A Good Sentence on Foreign Policy

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From a commenter:

(Good) Foreign policy and military intervention is about figuring out actual intentions and capabilities without making self-fulfilling prophecies.

If each adversary judges the others’ intentions as hostile, then you get war as the self-fulfilling prophecy. So you want to err on the side of not judging others’ intentions as hostile. But when others’ intentions truly are hostile, judging them otherwise is a mistake.

8 thoughts on “A Good Sentence on Foreign Policy”

  1. Where is the line where judging someone as hostile make them so? Is it a priori knowable?

  2. This is fundamentally true statement. Understanding your adversary’s intentions and not conflating them with your own can cause fatal errors. In intelligence, this problem is called mirror imaging. It is difficult to overcome, but is a well know problem in the Intelligence Community so writers of intelligence reports have somewhere in their minds the thought “Am I predicting the adversary’s action based on what I would do if I was in their situation?” So correcting for the problem becomes (or should become) habitual.

    Now that I am in the business consulting world I am continually startled at how widespread and unknown this problem seems to be. Managers do this when evaluating employees, consults do it when dealing with clients, etc. If you find yourself thinking “What are they thinking? I would never do that!” You are probably not thinking hard enough about their intentions.

  3. An interesting read that perhaps relates, is “The Last Warrior,” about Andrew Marshall and the Office of Net Assessment at the Pentagon. A quote from this paper describes Marshall’s concept of net assessment: “You need to study the opponent, whether it is a terrorist cell or a company doing business with your department. Improve your understanding of how they see the world, what metrics drive their behavior, and so forth.”
    In discovering the “net” in the assessment, you identify your opponent’s or competitor’s weakness(es), and strategize how to exploit that in the long term.

  4. It seems to me that we should respond to actions directed against us or allies with whom we have mutual defense agreements, not our interpretation of the intentions of others. We have a capacity for force equal to to the entire rest of the world. What good is that position if we don’t trust it to deter aggression against us?

    • Yes, and always make peace at every step. Sometimes make peace by creating a desert.

  5. Good foreign policy also entails knowing your own strategic goals, and your own limitations. We need to give up on the idea that we are capable of changing other cultures. Set goals that we need to meet, then figure out our best options based upon our capabilities.

    Steve

  6. But can unassuming others are hostile make them unhostile?

    No, I don’t think so, even if they only initially became hostile as a result of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    Reversing hostility then is a more difficult process than creating it in the first place.

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