Foreign policy and military strategy suffer because of two assumptions, one related to space and the other time. First, U.S. and NATO strategists draw too much from the WEIRD countries: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich Democracies.[1] Second, for all the supposed influence of history, strategists’ obsession with interstate war is decidedly a manifestation of a 19th- and 20th-century bias.[2] In other words, the U.S. and Europe have a disparate influence on what the military studies and on strategists’ baseline assumptions—every major strategic course in professional military education draws overwhelmingly from WEIRD wars.[3] In not studying how other cultures wage war and/or peace, strategists are underprepared to analyze it effectively.
The current Beltway obsession with large-scale combat operations has exacerbated this tendency. Too many analysts are talking about wars between organized entities with clear beginnings and ends. But that expectation does not always hold. Further, these assumptions have bled into the very language of war. Most importantly, the idea that the next war will be fought against a near-peer undergirds the assumptions strategists make about the expected behavior of both partners and enemies. This can have deadly follow-on implications. If every action is to supposedly “stop WWIII,” then that phrase loses meaning, which dilutes strategists’ ability to, indeed, stop WWIII.
This article draws from research in social psychology and sociolinguistics to argue that strategists would benefit from looking beyond the parts of the world that most make sense to Westerners. Getting out of English and engaging more intentionally with other cultures on their terms—including, if not especially, those hostile to the U.S.—should be the rule, not the exception, in strategic foresight and planning.
WEIRD
In a now-famous article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Dr. Joseph Henrich, Dr. Steven Heine and Dr. Ara Norenzayan questioned the validity of an assumption underlying many findings in psychology: that humans are comparable at the individual level.[4] On the surface, that assumption seems fine. But it disaggregates any individual from his or her surroundings, including, importantly, their cultural context.
The study of strategy has the same pitfalls as those in behavioral science—over reliance on what Henrich and his co-authors call the WEIRD countries. For national security professionals, this tendency makes us more likely to project Americans’ more individualistic, often end-state-driven, assumptions on counterparts who may think in different ways. Pearl Harbor is one historical example of this. Even if the term kamikaze did not officially exist until a few years later, many at the time dismissed the possibility of an attack on Hawaii because of planes’ limitations—if the planes could not carry enough fuel for a return flight to Japan, not enough people thought that pilots would really go on suicide missions. It was outside the parameters of the plausible for many strategists. That erroneous WEIRD assumption blinded better analysis about what Japanese society valued or about Japan’s own grand narratives.
Think of how Americans react when they hear that other countries have issued travel warnings about the dangers of visiting the United States.
But there are numerous contemporary examples as well. Think of how Americans react when they hear that other countries have issued travel warnings about the dangers of visiting the United States. And why should countries not? The rate of death from gun violence is eight times higher in the U.S. than in Canada. It is nearly 100 times higher than the rate in the U.K.[5] America’s, privatized healthcare system is an outlier among even industrialized democracies, which multiple countries warn their citizens about in terms of incurring unexpected debt.[6] And Muslim-majority and Black-majority countries regularly issue travel warnings about hate crimes and police brutality.[7] But Americans think of themselves not only as the good guys, but as the country everyone would want to visit. And Americans project their understanding of whatever normal might be onto others, even allies. If America cannot even accurately conceptualize how other WEIRDos think of them, American strategists should embrace the reality that how enemies might view what is supposedly normal is well outside the American reality.
Trying to red team strategy requires admitting that even a villain is the hero of their own story and comes to the present with their own past that we both cannot ignore and which they expect their interlocutors to respect.
Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Newport, RI, United States Mar. 22, 2016 (Chief Petty Officer James Foehl).
Getting outside a WEIRD worldview requires both effort and empathy. As retired general H.R. McMaster puts it, American foreign policy is currently lacking such “strategic empathy,” or ability to conceive a problem from the mindset of another. “Empathy displaces narcissism with an appreciation of the aspirations, and ideologies that drive and constrain our rivals,” he wrote last year.[8] McMaster has repeatedly stated that policy makers must remember that, to use a cliché, the enemy gets a vote—something everyone claims to understand but history shows gets forgotten.[9] Getting outside WEIRD biases requires self-reflection that is likely difficult, but nonetheless critical, as it is the precursor to even being able to engage empathetically with allies and enemies. Trying to red team strategy requires admitting that even a villain is the hero of their own story and comes to the present with their own past that we both cannot ignore and which they expect their interlocutors to respect. In international politics, that translates to being much more intentional when contemplating other countries’ strategic goals.
