A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind (25 page)

The same was true for the way Hanoi assessed America’s international position. On August 29, 1968, a report to the Central Committee observed that Vietnam had hamstrung U.S. actions in other hot spots. Referring to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, the report argued that America could not mount a serious response because it was tied down in Vietnam. It could not go deeper into the Middle East despite the recent Arab-Israeli War. It could not go deeper into Laos following its defeat at Nam Bak.
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Despite Hanoi’s military losses from the Tet Offensive, Party leaders still maintained that America’s underlying constraints left its future prospects grim.

By the start of 1969, Le Duan recognized that American support for the war had reached a turning point after Tet. On January 1, the Politburo cabled Le Duc Tho and Xuan Thuy (two of the leading delegates to the Paris peace talks) to report on its discussions of American intentions. Party leaders believed that the key American policymakers wanted to end the war by withdrawing troops but maintaining a strong regime in the South. President Nixon, they presumed, was also compelled to follow this course, though he sought an honorable end to the war. In subsequent Politburo cables throughout January and February, Hanoi reiterated its belief that U.S. politicians wanted to deescalate and de-Americanize the war, though Nixon hoped to negotiate from a position of strength. Consequently, the Politburo concluded that the struggle
must continue on all three fronts—military, political, and diplomatic. In order to maintain the protracted war strategy, the cable instructed that diplomacy must not give the impression that Hanoi desired a quick conclusion to the conflict.
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On each of these three fronts, Le Duan continued to pursue an effective grand strategy of wearing the Americans down.

Conclusion

Le Duan’s strategic empathy for America—his ability to identify America’s underlying constraints—proved strong on the most crucial dimension. He grasped the enemy’s sensitivity to casualties. He understood America’s vulnerability to being bogged down, fighting for years without demonstrable progress. He comprehended that America’s global commitments could be hamstrung if overextended in Vietnam. Ultimately, this was the most important assessment to get right, and on this point he succeeded in knowing his enemy well.

Le Duan also saw the shelling of North Vietnamese islands and the Tonkin Gulf episode as both a provocative act by America and a distinct break in the pattern of U.S. behavior. According to the Politburo directive of August 7, 1964, he expected America to intensify the war in the South and step up its measures against the North. Here, too, he correctly estimated his enemy’s intentions.

Le Duan likely understood that President Johnson would retaliate against the post-Tonkin attacks culminating at Pleiku. Rather than halting COSVN assaults in order to avoid provoking an American escalation, Le Duan seems to have reasoned that since escalation at that point was both likely and imminent, attacking the Americans would boost morale, giving southern communists a resource that would be greatly in need throughout the protracted war to come. The fact that Le Duan permitted those attacks to continue after Tonkin strongly suggests that he recognized Tonkin as signaling an inevitable escalation. It is not clear that Le Duan ever comprehended why President Johnson and his advisors decided to expand the war, but his uncertainty is understandable, especially since even historians are divided on the matter. They have been debating the Johnson administration’s motivations for decades and will no doubt continue to do so. Given Le Duan’s
in-depth, reasoned efforts to understand his American foes, we cannot attribute his predictions of American actions to his Marxist-Leninist convictions alone. The often conflicted nature of Hanoi’s assessments of America show that ideology influenced, but did not determine, Hanoi’s thinking. Instead, Le Duan’s and Hanoi’s strategic empathy derived from a complex interplay of pattern recognition, attention to pattern breaks, and an overlay of Marxist dogma.

Contingency and chance are always at play in every conflict. Rarely are any outcomes predetermined or ineluctable. Obviously there were many causes of Hanoi’s ultimate victory, primary among them being the support it received from China and the Soviet Union, its ability to continue sending arms and materiel south via the Ho Chi Minh trail, and its willingness to allow its people to endure extraordinary suffering. We must add to that list Hanoi’s strategic empathy for America. Despite its failings, that empathy proved an equally important factor in its final triumph.

