Moths to Flames: Foreign Policy Blindness, Reenactment, and Surprise

David Beisel, in “Military and Diplomatic Blind Spots and Traumatic Reenactments,” suggests that countries that have suffered previous surprise attacks are prone to repeat the experience. They suffer from “unconscious compulsion and traumatic reenactment,” which drive them to repeat the experience. He cites as evidence incidents during World Wars I and II; the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; North Korea’s attack on South Korea; the Cuban missile crisis; the Gulf of Tonkin incident; the Iranian hostage crisis; Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait; and, most importantly, the attacks on 9/11/2001. The Russian Tsar, it was claimed, was surprised by the revolution because he did not know the desperate situation of the Russian people. More skeptical analysts believe, however, that he would have known if he had wanted to know. Beisel claims a similar dynamic for many foreign policy crises. Political leaders, he believes, could have done a better job of avoiding many historical crises if they had wanted to.

His article raises a number of important questions. Are there foreign policy blind spots? Does foreign policy reenactment happen? What might be some of the mechanisms of reenactment? What remedies might be available? Do political leaders become the blind leading the blind?

As Beisel recounts, the historical record includes many surprises that, with hindsight, look like ignoring the obvious. Blindside mistakes are usually laid at the doorstep of misperception, misinterpretation, and unanticipated consequences. Political reality is opaque. The dots are not always clear, and their connections are even more ambiguous and fluid. Events do not roll out in a seamless narrative. Further, standard analyses tend to emphasize the danger of forgetting the lessons of the past rather than wanting to reexperience them. Political inertia and complacency also play a part.

The blind spot hypothesis is easier to accept than traumatic reenactment. It is less clear if foreign policy reenactment happens. Historians tend to focus on the uniqueness of political cases. In a

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strict sense, reenactment could not happen because new circumstances are always different from old ones. At the same time, Beisel believes that the trauma of a historical surprise attack feeds forward; the experience of being attacked in the past produces an unconscious desire to be attacked in the future. Past crises provide future scripts.

While this smacks of blaming the victim, we may still ask, what might be some of the mechanisms of reenactment? Beisel emphasizes unconscious sources, particularly a desire to relive the trauma of surprise. This formula requires political leaders who want to relive experiences that were not their own, but that happened to those who preceded them. There is a further problem of infinite regress. Beisel focuses on Pearl Harbor as the founding surprise, but what about surprises that came before? If later generations wanted to re-experience the pain of Pearl Harbor, what prior experiences was the Pearl Harbor generation trying to re-experience?

There might also be non-traumatic, unconscious, and conscious sources for reenactment. Psychological factors influence perception, policy, and action. There is an enormous inventory of possible filters. These include, among others, conformity and groupthink; denial of novel or unwanted news, perhaps combined with unwarranted optimism about crisis outcomes; projection of one’s own identity, values, or aggression onto others; fear or greed; insecurity or inferiority; anxiety, depression, or another disorder from the latest edition of the DSM; Freudian sexual repression, Oedipal conflict, or the Jungian shadow; the warrior ethic or religious belief; narcissism and delusions of grandeur; escape from boredom and search for excitement; ambition; anger or jealousy; desire for revenge; dominant or submissive personality; authoritarianism or lust for power; sado-masochism, death wishes, or worries about mortality.

Some other reasons for reenactment might include rational calculation. Political leaders might wish to have a context for greatness. Comes the moment, comes the man. Heroic deeds can only be done in heroic times. Surprise attacks can offer possibilities for political action on a larger scale. Followers must die so that leaders can live. Surprise attacks can also help political leaders re-

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arrange the preferences of their followers to support policy actions that they might oppose in more normal times. And surprise attacks can generate domestic political support in a “rally ‘round the flag” effect. So the 9/11 attacks allowed President George W. Bush to transform himself into a war president, to undertake a desired war of choice against Iraq, and to achieve reelection on a national security platform. Finally, hard choices between bad alternatives may involve calculated risks discounting the future and opening the way to later surprise. In any case, who can completely distinguish the reality from the rhetoric of blindness and surprise? Surprises for some are not necessarily surprises for all. Bad things happen, by accident or design, to imperfect people.

If blindness and surprise are really true, what remedies might be available? Are we like moths drawn to the flames, programmed forever to fly blindly and willingly into destructive surprises? Blindness may be a problem, but less so than willingness. It is hard to recommend permanent hypervigilance at increasing cost, even in a very dangerous world. Uncertainty can be reduced, but never eliminated. Yet an expanded intelligence architecture may provide a bit more light to mitigate blindness and help us to expect the unexpected. The latest surveillance and communication technology can inform more sophisticated risk assessment and foreign policy planning. Among other things, this may involve better information integration, pattern recognition, crisis alert and early warning, systematic case comparisons, parallel interpretive frames, and alternative futures.

State of the art intelligence may provide better prediction and avoidance of possible surprises if all political actors want to escape them. If, on the other hand, some individuals open the door to surprises and reenactments for rational or irrational reasons, there will be no quick progress toward a surprise-free future. Psychology only offers its insights to those who wish to read them. There are none so blind as those who will not see. The problem is not that the moths do not see the flames. They see them all too well and fly eagerly toward the hot light. The greatest surprise would be if moths stopped flying into it—and if there were no more apparent foreign policy blindness, reenactment, or surprise.

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