Beyond just being able to recognize existing WEIRD biases, having blinders to the non-WEIRD world may also beget other problems, such as with information warfare, which fundamentally requires an understanding of language.
The importance of non-WEIRD study
There are numerous ways to incorporate non-WEIRD thinking into strategy and military education. One is the aforementioned need to focus on empathy. A second is to draw from non-WEIRD examples, for example in the study of campaigns or battles. A third is by recognizing the importance of language.
Research in sociolinguistics shows that the language in which a conversation is conducted influences both understanding and how memories encode in the brain.[10] In other words, to a native bilingual, saying something in one language may evoke very different emotions and behaviors than saying the same thing to that same person in their other language.[11] It may not matter much if an American asks a Canadian ally about poutine in French or English, but asking a counterpart from the Northern Triangle about a sensitive topic like crime or emigration in Spanish versus English may provoke different reactions with potential national security implications. In terms of great power competition, it potentially could be very important for recall and memory if someone encodes an idea in their brain in Mandarin Chinese versus English, as the former may provoke more of an expectation of communalism than the latter.[12] To give another example, Mandarin may be better suited to systems thinking because the terms in that language overlay better with network terminology than existing English terms and explanations.[13] But few works on strategy or information discuss the implications of code-switching in discussions about strategic options or about which languages constrain or facilitate certain behaviors.
…the security clearance process actually compounds or accentuates WEIRD biases in the national security environment.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Government is notoriously deficient when it comes to bilinguals, especially in less common languages.[14] Ambassador Laura Holgate pointed out in 2017 that the security clearance process itself impedes bringing some of the people who speak the languages the U.S. government most needs.[15] Indeed, the security clearance process actually compounds or accentuates WEIRD biases in the national security environment. The military, for example, created a program to lure qualified foreign youths for hard-to-fill positions, in exchange for permanent residence.[16] But, even in that specific program, enlistees were denied clearances for having foreign contacts, which seems endemic to the design of the program, and is bafflingly myopic.[17] "They're rejecting me for the same reasons they hired me," one said.[18] That is, to use the technical term, utter bullocks! Especially since the clearance process itself may not actually root out native-born extremists, as evidenced in America’s Capitol on January 6, 2021.[19]
…can the national security and intelligence communities expect such patriots to step up if some in government and media are promoting Anglo-Saxon heritage as preferable?
Relatedly, the ethno-nationalist populism prevalent in today’s American politics, as well as the numerous xenophobic attacks catalogued in recent years prompted by merely speaking a language other than English or looking Asian, means that WEIRD biases could become more prevalent in the short-term.[20] That would be especially problematic for great power competition from a strategic perspective. After all, if the U.S. is worried about China and Russia, the country needs more people who both speak those languages and can analyze problems and offer options from those perspectives. But can the national security and intelligence communities expect such patriots to step up if some in government and media are promoting Anglo-Saxon heritage as preferable?[21]
Secretary Kerry Visits the Foreign Service, Mar. 15, 2013 (U.S. Department of State).
Learning about war with majority WEIRD historical examples in the age of great power competition has distracted from an important continuing reality: cultural sensitivity, knowledge of languages, and understanding one’s interlocutor is not merely the job of State Department Foreign Service Officers, or military Foreign Area Officers, and those tackling counterinsurgency. Such thinking still has a place when thinking about near-peer competitors and being aware of our own biases is essential to success.
Benito Juárez famously said that “el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz.”[22] The translation loses something, as the adjective ajeno is usually translated as alien. The translation I have always found most useful is more personal, akin to s/he who is not like me. S/he who is not like me primes a person to consider others, to be intentionally not ethnocentric, to get out of the only normal they know being their own.[23] American foreign policy cannot hope to win at great power competition, whatever that looks like, if, in trying to be strategically empathetic, strategists do not realize their own blinders and are blind to their own WEIRD-ness.
Amanda B. Cronkhite is an Assistant Professor at the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) at Fort Leavenworth, KS. She holds a PhD in political science and previously worked for the State Department as a Foreign Service Officer. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense.
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Header Image: Green and Black, May 26, 2020 (Yang Wewe).
Notes:
[1] Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, “The weirdest people in the world,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2010): 61-64, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X .
[2] Tanisha M. Fazal and Paul Poast, "War Is Not Over: What the Optimists Get Wrong About Conflict," Foreign Affairs vol. 98, no. 6 (Nov.-Dec. 2019): 74. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-10-15/war-not-over .
[3] Joshua Hastey and Adam Knight. “Grey Lines and Grey Zones: Toward a Broader Conception of Interstate War.” Presentation, Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Virtual, April 14, 2021.