Although Le Duan ultimately triumphed, he and other Party leaders still failed on numerous occasions to read their enemies correctly, most notably with their prediction that the South Vietnamese would rise up in revolution. Thus far we have examined cases in which the pattern-break heuristic played a helpful role (or could have, in the case of Stalin). I want now to turn to a different heuristic, one that sometimes undermines even the sharpest observers. I will call this the continuity heuristic: an assumption that the enemy’s future behavior will mirror past behavior. To illustrate this mistaken mindset, we must look back at one of its earliest recorded cases, on the battlefields of ancient China. As the Han dynasty collapsed into warring factions, three kingdoms vied for supremacy over China’s vast dominions. Amid countless generals, one strategic thinker stood apart. Though his fame was already secure, it turned legendary when he faced a massive onslaught with merely a hypnotic tune.

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The Continuity Conundrum

When the Past Misleads

The Lute That Beat an Army

They called him Sleeping Dragon, though his mind was wide awake. Master Cun Ming’s strategic insights were so renowned throughout China that his enemies shuddered at his name. When garbed in his white, silken Taoist robes embroidered with red cranes down the sides, it seemed hard to imagine that such a placid figure could be so dominant in battle. Yet through the careful, cautious application of superior force, Cun Ming had reached almost legendary status. But the Dragon’s string of victories was about to end when he found himself left to defend a city with just 2,500 men. In the distance, Marshall Sima Yi advanced with the full might of his Wei army, nearly 150,000 troops. This time, even Sleeping Dragon could not hope to fight and win.

Cun Ming’s officers were terrified. They knew a bloodbath was soon to come. Their foreboding only heightened as they received the Dragon’s orders. After soberly assessing their impossible predicament, Cun Ming ordered the city gates flung open. Strangely, he did not issue the command to surrender. Instead, he instructed twenty of his soldiers to remove their uniforms and dress in the clothing of townsfolk. The disguised soldiers were to do nothing more than peacefully sweep the streets at the city gates. All other soldiers were to hide from sight. Any officer who so much as made a noise would be instantly put to death. Cun Ming then changed into his Taoist robes and ascended the roof of the highest building, armed only with his lute.

Had he gone mad? Was the strain of endless battle at last too much to bear? Or had he simply decided to meet his fate with the serenity of a peaceful spirit? As Sleeping Dragon played a haunting tune, Marshall Sima Yi’s scouts surveyed the eerie scene. Uncertain as to its meaning, they hurried back and reported to their commander. Incredulous and slightly unnerved, Sima Yi ordered his army to halt while he advanced alone to observe the situation for himself. Sure enough, he saw precisely what his scouts had described. Townsfolk peered downward as they methodically swept the streets. Two ceremonial guards flanked Cun Ming atop the building: one bearing a sword; the other holding a yak tail, the symbol of authority. Cun Ming sat between them, absorbed in the playing of his lute, as if nothing at all were amiss.

Now Sima Yi’s confidence was shaken. Cun Ming’s lack of preparation had to mean a trap. But what exactly did he intend? By making the city appear undefended, Cun Ming must be planning an ambush, the Marshall had to conclude. Sima Yi’s second son tried to offer counsel. “Why do you retire, father?” the boy asked. “I am certain there are no soldiers behind this foolery. Why do you halt?” But Sima Yi knew better. He had known Cun Ming for years and knew that the Master never took risks. If the city seemed defenseless, then he could be certain it was too strongly defended to attack. Sima Yi turned his entire army around at once. They headed for the hills in full retreat.

Upon seeing the massive ranks of soldiers fleeing from his lute, Sleeping Dragon laughed and clapped his hands with delight. “Sima Yi knows that I am a cautious man,” Cun Ming explained to those around him. “But if I had been in his place I should not have turned away.”

