Kadeesha had a tip. It arrived by anonymous e-mail. “Watch the 9:20 race at Wolverhampton. The winner will be a horse called Boz.”
Kadeesha was instructed not to place a bet; she was merely to watch. She had never put money on the races before. In fact, she had no history of gambling. Why would she, of all people, be receiving this tip? A single mom in Kew, England, working two jobs to support her son, Kadeesha barely had enough income to cover the monthly bills. “I never had a large sum of money,” she explained, “’cause it always goes out ’cause of all the responsibilities I’ve got in life.” But the sender insisted that he possessed a foolproof system for consistently predicting the winners at the race track. “I was gutted that I couldn’t put a bet on, but I checked it out and it won.”
Kadeesha was intrigued. The next e-mail came a few days later. Again it predicted the result of a race just twenty-four hours in advance, this one at Suffolk Downs in Boston. How could this “system” know anything about a race in America? Kadeesha figured, “I’m up for a laugh,” and this time, as instructed, she put a small amount of money on Laced Up. Though not the favorite, her horse won again.
Now Kadeesha was hooked. When the third e-mail came, she zoomed out from her desk at work to the nearest betting shop. She put down 20 quid, which for her was not a small sum, on a horse named Naughton Brook, an eighteen to one outsider. Nervous and excited, she repeated to herself, “This had betta’ win. Oh, God, this had betta’ win.” As the announcer declared the winner, Kadeesha shrieked, “Thank you, The System!” She had just won 360 pounds.
Race four took place back at Wolverhampton. The 2:45, a horse called Formation. The odds of correctly predicting four of these races in a row stood at nearly a thousand to one. But Formation did win, and Kadeesha had now made over 500 pounds. The System, it seemed, could not lose.
After race five, Kadeesha’s confidence in The System had solidified. She was now ready to put down serious dough. She went to her father to ask for 1,000 pounds. “The most I ever put on a horse was 20 quid,” her father told her, “and when I lost it, I said that’s it. Never again.” Nonetheless, the predictions had been right so far. Kadeesha then borrowed more money from a loan company. For race six she had assembled 4,000 pounds. She bet it all on Moon Over Miami, the horse in the green and white checks. “I’m really, really scared now,” she admitted to the TV cameras filming her story. The worst part, she confessed, was gambling her father’s money as well as her own.
What Kadeesha did not know but was about to discover was that The System was simply an exercise in probability. Derren Brown, a British entertainer, wanted to demonstrate how difficult it is for most of us to think rationally about prediction. No such system could exist for accurately predicting horse races, yet Kadeesha and thousands more like her are willing to believe in a bogus ploy. Soon after his first anonymous e-mail, Brown informed Kadeesha that he was the actual sender. She then agreed to let him film her as she bet her money. But what Brown did not reveal (not yet) was that the same e-mail Kadeesha initially received Brown had also sent to 7,775 other randomly selected people. The only difference in all those e-mail messages was that the recipients were divided into six groups and each group was given the name of one of the six horses in the race. Kadeesha just happened to be in the group that was told to watch for Boz. The five groups whose horses did not win were sent a follow-up e-mail, blaming the loss on a glitch in the system. They were never contacted again. Kadeesha’s group, however, was then subdivided into another six groups, each given the name of one of the six horses in a new race, and instructed to bet. And thus the process was repeated, until by the fifth race, only six participants remained, each one betting on a different one of the six horses. Kadeesha just happened to be the lucky winner. By race six, however, she was the only one left. Moon Over Miami had as good a chance of winning as any other.
“Fuckin’ hell!” was all Kadeesha could muster after Brown explained what he had done. “I’m gonna’ be sick,” she declared. And yet, even after the explanation, Kadeesha seemed in disbelief. “I was lucky all this time and now it’s all gone wrong.”
Moon Over Miami did not win. The lucky horse was Marodima.
Only moments after Kadeesha’s horse had lost and her agony was plain, Derren Brown assured her that he had not actually bet her money on the unlucky steed. With dramatic flare, Brown handed her a ticket showing 4,000 on Marodima to win. (Most likely, he had put 4,000 down on each of the horses, just to be certain.) Kadeesha was about to receive 13,000 pounds in cash. She shrieked for joy. “I’m debt free for the first time in eight years!”
Brown’s experiment tried to show how poorly most of us grasp basic concepts of probability. What he actually revealed was something he himself might not have realized. Kadeesha always had the upper hand, and she very likely sensed it. She had no way of knowing whether Brown’s so-called system was legitimate or not. She probably lacked a firm grounding in the science of probability. What she really needed to know, however, was not whether Brown’s system could find her the winning horse. Instead, she needed to know whether Derren Brown would permit her to lose her and her father’s savings on national TV.
