A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind (27 page)

Fitzmaurice tactfully presented the opposite view, or at least a modification of Crowe’s view. He suggested that individuals do have agency and influence. Two different leaders can make different choices despite being bound by the same basic circumstances. This perspective not only challenges the notion of static national character traits but it also refutes the idea that individuals will invariably use whatever power they possess and that they will all use it in the same way. In contrast, those who believe that international relations are governed by immutable laws of power relations are more sympathetic to Crowe’s views. Unfortunately, they are also often susceptible to Crowe’s notions of national character. The two perspectives are often intertwined.

Crowe’s memorandum had yet another, more pointed critic. Thomas Henry Sanderson had served in the Foreign Office for more than four
and a half decades, rising to the post of Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He therefore spoke with considerable authority. In Sanderson’s view, Germany’s past behavior had not, in fact, been unreasonable or unprovoked. In case after case, Sanderson argued that Germany had legitimate cause for its actions. If the acquisition of territory were a sin, Sanderson mused, then surely the British must be far guiltier than the Germans. He noted that even some British diplomats agreed that England had not always treated the Germans fairly. In one instance Britain had forcibly searched three German cargo ships full of passengers, yet found no evidence of wrongdoing. If the situation had been reversed and Germans had searched British ships, Sanderson opined, Britain would have denounced it as intolerable. In direct contrast to Crowe’s depiction of the German people, Sanderson argued that popular opinion in Germany was “on the whole sound and prudent,” and could be expected to “exercise an increasing amount of wholesome restraint.” He concluded that a great and growing nation could not be repressed, but it was not necessary for Britain to block German expansion where the two nations’ interests did not directly clash.
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Sanderson was countering Crowe in several ways. First, he disputed Crowe’s entire depiction of Anglo–German relations, instead casting them as frequently cooperative and only sometimes caustic—and with Britain not blameless for the tensions. Second, Sanderson argued against the idea that the German people were relentlessly aggressive. Instead, he maintained that they were prudent and restrained. And third, he did not assume that conflicts would be inevitable because of clashing interests. On the contrary, he maintained that goodwill could be fostered through accommodation of German aims where Britain’s vital interests were not at stake. His entire assessment of Germany stemmed from a rejection of the continuity heuristic and a repudiation of Crowe’s blanket statements about the true German character. Unfortunately, it was Crowe’s memorandum that garnered more attention.

The Oriental Mind

Crowe’s way of thinking did not end in World War I. Instead, it is part of a long and potent tradition.
¹⁰
On February 22, 1946, the American Chargé d’Affaires in Moscow cabled the U.S. Secretary of State in
Washington with a secret report. The official aimed to analyze Soviet behavior and to forecast Soviet actions. The “long telegram,” as it became known, was subsequently published in a somewhat different form in 1947, as an article in
Foreign Affairs
under the title “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” The telegram has since become what is arguably the most impactful and well-known diplomatic document of the twentieth century, while the published article remains one of
Foreign Affairs
’ most memorable contributions. The ideas embodied in both the telegram and the article profoundly shaped the discourse on American Cold War strategy.

George F. Kennan’s notions of containing Soviet aggression arrived in Washington to a receptive audience. Decision-makers needed a conceptual framework within which to fit the policies they were already crafting. President Truman tasked two top advisors to assess the Soviets’ record of keeping their promises. The report was intended to remain close hold within the government, not for public scrutiny. The resulting Clifford-Elsey report drew upon Kennan’s analysis and further concretized his assumptions of Soviet aggression into policy. Yet Kennan never intended for his reflections to be used to justify all manner of military interventions around the globe.
¹¹

