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

of past German leaders could predict the behavior of present and future German leaders. In short, he did exactly the opposite of what a good strategic empath should do—the opposite of what Stresemann had done. Stalin mentalized by simulation theory, and he relied on the continuity heuristic to interpret information. What he needed instead was to mentalize by employing the pattern-break heuristic. He should have focused on Hitler’s behavior during two pattern-break moments: Night of the Long Knives and Kristallnacht.
If Stresemann and Stalin represent the two extreme ends on the strategic empathy spectrum, then the North Vietnamese leader Le Duan would fall closer to the middle. On the eve of American escalation in Vietnam, Le Duan accurately grasped America’s most salient underlying constraints: its vulnerability to high numbers of casualties, its difficulty in maintaining support for a protracted war, and its distracting global commitments. This recognition shaped not only Hanoi’s strategy but also the war’s outcome. The Party leader further identified American actions surrounding the Tonkin Gulf incidentas a provocative prelude to escalation. Yet while he was successful in spotting America’s constraints, there is little evidence that he truly comprehended what drove President Johnson and his advisors. Because Le Duan is known as an austere Marxist ideologue, it is tempting to conclude that he could only view the Americans through that ideological lens. But given Le Duan’s considerable efforts to understand his principal adversary, it is unlikely that he allowed his ideology to serve as his only means of thinking about America—his ample Marxist rhetoric notwithstanding.
    Does He Sting, or Only Roar?
Entering another’s mind is hard enough when we know that person well. It is vastly harder when that person comes from a foreign culture, speaks a foreign tongue, and thinks in ways distinctly different from ourselves. I have tried to show that the pattern-break heuristic enhanced leaders’ ability to think like their enemies and that this ability affected key conflicts in the past century. Yet the pattern-break heuristic is not simply a tool of the past. It can be just as useful to present-day policy analysts seeking to predict their adversaries’ likely actions. Although analysts should not overweigh the expected payoffs of this approach, they should weigh heavily the value of surprising information. When routine trends are broken and individuals behave in unexpected ways, that information can reveal more about an opponent’s root ambitions than his actions under normal conditions. This is primarily true when an opponent’s actions impose costs upon himself.
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