A Sense of the Enemy: The High-Stakes History of Reading Your Rival’s Mind by Zachary Shore (review)

This creative and highly readable study defines and illustrates the concept of “strategic empathy,” the ability to think like one’s enemies. The central characters under analysis include some major twentieth-century decision makers—Mohandas K. Gandhi, Gustav Stresemann, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as the more obscure Vietnamese strategist, Le Duan. Shore’s analyses demonstrate a deep knowledge of developments in a number of disciplines, including cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, and political science, and his case studies are based on first-rate archival research.

The Gandhi case study shows how the Indian leader discerned that non-violence could be an effective strategy for coping with British colonial rulers. The two chapters on Gustav Stresemann focus on his ability to turn the German Weimar Republic into a nation of growing economic strength and international status by skillfully manipulating its adversaries after the disastrous loss in World War I. Having previously written a book about Germany—What Hitler Knew: The Battle for Information in Nazi Foreign Policy (New York, 2005)—Shore’s archival research in these chapters is especially impressive. Le Duan’s importance derives from his ability to discern the growing domestic constraints on the United States’ ability to persist in pursuing its disastrous policy in the Vietnam War. Hitler plays a central role in two of the studies. Roosevelt used multiple sources of information that enabled him to perceive—well in advance of his domestic critics, including the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh—the threat posed by Hitler’s Nazi Germany. In contrast, Stalin projected onto Hitler his own concept of rationality; he was certain that Hitler would not attack the ussr because he would not want to fight a war on two fronts. Thus, despite ample evidence of massive German military deployments and repeated warnings from British intelligence that attack was imminent, Stalin took no precautionary steps until hours after the onset of Operation Barbarossa. Whereas Gandhi, Stresemann, Roosevelt, and Le Duan were able to able to anticipate their adversaries’ moves—to exercise “strategic empathy”—Stalin failed to read the signs, with almost disastrous consequences.

The key to “strategic empathy” is to search for “pattern breaks” in which an adversary deviates from previous patterns of behavior, especially if doing so entails significant costs. Shore is critical of theories in various disciplines, especially of quantitative methods, that employ a “continuity heuristic” to understand decision-making behavior. He cites a number of major studies that question the ability to predict.¹ However, which “pattern breaks” are crucial? Moscow’s foreign policy after the death of Stalin provides a case in point. Stalin’s successors reduced Soviet armed forces by 1.2 million men, signed the Austrian State Treaty, and withdrew from the Porkkala Peninsula in Finland ahead of schedule. Some saw a “break point,” but Secretary of State Dulles was having none of it, attributing the Soviet moves to the weakness of a failing regime and to the strength of American containment policy.

Shore asserts that “strategic empathy” can be learned, that it is both generalizable and parsimonious, but he also correctly states that it is not predictive (200). He points out that studies of historical decision making can significantly complement the cognitive sciences. His excellent study provides strong support for the latter point.