One too often overlooked aspect of Kennan’s analysis involves its assumptions about the Russian character. Like Crowe’s memorandum some forty years before, Kennan looked to his adversary’s history as having profoundly influenced its leadership: “From the Russian-Asiatic world out of which they had emerged they carried with them a skepticism as to the possibilities of permanent and peaceful co-existence of rival forces.” Presumably, this “Russian world” from which they came precluded compromise and cooperation. Describing the Kremlin leaders, Kennan observed that they remained predominantly absorbed by the struggle to achieve and retain power, both within and beyond their nation’s borders. Not only did Marxist-Leninist ideology convince them that the world was hostile, but history reinforced that view: “The powerful hands of the Russian history and tradition reached up to sustain them in this feeling.” Just as Crowe saw the Prussian past, as far back as Fredrick the Great, reaching out to imprint itself upon German statesmen in 1907, so Kennan saw Russia’s past—at least, one particular interpretation of that past—as shaping Soviet leaders in 1948.

There was a curious tension in Kennan’s analysis. On the one hand, he was well aware of the obvious differences between Tsarist and Bolshevik rulers, with the latter embodying an ideology radically opposed to the former. On the other hand, Kennan perceived continuity between the two regimes, with each supposedly being influenced by the same historical forces. Kennan’s article further revealed that he believed in a distinctly Russian deceitfulness, a legacy of the ancient past:

Again, these precepts are fortified by the lessons of Russian history; of centuries of obscure battles between nomadic forces over stretches of vast unfortified plain. Here caution, circumspection, flexibility and deception are the valuable qualities; and their value finds natural appreciation in the Russian or the oriental mind.
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Passages like these suggest not simply that a Russian mind exists but that its nefarious qualities are permanent because of unchanging, deeply rooted historical conditions. In his original telegram, Kennan stressed that the Russian people are not hostile by nature but on the contrary are quite friendly to the outside world and eager to live in peace. It was to the Soviet leadership that he attributed the worst fundamental characteristics. He referred to the whole of Russia’s leaders, past and present, as deeply insecure about their type of antiquated regime. He alleged that they were threatened by the West’s greater competence. The rulers thus feared any contact between their own people and the West. He concluded with the chilling assertion that Russian leaders had learned to seek security only in a patient, deadly struggle for the total destruction of a rival power. They never, he proclaimed, sought accord with those rivals. If they did, it was only temporary and borne out of necessity.

Naturally, Kennan was insightful enough to accept the possibility that the Bolshevik system could change. He further recognized that, because of the Bolsheviks’ deterministic ideology, they were unlikely to risk a cataclysmic war. But with such sweeping, categorical depictions, it was not at all surprising that his long telegram and subsequent article found many fans.
¹³
American Secretary of State Dean Acheson would later write: “His historical analysis might or might not have been sound, but his predictions and warnings could not have been
better.”
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Strong statements about other peoples typically appeal to policymakers seeking simple guidelines. It was equally unsurprising that his prescriptions would be distorted from patient economic and diplomatic containment to an unrealistic, overzealous military doctrine of combating Soviet influence wherever it emerged. The remarkable aspect of Kennan’s analysis was that it succeeded in predicting anything accurately about Kremlin behavior. When Kennan relied on reductive generalizations about Russian history and the character of Russian leaders, he omitted key facts and ignored evidence that would have forced him to qualify his claims. But when he generalized about the contemporary crop of Soviet leaders, his insights proved more trenchant. This is because while national character traits obviously exist, their consistency throughout a population is highly variable, and their salience in decision-making processes is only partial at most. Consequently, relying on national characteristics as a heuristic for prediction is of minimal utility. In contrast, when people willingly adopt an ideology and devote themselves to it as true believers, demonstrating that they are capable of killing or dying in the name of their beliefs, then it is perfectly possible to make certain predictions about their likely behavior. Kennan understood how Marxism-Leninism could affect its purest ideologues. His long telegram was premised on the belief that the current and future Kremlin occupants would doggedly adhere to their espoused convictions.

