America’s politicians are hopeless at understanding other countries – but they’re not alone in that
Ever since the United States rose to great power status, it has displayed bouts of appalling ignorance about the politics and cultures of the rest of the world. Pick a region, any region, and one can find quotations and policies that demonstrate a breathtaking ability to think that other countries were just like the United States. During the Cold War, US policymakers continually misread the Pacific Rim. In the 1940s, Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska vowed that ‘with God’s help, we will lift Shanghai up until it is just like Kansas City’. It turned out that the communists were more successful in that endeavour than Chiang Kai-Shek.
Lack of local knowledge has hampered America in the Middle East over the past decade. US policymakers were convinced prior to the second Gulf war that Ahmed Chalabi would be welcomed by Iraqis as their Thomas Jefferson. The entire ‘axis of evil’ speech posited that Iran and Iraq were acting in concert, despite their decade-long war in the 1980s. The Iraq Study Group found that, of the thousand employees at the US embassy in Iraq, six spoke Arabic. And this kind of ignorance was not limited to the Bush administration; it is shot through America’s foreign policy community.
Since the days of George Kennan, Americans have fretted over the apparent asymmetry between the US and its rivals. Their argument is simple: the United States is an open society, which allows foreigners to see much of what remains opaque in the rest of the world. Anyone who has a decent command of the English language and an internet connection can access reams of useful information about American grand strategy and foreign policy. The same cannot be said of Russia, China or Iran, much less the hermit kingdoms of North Korea or Myanmar. In his writings Kennan repeatedly argued that, with this information gap, the enemies of the United States possessed a crucial advantage.
The past year, however, has demonstrated that Kennan was wrong. Despite America’s apparent openness, other countries’ officials are just as inept in understanding the United States. The exposed Russian spy ring, for example, revealed some magical thinking on the part of Russia’s intelligence services. These agents were given deep cover assignments in the United States — in some cases for more than a decade. According to US federal prosecutors, the spies were directed to gather information on nuclear weapons, American policy toward Iran, CIA leadership, and congressional politics. Based on the indictment, however, it appears that the Russian spies gathered nothing from the decade-long enterprise that a well-trained analyst couldn’t have picked up by trolling the internet. The problem is that Russia’s intelligence services believed that a secret cabal runs American foreign policy.
Similarly, the current Iranian leadership seems to have very little understanding of how the American government works. Hossein Shariatmadari, a key adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, recently told a reporter for the New Yorker that the green movement was a US-led conspiracy organised by, among others, the neoconservative think-tanker Michael Ledeen, Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the billionaire George Soros. These three individuals agree on very little. They are more likely to form a new hip-hop group than successfully organise the Iranian reform movement. American pundits and policymakers have not read the tea leaves in Iran all that well, but Iranian analysts are just as deficient in their analysis of the United States.
Myriad national reactions to the decision of the pastor of a small, sad little church in Gainesville, Florida to threaten to burn Korans on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks were also revealing. Protestors and politicians in Afghanistan and Pakistan were understandably upset by Pastor Terry Jones’s bigotry. At the same time, however, many leaders committed two errors in their response.
First, they presumed that the actions of 40 to 50 Floridian fundamentalists were a synecdoche for the rest of American public opinion; Khamenei argued that the Florida churchgoers were ‘puppets’ of the US government. Second, they demanded that President Obama use the federal government to put a stop to the burning. While the president was vociferously opposed to the media stunt, the first amendment of the US Constitution clearly protected Pastor Jones’s right to carry out such an act.
Why are foreign policymakers — who presumably would not be able to rise to leadership status without some appreciation for their own country’s domestic politics — so awful at understanding the domestic politics of other countries? Alas, there are a surfeit of reasons. The most basic is that our standard models for understanding international relations are based on a radically simplifying assumption: that states can be treated as rational, unitary actors. Realists assume that all states act in an opportunistic manner, fearing the relative power of other countries. Liberals assume that states are self-interested utility-maximisers interested in co-operation. What these theories have in common is the assumption that states have something resembling a national interest, and that these interests are similar across states. When trying to analyse the motivations of particular politicians in particular countries, this is more than a touch unrealistic.
It’s not just the rational mind that causes policymakers to ignore the domestic politics of other countries — the emotional mind works in a similar manner. When interpreting the behaviour of other actors, individuals will often perceive allied nations differently from adversaries even if their policies are similar. If an ally does something positive, it is attributed to the country’s ‘good’ internal character. If an adversary does, we look for evidence that the country was forced into co-operating. Conversely, if an ally acts in an unproductive manner, that is explained away as a situation in which circumstances forced a good actor to behave badly. If an adversary acts in the same manner, it is because the country is wicked.
Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as ‘fundamental attribution error’, and it has a curious effect on how policymakers perceive the domestic politics of other countries. With allies, there is usually a greater appreciation for the nuances of domestic coalitions and institutions. There has to be, in order to explain when allied governments engage in policies perceived to be unproductive. Consider the US reaction to the Israeli government’s decisions on expanding housing settlements in the West Bank. The first thing political analysts do is reference the shakiness of Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition, and his need to appease ultra-conservative parties. With adversaries, such distinctions are glossed over in favour of putting black hats on everyone in power. For the United States, this means that fissures within Iran or China’s leadership are often ignored. Equally, these countries look on the US government as a cohesive cabal.
Of course, there are international relations scholars, area experts and policy wonks in every country who push back against these stereotypes. Doing so, however, carries significant political risks. Any analyst who preaches a more nuanced appreciation of the politics of a rival country will be accused of ‘going native’. This is a serious charge to levy against a foreign policy analyst — but it’s not the worst. In the US debate over Middle East policy, for example, Iran hawks posit that analysts advocating more positive engagement with Iran are just trying to profit commercially from any expansion of bilateral ties. Those who defend Israeli policies are frequently accus
ed of having dual loyalties. It is not hard at all to imagine the equivalent of these smear tactics within the corridors of power in Tehran or Beijing.
There is one final reason why policymakers are often wilfully ignorant of the domestic politics of other countries — such awareness can actually lead to a bargaining disadvantage. International relations scholars from Thomas Schelling onwards have observed that leaders can translate domestic weakness into international strength. Both Netanyahu and the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, for example, have not been shy in pointing out the domestic constraints on their ability to cut a deal. If the other side can comprehend the domestic political situation, it might make them willing to offer concessions.
Increasingly in international relations, it seems that all politics are local. Conceptually, cognitively and politically, leaders are hard-wired to neither think nor care about the domestic politics of their adversaries.
Unfortunately, this will lead to a lot more misunderstandings and a lot more conflict. In democratic countries, foreign policy issues are increasingly a source of partisan divide. Even in authoritarian countries like Iran and China, leaders need to play to their domestic bases. The political incentives for acting this way are understandable. The problem is that, when everyone cares only about their domestic standing, sustainable international co-operation looks more and more like a chimera.