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4Q22: Perspectives Matter

Strategy Bridge

In recent quarterlies published by The Strategy Bridge, many authors have tended to center the United States in discussions about strategic competition. In doing so, they have illuminated perspectives about the national security challenges facing that nation.

Such an approach can be limiting, however, because it is narrowly specific in its framing. As a U.S.-based journal—with a majority of our readers historically from the United States—it is perhaps natural that contributors argue from this perspective, but it can be troublesome to view challenges with a too-consistent perspective. Susan Colbourn articulates this dynamic, arguing, “The scholarly obsession in the United States with centering the United States is stunting our ability to analyse foreign affairs, leading too many of us to assume the United States can influence everything.”[1]

And, if alliances are a strength of the United States and Western nations in strategic competition, then it is more important than ever to view strategic competition from the perspective of a variety of nations to better understand their complex positions due to economic, diplomatic, political, military, and other circumstances.

In this spirit, the first piece of Strategy Bridge’s final 2022 quarterly returns to Afghanistan. Joe McGiffin asks us to wrestle with how U.S. ethnocentrism affected statecraft, leading us not only to misconstrue ourselves while stereotyping others in this process. We cannot leave the challenges of the Global War on Terror in the past in the shift toward strategic competition given U.S. failures to understand our allies and potential adversaries.

The next piece, from Australian contributors Elizabeth Buchanan and Christopher Kourloufas, demonstrates how this limited understanding is affecting the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, with Australian strategy conducted by staff officers who have little understanding of either the nations involved or the region.

Our quarterly remains in this region for the next piece by Heather Levy, who argues that “large investments become lost opportunities when great powers fail to adequately account for the perspective of other nations in their foreign policy.” Here Levy refers particularly to setbacks in Cambodia and the Philippines.

Then Garrett Martin argues the United States should think less like a hegemon, which could be setting itself on a direct path to war with China, and more like a small nation. This approach would require the U.S. to de-emphasize long-term kinetic capabilities while increasing emphasis on sociocultural elements of multi-domain warfare.

Next, Amanda Cronkhite points to how the U.S. ignores its neighbors to the south while China invests heavily in the region, to its potential peril. However, her argument has ramifications beyond South America, as she points out how Western nations are losing the information war in cases where they think they are winning, as in the competing narratives about the Russian war in Ukraine. To win the information war, it is worth considering the target audience. Cronkhite points out, for example, that 85 percent of the world’s population lives outside of industrialized democracies.

Yvonne Chiu further stresses how the U.S. misunderstands strategic competition regarding Taiwan and China. Indeed, many in Taiwan wonder at the extent to which the U.S. fully understands Taiwan’s perspective. In strategic competition, the U.S. tends to consider other nations as pieces to be moved around a chessboard, an approach that only alienates its present and potential partners and allies.

Historically, the U.S. is not alone in this strategic narcissism, as Wesley Moerbe argues in the quarterly’s next piece. He offers a solution to this narcissism—the process of storytelling to help situate the strategist in an alternative perspective. As he explains, stories “transport an audience outside their own reality,” thus helping a strategist to “visualize a probable reaction to unfolding events from the perspective of another.”

Walter Hudson then shows it is possible to expand U.S. thinking beyond its often narrow focus on a military confrontation with China to consider an economic strategy. This approach also decenters the United States because it frames the U.S. as part of the complex adaptive system that is the global economy. In such a system, one studies the system rather than the constitutive elements of the system. Influential as the U.S. is in the global economy, no state can exist at the center of such a system, opening up possibilities for strategic developments that are non-linear.

Finally, our last two pieces in the quarterly draw on strategic empathy. Kyle Balzer provides a historical case study of the Cold War to warn the U.S. about the “pitfalls of an ethnocentric view of the security landscape” that adversaries draw on. Adversaries, after all, are bounded by “distinctive national styles” that do not always neatly align with American logic. Then J.B. Vowell and Craig Evans explore how U.S. Army Japan is seeking to operationalize strategic empathy by helping soldiers implement strategic empathy.

Together, all of these contributors help us understand the limits of what the U.S. can do in the near- and mid-term future. They also suggest how how stepping outside the perspective of a global hegemon might be an asset in strategic competition.

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Header Image: Viewing Machine, 2019 (Nadine Shaabana).

Notes:

[1] Susan Colbourn (@secolbourn) on Twitter, 19 May 2022, 12:05 PM, https://twitter.com/secolbourn/status/1527334581275222019.