There was a problem, however, with the more persuasive part of Kennan’s assessment. His heuristic of using Marxist-Leninist ideology as a predictor of Kremlin behavior rested on several assumptions. First, all Kremlin leaders would be devoted Marxist-Leninists, given to the same interpretation of that ideology. Second, those leaders could not change their views as circumstances and contexts changed. Third, power impelled all individuals and organizations to behave in similar fashion. In other words, if the enemy believed it had the ability to achieve a particular objective, it would act on that belief.

The results of these assumptions are predictable: tension and conflict. Not long after the Crowe and Kennan memoranda, World War I and the Cold War ensued. Obviously, a great many factors combined to produce these conflicts, but assumptions about the enemy’s nature were an essential part of the mix.

Codes of Conduct

In the wake of Kennan’s telegram, as the Cold War heated up, analysts devoted enormous energy to understanding and, with luck, predicting Soviet behavior. One of the hubs of Sovietology, where Kremlin-watchers scrutinized every aspect of Soviet society, was the RAND Corporation, a think tank headquartered in Santa Monica, California. In 1951, a RAND analyst named Nathan Leites authored a book titled
The Operational Code of the Politburo
.
¹⁵
He later developed those ideas in a subsequent book called
A Study of Bolshevism
.
¹⁶
Leites aimed to reconstruct how Soviet leaders thought—their operational code—based on key Marxist-Leninist texts and compared to Soviet behavior. Though his concept was slow to catch on, in 1969 the operational code was resurrected by the noted Stanford political scientist Alexander George. George applied the code to the study of political leaders’ belief systems more generally.

One of the striking aspects of George’s presentation of the code is that Soviet beliefs appear remarkably similar to those of American decision-makers. For example, the Bolsheviks’ first strategy was said to be one that pursued graduated objectives, yet avoided adventures.
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In other words, gain as much as you can, but don’t be reckless. The code further stated, according to George, that Bolsheviks must “push to the limit” —engage in pursuit of an opponent who begins to retreat or make concessions—but “know when to stop.” George cited Charles Bohlen, one of America’s famed “wise men” in foreign policy and a Soviet specialist. Bohlen pointed to one of Lenin’s adages that national expansion is like a bayonet drive: “If you strike steel, pull back; if you strike mush, keep going.” Put another way, the Soviets would seek to maximize their gains in any encounter, but they would not push beyond what seemed reasonable in the face of strong resistance.

The difficulty, of course, was that these maxims were scarcely different from those employed by any statesmen in diplomacy and war. They were hardly unique to Bolsheviks in particular or communists more broadly. The operational code was an attempt to demystify the underlying drivers of Soviet behavior, but it had the opposite effect of cloaking the Soviets in the veil of a unique cognitive framework. Under closer scrutiny, the enemy’s thinking did not sound all that different from that of American leaders.

Some of the code described Soviet aggression as based on a Marxist notion of historical inevitability, but this notion was so vague that it could hardly serve as much of a guide for action. According to the code, Marxists were instructed to bide their time indefinitely yet at the same time to seize any opportunity to advance their cause. This may well have been what Marxist dogma advised, but it did not help outsiders to predict which course the Party would pursue in any given context. Would it be patient or proactive? As George put it: “Action, therefore, tends to be either required or impermissible; there is nothing in between.” Statements such as these offered outsiders (non-Bolsheviks) little concrete guidance and no predictive power.

More than this, however, the operational code overshadowed the fact that internal debates and Party factionalism were often crucial factors in Soviet policy outcomes, except during the period when Stalin’s decisions went largely uncontested. In 1923, for example, it was Stalin who advised against pushing for revolution in Germany, while Trotsky and Zinoviev urged the revolution onward. At that time the latter two won out. The operational code would not have helped German statesmen to know what the Kremlin was likely to do because the decision depended more on the underlying drivers of those with the greatest influence at that moment. America’s postwar Kremlin watchers obviously understood this, for they microscoped every shift in top personnel and dissected every statement from Moscow’s leaders. Having a general idea of how Bolsheviks understood their own ideology sounded sensible, but the operational code lacked sufficient context to be of genuine value.