Kadeesha had two ways of thinking about what Brown would likely do. She could have tried to ascertain Brown’s character, observing subtle cues to gauge his kindness and compassion—the underlying drivers that make him tick. The second method was for Kadeesha to contemplate the limits on what Brown could actually do, regardless of his inclinations. With this approach Kadeesha had to focus on Brown’s constraints. The key question then would be not whether Brown, of his own volition, would let her lose, but whether his television network or the British TV-viewing public would permit a working-class single mom to be ruined by a clever TV host.
Kadeesha may not have had the skills to think deeply about the probability of predicting races, but rather than being a sucker for “The System,” Kadeesha may have worked the system—the larger social system in which both Brown and Kadeesha have to function. Moon Over Miami had little chance of winning, but placing her money as Brown instructed her to do proved the shrewdest guess she could have made.
We will never know what Kadeesha really thought, but we can use her predicament to illuminate the kinds of questions leaders face when thinking like the enemy. Exactly like Kadeesha, leaders must seek out their adversaries’ underlying drivers and constraints. They must gather information, filter out the ocean of irrelevant data, and devise shortcuts for locating the points that matter most. I have called this exceedingly difficult endeavor strategic empathy.
Kadeesha’s story also highlights a related problem in prediction. Quantitative methods often miss the mark because they calculate the wrong data, as I described in the previous chapter. Even if Kadeesha had possessed training in statistics, math, or the science of probability, seeing through Brown’s system would have done her little good. Kadeesha walked away a winner: 13,000 pounds richer than before. Moon Over Miami’s fate never mattered. The only odds that counted were the ones on what Brown would do to her in the public eye. And those odds were probably always in her favor. Knowing which data matter most is what strategic empaths do best.
I began this book by asking what produces strategic empathy—the crucial yet all-too-rare capacity for divining an enemy’s underlying drivers and constraints. I have argued that when leaders focused on the right data—their enemy’s behavior at pattern-break moments—they improved their chances of reading their enemies correctly. When they ignored the pattern breaks entirely, or else grossly misinterpreted them as in Stalin’s case regarding Hitler, they thwarted their capacity for accurate assessments. I further argued that when leaders assumed that their opponents’ future behavior would resemble their past behavior, they hindered their own ability to identify and correctly interpret surprising new information, which could have afforded them useful insight.
Mahatma Gandhi’s recognition that the British leadership was not evil, as he frequently stated, but in fact remorseful over the Amritsar massacre emboldened him to pursue a strategy of aggressive nonviolence. He could do this in 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 as the 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 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 incident as 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.
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 himself. It was just his nature. The original tale probably traces back to Aesop, who related the same parable through a farmer and a viper, but the moral was the same. Some people just can’t change their wicked ways.
The scorpion story would be a tremendously depressing commentary on human nature if it were not offset by another of Aesop’s fables, one with a strikingly alternative lesson. In the story of Androcles and the lion, a slave in ancient Greece escapes his captors and flees into the woods. There he comes upon a roaring beast. Whereas others might have fled in terror, Androcles overcomes his initial fear and approaches the animal. He discovers that the lion has a painful thorn caught in its bleeding paw. Once he removes the thorn and binds the wound, the lion is not only grateful, he develops a genuine warmth for the human. Later, both the lion and the slave are captured. As punishment, Androcles is thrown into the arena, where the hungry lion is sent to devour him while the emperor and crowds look on in savage expectation. But when the lion rushes toward his prey, he recognizes Androcles. Rather than tearing him apart, the lion licks Androcles’s hand in friendship. The moral Aesop had in mind had to do with gratitude. But the story conveys another equally important lesson. Sometimes our enemies are not enemies by nature but because of conditions external to themselves. They can be transformed into allies simply by a change in circumstance.
These two tales can easily serve as metaphors for a recurring debate within foreign policy circles. Leaders are frequently confronted by aggressive states. They must then devise strategies for dealing with them. It would be just as foolish to assume that all opponents are potential allies as it would be to think that all are implacable foes. One of the most crucial tasks of statecraft is to distinguish the scorpions who cannot change from the lions who can. It is here that pattern breaks can help.
Strategic empathy might seem useful only for getting the better of your opponent. Certainly that was its value to the leaders I described throughout this book. But strategic empathy can be used just as effectively to avoid or ameliorate conflicts. It can be a means not for outmaneuvering the enemy but instead for making amends. Obviously, some enemies cannot be accommodated. Some differences can never be bridged, but many can. Understanding what truly drives others to act as they do is a necessary ingredient for resolving most conflicts where force is not desired. It is, in truth, an essential first step toward constructing a lasting peace.