More recently, H.R. McMaster published Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World, in which he introduced in his view on strategic narcissism: the tendency to view the world only in relation to the United States and to assume that the future course of events depends primarily on U.S. decisions or plans.”[12] McMaster elaborates on the concept as a linear thought pattern which puts U.S. action as the central force in world politics, undervaluing the strategies and dispositions of other actors.[13] The result of this influence, in his estimation, is strategic failure: the plan fails to yield the desired political outcomes. McMaster points to the 20 years the U.S. struggled to make progress in Afghanistan; Booth points to a host of blunders from a variety of different nations throughout history, especially in Cold War maneuverings and politics.
McMaster and Booth also propose solutions to this problem: strategic empathy and cultural relativism, respectively. The former counteracts narcissistic biases by forcing strategists and policymakers to personify their opponent in a way that meaningfully penetrates the other’s psyche.[14] Booth, on the other hand, goes even further in his argument, parsing how strategists fail to account for enemy considerations:
To know the enemy has always been a cardinal tenet of strategy. If this goal is to be achieved in the future with more regularity than it has in the past, then cultural relativism should take its place in the strategist’s lexicon. Knowing the enemy is the bedrock of the business of strategy: strategic theories, in comparison, are second order problems. To concentrate on doctrines before enemies is to put the theoretical cart before the actual horse—a double error.[15]
Because strategy needs to be crafted in relation to other actors, it is important to understand the enemy at a fundamental level.
As mentioned above, strategy is group decision-making on a larger, systemic scale. As a consequence, it is crafted relative to what the actor wants vis-à-vis a competing actor. As Booth stresses several times: “Strategy, like nature, abhors a vacuum…Without enemies strategy is shapeless: it is like a house without walls…Sometimes the assumption of an enemy relationship will be justified, sometimes it will be misperceived. Sometimes the enemies will be real; sometimes they will be imagined.”[16] Because strategy needs to be crafted in relation to other actors, it is important to understand the enemy at a fundamental level. Whether or not the enemy is real, strategy’s need to construct actors into these juxtaposed roles has two flawed heuristics: accounting for the enemy’s philosophy and approach to war, and accounting for its strategic process.[17]
The two negative tendencies encouraged by ethnocentrism are the imposition of stereotyped strategic decision-making and cultural values on adversaries. For instance, the U.S. strategic climate of today is replete with references to the founders of military theory: Clausewitz, Mahan, Corbett, Douhet, and other common names. As Booth notes, “Philosophies of war, like strategic theories, are products of time and place.”[18] There are always conditional variables from the times and places in which these theorists wrote which must be reconciled against the current operating environment. Their findings must be applied to changing circumstances and reassessed over time, or strategy becomes a rote function of a given society, liable to be circumvented by an enemy with little effort on their part.
Beyond the decision-making framework, the decision-making process itself is also stereotyped, leaving the impression that the enemy’s decisions are not rational, not understandable, and that they are just lucky in their outcomes. Booth argues that this friction is caused by the assumption that the enemy’s decision process is a black box operating along the rational agency model; that is, the enemy uses similar reasoning and a similar process and, regardless of other factors, will always seek value-maximizing outcomes. However, while treated as an objective value, what is rational or reasonable is a relative assessment informed by one’s ethics and personal values.[19] Without understanding those values, one cannot anticipate another’s strategic process or objectives.
Altogether, knowing one’s enemy, down to their cultural-ethical values system, is the key to victory. However, knowing one’s own biases and judgment values is necessary to avoid defeat. Balancing the values of both sides and developing a strategy relative to each is not a part of the U.S. strategic process, resulting in Sun Tzu’s exact prediction. If the United States can identify and control its ethnocentric tendencies in its strategy, then it will see more consistent success.
