President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.
To operationalize the concept of strategic empathy, this article argues that strategic leaders must appreciate three critical factors: geography, history, and domestic politics. These three factors are the pillars of the framework employed by U.S. Army Japan, a theater-strategic headquarters in the Indo-Pacific theater.
Strategic assessments reveal a given nation’s understanding of the security landscape and its relative power position. However, strategic appraisals can also betray the fundamental values and prevailing attitudes of the country generating the assessment. American estimators have shown a propensity to frame questions in a manner reflecting their internal predispositions—a tendency that has often contributed to flawed images of external threats. This was the case during the early Cold War when American analysts routinely transferred judgment to Soviet decision-makers. By projecting their own proclivities onto an adversary whose preferences did not align with the United States, analysts persistently misdiagnosed the threat and concealed opportunities to exploit Soviet vulnerabilities. It was not until American strategic analysis underwent a dramatic transformation in the 1970s that more reliable assessments began to emerge. The Cold War, then, offers a stark warning about the pitfalls of an ethnocentric view of the security landscape. Adversaries, after all, are bounded by distinctive national styles that diverge from American logic.
The United States acts upon the world, but not within the world. The United States understands other state or non-state actors to be working towards the United States, or not at all. Most give little thought to the agency of America’s international peers, their worldview, and the complex system of attitudes and events that shape their foreign policy decisions. The United States must go further than rediscovering strategic empathy.
Writing provides one of the few venues available for leaders seeking to develop themselves through inward reflection, and, to that end, poetry is writing’s finest vehicle for cultivating empathy. Analytic prose is limited in that it can make self-knowledge explicit only by delineating one’s cause-and-effect reasoning. Poems, however, can go where prosaic essays cannot.
