A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival’s Mind

When constructing a strategy, your enemy gets a vote on whether it works. In statecraft, every action will be met with a countervailing response motivated by an adversary’s unique characteristics and drivers. To succeed, a strategist needs what Zachary Shore calls “a sense of the enemy.” This requires an ability to engage in “strategic empathy,” which does not mean sympathizing with the opponent but rather involves understanding his motivations, priorities, and limits. In essence, to beat an adversary requires you to know what makes him tick. The book explores four cases where success and failure turned on this ability: Mahatma Gandhi facing the British, Gustav Stresemann in balancing interwar Weimar relations, Stalin misperceiving Nazi Germany’s ambitions in Eastern Europe, and Le Duan’s sense of U.S. domestic constraints during the Vietnam War. Shore offers an approach to gain a sense of the enemy that focuses on analysis of why an adversary unexpectedly deviates from the status quo in a moment of crisis. In his view, these “pattern breaks” often reveals what drives his behavior, which in turn opens up options to shape his actions.