchanging, aggressive traits, they typically also believe that the enemy only understands force and that he views compromise as a sign of weakness. These assumptions have at least three detrimental effects. First, they inhibit the assessor from recognizing that a change in context or conditions could change his enemy�
��s behavior. Second, they lead the assessor to the only reasonable policy option—taking the toughest line possible. Third, they create a self-fulfilling prophecy. By adopting the hardest line possible against the enemy on the assumption that he is implacable, the enemy often becomes implacable, digging in his heels even on issues over which he might previously have been conciliatory.

  The second major shortcut employed by these assessments involved the continuity heuristic. The assessors assumed that past behavior was the best predictor of future behavior. The idea that new contexts could substantially change the enemy’s intentions formed only a secondary part of their analysis. While it is true that the future may often resemble the past, that does not tell us why it does. It is an assumption with no explanatory power. It tells us nothing about the underlying drivers of an individual or group. Consequently, when conditions change, as they inevitably do, the analysis cannot adequately explain or predict the enemy’s behavior.

  The Enemy Mind

  On New Year’s Day 1907, an ambitious and stridently self-confident member of the British Foreign Office laid out his views on what he perceived as the growing German threat. Germany’s rising power, he insisted, made continued clashes with Britain inevitable. His analysis sparked much interest, even generating a reaction from the Foreign Secretary himself. Unfortunately for the cause of peace, his sense of the German enemy was grounded in at least two fundamental flaws—flaws that have bedeviled international relations ever since.

  Known today simply as the Crowe Memorandum, Eyre Crowe’s assessment of Anglo–German relations laid out a conceptual framework for anticipating German behavior. The extent of the document’s influence is still debated, yet it remains a compelling source in the history of international conflict in part because it so boldly ascribed a nature to the German people. That nature, Crowe claimed, was expansionist.

  The child of a British father and German mother, Crowe was born in Leipzig and lived for a period in France. His trilingual fluency made him a natural fit for work in the British Foreign Office. Though he never held a diplomatic post overseas, Crowe steadily rose through the organization in Whitehall, was eventually knighted in 1911, and subsequently became Permanent Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs in 1920. Convinced of his own insights into the German nature, and vehement that Germany would continue to expand, Crowe offered his superiors an unsolicited assessment of the perceived German threat.

  According to Crowe, German history led in a straight line toward ever more territorial aggrandizement. Crowe saw the modern German state as the inheritor of Frederick the Great’s Prussia, which was forged by the sword. Bismarck then built upon Frederick’s legacy, again by blood and iron. Crowe claimed that the idea of controlling a vast colonial empire had possessed “the German imagination.” The German people, he insisted, believed that it was their natural right to spread their ideals and increase their control over territory. And this outward thrust would, inevitably, lead that nation into increasing conflict with Great Britain.

  In his detailed review of Anglo–German relations over the previous twenty years, Crowe saw a consistent pattern of German aggressiveness and British acquiescence to German demands. Under Bismarck, Crowe alleged, the German Foreign Office browbeat Britain into friendship, but subsequent to the great Chancellor’s departure, “the habit of bullying and offending England had almost become a tradition” in Berlin.5 He likened German policy since 1890 to that of a professional blackmailer, forever extracting concessions by mere threat and bluster. Based on this reading of the relationship, Crowe advocated a far firmer stand in any future negotiations with the Germans, in the implicit expectation that Germany continued to seek expansion by any means. Like Marshall Sima Yi, who assumed that his enemy Cun Ming would behave at present and in the future just as he had behaved in the past, Crowe assumed that German leaders as a whole would behave similarly in future as they had done in the past. The key difference was that Crowe applied the continuity heuristic to an entire group of leaders rather than to an individual opponent. Nonetheless, Crowe’s and Sima Yi’s style of thinking was essentially the same.

  On one level, Crowe’s analysis was based on a structural interpretation of international affairs. The growing strength of one state was seen as ineluctably clashing with that of the dominant world power. The only viable option, as he saw it, was to resist the pressure from the burgeoning threat. This is the standard interpretation of Crowe’s text.6 But Crowe’s assessment was built on multiple assumptions. His structural interpretation ignored the possibility that individual German statesmen could shape Anglo–German relations in peaceful ways. He assumed that the distribution of global power necessitated that all German statesmen would relentlessly pursue their national interests in the same or similar manner, namely aggressively. He further assumed that each German statesman would perceive the national interests in the same way.

