The failure of national security planners to adequately incorporate multiple perspectives into United States foreign policy has proven costly both financially and in terms of failure to achieve policy objectives. This unilateral focus stems from a combination of limited thinking and limited planning resources that can be difficult to overcome. As global conditions change, however, U.S. policymakers must incorporate multiple perspectives into foreign policy planning. This is especially true in the Indo-Pacific region, where consensus-based discussions are likely to be prioritized over formal alliances and China is operating a parallel strategy in the same countries as the U.S.
Large investments become lost opportunities when great powers fail to adequately account for the perspective of other nations in their foreign policy. The U.S. has given over $3B in foreign aid to Cambodia over the past 30 years and conducted more than 10 annual security cooperation exercises between the U.S. and Cambodian military.[1] Despite the extent of the shared investments, the Cambodians permitted China to demolish U.S.-funded buildings on the Ream Naval Base in 2021 to facilitate Chinese-sponsored port development, and Phnom Penh has truncated U.S. access to the base.[2] The U.S. is not the only great power whose self-interested policy has resulted in unintended consequences. China spent $96B on infrastructure-related projects in the Philippines that ignored local environmental and hiring processes, generating geopolitical, environmental, and social issues that have undermined China’s national interests.[3]
Cambodian navy personnel at Ream naval base in 2019. (Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP)
In recent decades, the United States has been similarly myopic through a combination of heuristic bias among policy elites, resource limitations for its foreign policy institutions, and social systems in academia and policy-making circles that create and reinforce parochial thinking. Intellectuals and other policy elites must avoid such myopia and make a deliberate effort to recognize the significance of other countries’ perspectives by adopting a systems thinking approach. The Secretaries of State and Defense could support such a systems thinking effort through restructuring the way the U.S. formulates strategy documents to provide accountability and clarify the assumptions that inform alternate perspectives. U.S.-based academic institutions and think tanks could resource these efforts through prioritizing the hiring or scholarship of those with alternative perspectives in roles where they can integrate that knowledge into foreign policy works. To imbue these three efforts with a sense of criticality, intellectuals and policy elites must popularize an outcomes-based understanding of why perspectives beyond those of the global powers are important. There are sufficient examples to illuminate these outcomes already—from national security, economics, and overarching foreign policy perspectives.
Challenges and Advantages to Alternative Perspectives
Policymakers and academics use heuristics and are as susceptible to heuristic bias as the rest of the population.[4] Senior U.S. foreign policy decision makers, from State to Defense, must enforce a systematic approach to mitigating the effect of these potential biases if they are to develop truly insightful strategic objectives in conjunction with regional partners and allies.[5] Daniel Kahneman describes heuristic biases that can contribute to issues with a self-centered foreign policy and how they can be mitigated by starting from the perspective of other stakeholder countries. For example, Laos has demonstrated that their government perceives their best interest lies in continuing to conduct Mekong-related agreements with both China and the U.S rather than choosing one power over another. If Defense Department planners incorporate this perspective clearly into a theater posture plan, it could counteract the simple causal claim that the U.S. can gain primacy over China through developmental aid.[6]
Similarly, if State Department planners integrate other countries’ objectives into U.S. strategies, this could identify friction points early, mitigate the assumption that U.S. objectives take priority in international relationships, and clarify challenges to the U.S. strategic narrative. A more inclusive framing of the interests and issues involved can help policymakers avoid underestimating risk and overstating benefits by reconciling the relevant risk and interests of other nations with those of the U.S.[7] Washington, therefore, might have to acknowledge that despite a relative military and economic advantage over Phnom Penh, it might not be able to negotiate access to the latter’s naval facilities.
Policymakers must invest significant time and energy in analyzing third-party perspectives to adequately incorporate alternative ideas into policy documents. The limited time and expertise available for such analysis is a significant reason that the red team, representing the adversary, is rarely as well-represented as the blue team in an analysis.[8]
The sheer number of perspectives that influence global policy add to the length of an analysis and complication of the problem. For example, in an ends-ways-means approach to strategy for the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific, there are potentially hundreds of stakeholder countries, non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations (NGOs and IGOs), cultural groups, and other organizations that bring important perspectives to bear in the situation.[9] It is difficult and time-consuming to integrate these perspectives into an analysis of the situation. Researchers within the U.S. will not have equal access to foreign perspectives as they do domestic ones.
Even dealing with national governments, the U.S. may struggle to build a true picture of how multiple different nations perceive the various elements, for example, of the cultural exchanges and minor projects that make up the Belt & Road Initiative.[10] Micah Zenko describes the advantages of incorporating unique external perspectives into the decision-making processes of a business of government. Hiring and educating practitioners and academics with perspectives that are not centered around the U.S. can provide a more nuanced and consensus-based counterpoint to great power thinking.[11]
Defense policy makers must include people with diverse perspectives as the first part of a broadening process in national security decision making. Lasting effects require an established system for displaying those results. An understanding of multiple perspectives should be taught to aspiring strategists in their academic classes, which would ideally require an in-depth analysis as a part of a best-case strategy preparation.[12] If these multiple perspectives are applied through the lifetime of a strategy, they would help instruct the class on possible reactions, counterreactions and escalations from another point-of-view.