[4] Henrich et al, “Weirdest,” 63.
[5] Nurth Aizenman, “Gun Violence Deaths: How The U.S. Compares With The Rest Of The World,” NPR, August 5, 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/03/24/980838151/gun-violence-deaths-how-the-u-s-compares-to-the-rest-of-the-world .
[6] Caitlin Hu, 2019, “What they really think: America seen through the world’s travel warnings,” CNN (August 10) https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/07/world/us-travel-advisories-intl
[7] Talia Lakritz, 2019, “13 travel warnings other countries have issued about visiting the US,” Business Insider (August 7) https://www.insider.com/traveling-in-the-us-warnings-2019-7
[8] H.R. McMaster, “US foreign policy took a narcissistic turn after the Cold War. Here’s how to set things right,” Korea Herald, October 19, 2020, http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20201018000011 .
[9] Daniel Mollenkamp, “Former National Security Advisor McMaster ‘Not a Military Drone’,” The Well News, April 9, 2021, https://www.thewellnews.com/geopolitics/former-national-security-advisor-mcmaster-not-a-military-drone/.
[10] Susan Ervin‐Tripp, 1964, "Language and TAT Content in Bilinguals." Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology 68: 500-507, quoted in Wenshuo Zhang, “Political implications of bilingual cognition” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018), 108-114, http://hdl.handle.net/2142/100900
[11] Wenshuo Zhang, “Political implications of bilingual cognition” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagin, 2018), 22-24, http://hdl.handle.net/2142/100900
[12] Zhang, “Political Implications,” 27.
[13] Army major, conversation with author, May 2021.
[14] Zekeh Gbotokuma, “Opinion: World language skills matter for U.S. national security,” Baltimore Sun, September 12, 2017, https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/readers-respond/bs-ed-rr-sept-20170912-story.html .
[15] Michel Nugent, Esther Brimmer and Marth Abbott, “The Link Between Foreign Languages and U.S. National Security,” moderated by Sanford J. Ungar, Council on Foreign Relations, June 14, 2017, https://www.cfr.org/event/link-between-foreign-languages-and-us-national-security .
[16] Richard Sisk, 2021, “These Recruits Were Promised Citizenship in Exchange for Military Service. Now They Fear the US Has Forgotten Them,” Military.com, March 13, https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/03/13/these-recruits-were-promised-citizenship-exchange-military-service-now-they-fear-us-has-forgotten.html
[17] Sisk, “Recruits”
[18] Sisk, “Recruits”
[19] Hannah Gais, 2021, “A New ‘War on Terrorism’ Is the Wrong Way to Fight Domestic Extremists,” The New Republic, May 18, https://newrepublic.com/article/162229/war-domestic-terrorism-stop-far-right-extremists
[20] Robert Shertzer, “Understanding Today’s Populism as Ethnic Nationalism,” Migration Policy Center Blog, February 21, 2020, https://blogs.eui.eu/migrationpolicycentre/understanding-todays-populism-ethnic-nationalism/; Daniel Villareal, “Hate Crimes Under Trump Surged Nearly 20 Percent Says FBI Report,” Newsweek, November 16, 2020, https://www.newsweek.com/hate-crimes-under-trump-surged-nearly-20-percent-says-fbi-report-1547870; Robert Rey Agudo, “The Danger Of Speaking Spanish In Public,” WBUR, March 4, 2019, https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2019/03/04/spanish-hate-crime-oscars-roberto-rey-agudo; Barbar Sprunt, “Enough Is Enough: Democrats Push For GOP Support On Asian American Hate Crimes Bill,” NPR, April 13, 2021 https://www.npr.org/2021/04/13/986749681/enough-is-enough-democrats-push-for-gop-support-on-asian-american-hate-crimes-bi
[21] L.D. Burnett, “In the U.S, praise for Anglo-Saxon heritage has always been about white supremacy,” Washington Post, April 26, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/26/us-praise-anglo-saxon-heritage-has-always-been-about-white-supremacy/
[22] The full quote is “entre los individuos, como entre las naciones, el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz,” commonly translated as follows: Among individuals, as among nations, respect for the rights of others is peace.
[23] A recent tweet, to show the converse, was widely panned for talking about every supposedly recorded battle in history, with continents other than Europe largely ignored in what was recorded. Soner Cagaptay, “Every recorded battle in history --also why the EU was such a a good idea,” May 3, 2021, 21:14 EDT. https://twitter.com/SonerCagaptay/status/1389387850551005192.