Because Cun Ming knew his enemy even better than the enemy knew him, Cun Ming was able to predict how his enemy would react to surprising information. Sima Yi did not possess the wit to accurately interpret the meaning of this pattern break, and Sleeping Dragon understood this. Instead, Sima Yi fled at the sound of a lonely lute. Later, when Sima Yi learned he had been tricked, he could only sigh resignedly. “Cun Ming is a cleverer man than I.”
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Written in the fourteenth century,
Romance of the Three Kingdoms
is one of China’s best-known and beloved novels. Based on the historical scholarship of Chen Shou in the third century, the novel imagines the thoughts and feelings of characters engaged in bitter conflict following
the Han dynasty’s collapse. The massive chronicle, all 800,000 words of it, embodies the principles outlined in an even older work: Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
. While it is tempting to focus on the cunning of Cun Ming, the story holds even greater value for what it suggests about Sima Yi. Though it does not make the point explicitly, the tale demonstrates an age-old problem in how too many leaders think.

Sima Yi fell victim to the continuity heuristic—the belief that the best guide to someone’s future behavior is his past behavior. If an enemy has been aggressive previously, we can expect him to be aggressive again. In fact, many of us tend to use this same heuristic across a range of contexts, not just regarding leaders and their adversaries. We do this even when the cost of making the wrong decision would be dear.

The Pattern Problem

An example of the continuity heuristic can be seen in a surprising place. It is embedded in a story created by one of today’s leading cognitive psychologists. Daniel Kahneman has studied heuristics and biases for decades. In his best-selling book,
Thinking Fast and Slow
, Kahneman constructs a hypothetical example of how we all tend to rely on what he calls the “availability heuristic.” This is where we assume that the information available to us is, in fact, all the information we need to make the right decision. To illustrate his availability heuristic, he offers the following scenario.

An academic department is planning to hire a young professor and wants to choose the one whose prospects for scientific productivity are the best. The department narrows the choice down to two candidates, Kim and Jane. Kim is a Ph.D. student and the prototypical rising star. She arrives on campus with sterling recommendations from all of her instructors. She delivers a brilliant job talk and sails through her interviews with ease. She leaves a profound impression on the faculty that she is truly gifted. There is one problem, however. Kim has no track record of scholarly publications. She has yet to publish anything. Jane, in contrast, gives a less spectacular job talk and makes a less stellar impression in her interviews. But Jane has been working as a postdoc for the past three years and has an excellent publishing record. Which candidate should the department choose?
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Kahneman argues that to select Kim would be to fall victim to the availability heuristic. We simply do not possess enough information about her capacity to produce scholarship. Kahneman states that he would offer the job to Jane, even though Kim made the stronger impression. Jane is arguably the safer bet, whereas Kim is a gamble. Kim might produce path-breaking work, or she could just as plausibly fail to produce altogether.

Kahneman’s availability heuristic is, of course, a very real and often disastrous mental shortcut. Yet Kahneman appears to be basing his decision to hire Jane in part on the continuity heuristic. This mental shortcut assumes that the future will resemble the past, even though conditions may well change.

I want to alter Kahneman’s scenario slightly in order to illustrate the problem of the continuity heuristic. Instead of the academic department making a decision about a new hire, consider how it might make the decision to tenure Jane six years after she has been hired. (Six to seven years is the standard length of time after which young professors in America are tenured.) Receiving tenure virtually guarantees a scholar a job for life. Once the decision has been made, it is nearly impossible to fire that faculty member. One major purpose for granting tenure is to ensure that scholars will be free to publish any research findings that they deem true. Intellectual freedom ensures that scholars will not compromise their conclusions under political, financial, or other pressures. Naturally, tenure is a highly sought-after status within academia. If achieved, the scholar has tremendous job security. If denied, the scholar loses her job and typically must seek employment elsewhere. The stakes, therefore, are extremely high. From the standpoint of the senior faculty members, the stakes are almost as great. If they support a scholar’s bid for tenure, they will have a colleague for life. But if they get it wrong by tenuring someone who ceases to work hard, someone who abuses the benefits of job security, then the department will be stuck with that person for decades.