Practical Considerations
Both policymakers and the public have found it difficult to see the relevance of the interests and policy framings of minor stakeholders. Retired U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal was ridiculed in the press for a slide depicting the numerous perspectives that he considered within Afghanistan, but the single sheet of paper was designed to detail the number of factions and complexity involved in the region.[13] Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was similarly mocked by the American public for using the term “unknown unknowns,” in attempting to describe the dangers of false conviction.[14] In both cases, leaders attempting to describe the complexity of unknown or multiple perspectives were derided for their intellectual pretensions. Overcoming the desire for simplicity is a necessary prerequisite to establishing a complete, systems based policy.
Map and flag of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations countries (Rizky Jogja/Wikimedia)
Recently, applying this desire for simplicity to the question of foreign policy has included a desire to mandate political alignment of other nations with U.S. interests. When U.S. planners frame these relationships from a U.S.-centered perspective, they arbitrarily force stakeholder countries to choose between the U.S. and China as a preferred partner rather than developing a shared approach with collective objectives. Given the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) focus on consensus overall, U.S. strategists could improve their chances of overall success through early identification of regional perspectives on unilateral goals.
Conclusion
The U.S.-Cambodia example provides a deeper understanding of the dynamics at play when policymakers are framing policies involving other independent stakeholders. U.S. relationships with Cambodia and other nations have never been strictly centered around U.S. interests. Recognizing the danger of alignment, many smaller countries in Southeast Asia are pursuing a risk-mitigation strategy of hedging, using resources from China and the United States to maintain bilateral relationships with both countries.[15] In a multinational survey conducted across Southeast Asian nations in 2021, a majority of survey respondents believed that China and the United States will ask their country to choose between the two major powers and that making such a choice is not in their own best interest.[16] The U.S. must incorporate these varying perspectives in crafting deliberate consensus-based strategies in the Indo-Pacific.
Washington cannot afford a focus on unilateral U.S. perspectives, whether to prevent alienating potential partners or to forestall potential adversarial relations. When strategists center policy from a U.S. perspective, they ignore the real cultural risks that accompany those narrative frames. China is just as centered on their own conventional framing, with equally problematic results. Washington must counter Beijing’s growing influence across the instruments of national power without alienating potential allies and partners.
Heather Levy is an officer in the U.S. Army. She earned a Masters in Strategic Studies from the U.S. Army War College and a Masters in International Public Policy from The Johns Hopkins University. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
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Header Image: Refract, 2017 (Joseph Greve)
Notes:
[1] Office of the Spokesperson, “The United States-Cambodia Relationship,” Department of State, August 2, 2022. https://www.state.gov/the-united-states-cambodia-relationship/
[2] Abdul Rahman Yaacob, “Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base Attracts Competing Patrons,” East Asia Forum, September 5, 2022.https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2022/09/05/cambodias-ream-naval-base-attracts-competing-patrons/
[3] Aaron Jed Rabena, “The Belt and Road Initiative and the Philippines: Post-Duterte China Challenge,” March 25, 2022. https://fulcrum.sg/the-belt-and-road-initiative-and-the-philippines-post-duterte-china-challenge/
[4] Tversky, A. and Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science. 185(4157), 1124-1131.
[5] Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 29.
[6] Ibid., 29.
[7] Ibid., 32.
[8] Micah Zenko. Red Team: How to succeed by thinking like the enemy. Basic Books, New York: 2015, ix-xxi.
[9] Bonny Lin, Michael S. Chase, Jonah Blank, Cortez A. Cooper III, Derek Grossman, Scott W. Harold, Jennifer D. P. Moroney, Lyle J. Morris, Logan Ma, Paul Orner, Alice Shih, and Soo Kim, Regional Responses to U.S.-China Competition in the Indo-Pacific Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020, 32-38.
[10] Michael S. Chase and Arthur Chan. China’s Evolving Approach to “Integrated Strategic Deterrence”. Rand Corporation, 2016.
[11] Zenko, 20-24.
[12] Celestino Perez, Jr.,“What Military Education Forgets: Strategy Is Performance,”.War on the Rocks, September 7, 2018. https://warontherocks.com/2018/09/what-military-education-forgets-strategy-is-performance/#:~:text=solely%20a%20discipline.-,Strategy%20is%20performance.,holds%20an%20MA%20and%20Ph.
[13] Elisabeth Bumiller, “We have Met the Enemy, And He Is PowerPoint,” New York Times, April 27, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html
[14] David Graham, “Rumsfeld’s Knowns and Unknowns,” The Atlantic, March 28, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/rumsfelds-knowns-and-unknowns-the-intellectual-history-of-a-quip/359719/
[15] Cheng-Chwee Kuik and Gilbert Rozman, “Light or Heavy Hedging: Positioning between China and the United States,” in Gilbert Rozman, ed., Joint U.S.-Korea Academic Studies 2015 (Washington, DC: Korea Economic Institute of America, 2015)
[16] Bonny Lin, Michael S. Chase, Jonah Blank, Cortez A. Cooper III, Derek Grossman, Scott W. Harold, Jennifer D. P. Moroney, Lyle J. Morris, Logan Ma, Paul Orner, Alice Shih, and Soo Kim, Regional Responses to U.S.-China Competition in the Indo-Pacific Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020, 4-12.