  On a deeper level, the memorandum reflected a fundamental attribution error combined with the continuity heuristic. Crowe based his assessment in part on a particular interpretation of the German character. Despite the discussion of power and interests, there was something deeply personal embedded in his thinking. His language and his metaphors revealed prejudices about not just Germany as a government but about the German people as a whole. He proclaimed that it was not merely the Kaiser who demanded territorial expansion but also the entire spectrum of society, from statesmen to journalists to businessmen to the educated and uneducated masses alike. The German people cried out with one voice to demand colonies, “where German emigrants can settle and spread the national ideals of the Fatherland . . .”

  Crowe believed that he could interpret and articulate the true German mindset. “The world belongs to the strong,” he wrote, imagining that this is how most Germans thought and that these thoughts must dictate policy. “We have no designs on other people’s possessions, but where States are too feeble to put their territory to the best possible use, it is the manifest destiny of those who can and will do so to take their places.”

  Crowe was so convinced that he grasped the German mentality that he implied that anyone who differed must not be able to enter the German mind: “No one who has a knowledge of German political thought, and who enjoys the confidence of German friends speaking their minds openly and freely, can deny that these are the ideas which are proclaimed on the housetops . . .” Those who could not sympathize with these sentiments, he maintained, were considered by Germans as prejudiced foreigners who could not recognize their real feelings.

  To underscore his point that the problem lay with the German people, not simply its leaders, Crowe concluded his lengthy report with the final statement that a resolute, unbending British stance would be the best way to ensure the respect of not simply the German government but the German nation as well.

  Even if Crowe had correctly articulated the general German public mood, his analysis overlooked the idea that public moods can shift, especially when leaders direct it. Crowe’s weighty declarations garnered much attention inside Whitehall, reaching the man on top.

  Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, praised the report’s insights. Writing on January 28, he called it a “most valuable” memorandum that deserved to be studied and seriously considered. He described its overview of recent history as “most helpful as a guide to policy.”7

  There was, however, another view. Less often noted is a small but telling comment just below Sir Edward Grey’s remarks, signed only with the capital letter “F.” The words below were most likely penned by Edmond George Petty-Fitzmaurice, a Liberal politician who served as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from 1905 to 1908. Diplomatically couching his objections in caveats, Fitzmaurice noted the inescapable implications of Crowe’s report.

  The only other remark I make on this most able and interesting Memo[randum] is to suggest whether the restless and uncertain personal character of the Emperor William is sufficiently taken into account in the es
timate of the present situation. There was at least method in Prince Bismarck’s madness; but the Emperor is like, a cat in a cupboard. He may jump out anywhere. The whole situation would be changed in a moment if this personal factor were changed, and another Minister like General Caprivi [a former German Chancellor known for his pro-British foreign policy] also came into office in consequence.

  Fitzmaurice’s observation challenged the premise of Crowe’s analysis. In Crowe’s view, German behavior could be predicted based on its past behavior. Its past behavior was in turn based on a particular reading of events combined with an assumption that a German character not only existed but that this putative national character was also consistent, ubiquitous, and meaningful. Fitzmaurice was suggesting otherwise. If a change in personnel could cause a shift in policy, then there could not be a consistent German characteristic of aggressive expansionism. By the same token, although the structure of global power might make disputes more likely as interests collide, those disputes need not result in significant conflict if more moderate individuals were in charge.8

  Do individuals matter in the formulation of policy, or are they instead bound by forces beyond their control? Clearly, such a sharp dichotomy oversimplifies the matter. Individuals have influence, and structural forces can shape their actions. Crowe was arguing in part that Germany’s power had grown to a point where it would be uncontrolled if left unchecked. British interests would therefore continue to be threatened by German expansion because of the nature of German power.

  Fitzmaurice tactfully presented the opposite view, or at least a modification of Crowe’s view. He suggested that individuals do have agency and influence. Two different leaders can make different choices despite being bound by the same basic circumstances. This perspective not only challenges the notion of static national character traits but it also refutes the idea that individuals will invariably use whatever power they possess and that they will all use it in the same way. In contrast, those who believe that international relations are governed by immutable laws of power relations are more sympathetic to Crowe’s views. Unfortunately, they are also often susceptible to Crowe’s notions of national character. The two perspectives are often intertwined.