A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind Read Online Free PDF

full faith that British authorities would not permit the repeated slaughter of unarmed, peaceful protestors.He understood that British leaders were vulnerable to his brand of disobedience precisely because they could not stomach rule by tyrannical oppression. Against a Hitler, a Stalin, and possibly even a Le Duan, Gandhi’s strategy could not have prevailed. But against the post–World War I set of British leaders, nonviolent resistance, or what Gandhi sometimes called “love force,” had a genuine chance to succeed. The House of Commons debate on General Dyer’s deeds made that plain.
In the turbulent 1920s, Stresemann’s ability to read his opponents, particularly the Russians, greatly facilitated his task of maneuvering Germany back to equal status with the European powers. Gauging the Kremlin’s drivers was especially challenging at this time in part because power was shifting in the wake of Lenin’s illness and then death. As Stalin gradually consolidated his authority, Stresemann had to determine whether Stalin’s pronouncements of socialism in one country were sincere. Would spreading communist revolution to Germany, as had been attempted in 1923, be subordinated to the interests of technological and military modernization in cooperation with Germany? By observing Soviet behavior after Scheidemann’s embarrassing revelations, Stresemann recognized that he could continue the secret military collaboration without much fear of renewed revolutionary agitation against his government.
Yet Stresemann’s acumen involved more than this. He mentalized in a thoughtful manner. He gradually constructed a picture of Soviet intentions during a time of change, as Trotsky was being out-maneuvered by Stalin for control of the regime. No doubt precisely because power was shifting inside the Kremlin, Stresemann wisely remained open to the possibility that Soviet objectives were in flux.
Stresemann faced the same type of conflicting information about his enemies that nearly all leaders confront. It was easy to build an argument that the Soviet regime was bent on spreading communist revolution to Germany and overthrowing the government. It was equally plausible, based on a separate pattern of behavior, that the Soviet regime wanted military cooperation with Germany. If Stresemann had assumed a fixed nature to the Soviets, as George F. Kennan and many of his contemporaries later would do, he might not have been receptive to the break in Soviet behavior that accompanied the Scheidemann affair. Instead, Stresemann saw that the Soviet leadership of 1926 was not the same asthe leadership of 1923. Continuing the two countries’ secret rearmament now mattered more than fomenting a German revolution. No one could say what the farther future would bring, but at least for the short and medium term, the Kremlin under Stalin favored military cooperation, and Stresemann had the strategic empathy to grasp this.
It is painfully evident that Stalin grossly misread Hitler’s intentions in 1941, but he also misread Hitler’s underlying drivers more generally. Stalin’s strategic autism cost an estimated 20 million Russian lives and widespread devastation across eastern Europe. The Soviet leader’s profound inability to understand Hitler was rooted in the specific way he mentalized. By employing simulation theory, Stalin projected his own form of rationality onto his opponent. Because Stalin would never have risked his power by waging a two-front war if he had been in Hitler’s position, Stalin assumed that Hitler would be driven by the same calculations. But Hitler was primarily driven by his racist ideology. He was willing to risk his power, his life, and his nation’s fate in order to achieve his twisted dogmatic ends. Stalin’s further use of German history convinced him that Hitler would act in accordance with prior German leaders: avoiding a two-front war. In effect, Stalin employed the continuity heuristic, assuming that the behavior