Why America Misunderstands the World

National Experience and Roots of Misperception

Paul Pillar

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231540353
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Being insulated by two immense oceans makes it hard for Americans to appreciate the concerns of more exposed countries. American democracy's rapid rise also fools many into thinking the same liberal system can flourish anywhere, and having populated a vast continent with relative ease impedes Americans' understanding of conflicts between different peoples over other lands. Paul R. Pillar ties the American public's misconceptions about foreign threats and behaviors to the nation's history and geography, arguing that American success in international relations is achieved often in spite of, rather than because of, the public's worldview.

Drawing a fascinating line from colonial events to America's handling of modern international terrorism, Pillar shows how presumption and misperception turned Finlandization into a dirty word in American policy circles, bolstered the "for us or against us" attitude that characterized the policies of the George W. Bush administration, and continue to obscure the reasons behind Iraq's close relationship with Iran. Fundamental misunderstandings have created a cycle in which threats are underestimated before an attack occurs and then are overestimated after they happen. By exposing this longstanding tradition of misperception, Pillar hopes the United States can develop policies that better address international realities rather than biased beliefs.

1

THE AMERICAN PRISM

THE UNITED STATES is exceptional. One can agree with that statement even without accepting the tub-thumping type of exceptionalism that regularly infuses the rhetoric of American politicians. What sets the United States apart goes beyond the ordinary differences between any two countries. Having risen to strength on a continent widely separated from most of the rest of the world, the United States has come to exert power more broadly over the entire globe than any other state ever has. Human history has seen nothing else like it.

The federal, representative, democratic republic that constitutes the American political system stands out among political inventions, even though its founders borrowed many ideas from elsewhere and it has since been repeatedly emulated. Sheer longevity distinguishes the republic, despite North America being part of the New World rather than of the Old. One can find more antiquated political relics elsewhere, but no other major power boasts as much continuity as a democracy as does the United States. The Mother of Parliaments at Westminster is older than the U.S. Congress, but at the time the United States was founded, the British political system still had a hereditary monarch who was much more than just a figurehead.

Most American politicians who trumpet the concept of American exceptionalism are selling a narrow and one-sided version of what makes the United States unique. This brand of exceptionalism can justly be criticized for being politically tendentious and for whitewashing negative aspects of U.S. behavior. It often is a crude appeal to primitive nationalism and a rhetorical promotion of policies favored on other grounds. It is a type of triumphalism based on the notion that Americans are not just different from but also better than anyone else. American exceptionalism as typically used in political discourse understates or ignores the respects in which the United States is still subject to many of the same realities and limitations that other states are.¹ Even a state that is different in important respects can still be like other states in other important respects.

Nonetheless, whatever is exceptional can be expected to have exceptional effects, for good or for ill. Although not everything important about America is different from other countries, much of what is different about it is still important. Distinctly American ways of thinking and acting matter. One indication of this is how multiple generations of observers of the American character have reached remarkably similar conclusions about the traits that constitute that character.² Another indication is how the very belief in American uniqueness has provided a common creed within which policy debates are conducted. Debate over imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century, for example, between those who believed that America’s civilizing mission was best carried out by being the shining example of a city on the hill and those who instead wanted to charge down the hill and conquer what was below, was based on the two sides’ shared assumptions about American uniqueness.³

Even more basic than character and creed is perception: how people see things and think about the nature of things. A nation’s culture—which itself has been shaped by all of the physical, political, and historical circumstances that have made that nation what it is—powerfully influences its citizens’ perceptions. A culture determines much of what the people who are part of that culture take to be factual knowledge.⁴ American culture and everything that has gone into it constitute a prism that slants, distorts, and colors how Americans see what is around them. Sometimes the distortion is so great that they fail to see some things at all.

The distorting and coloring prismatic effects of being an American apply first of all to how Americans perceive things in their own country, which are most germane to their daily lives. But they also extend to how they perceive the world outside their national borders, especially situations and problems overseas that the United States may confront—including the nature and cause of a problem, its prognosis, the limitations and possibilities of any U.S. action, and the extent to which the problem gets noticed in the first place.

The distortion and coloration are chiefly unconscious and automatic. Americans’ perceptions of the world outside the United States exemplify what psychologists have taught us about human cognition: that mental constructs based on culture and past experience shape perceptions silently but so powerfully that they often outweigh even contrary facts and evidence. The constructs, also called heuristics, are shortcuts the mind uses to cope with daily deluges of information without having to apply slow and laborious analysis to every data point.⁵

Psychologists have more to tell us about how Americans’ own unusual situation affects their perceptions of the rest of the world, including what George Kennan referred to as “our inveterate tendency to judge others by the extent to which they contrive to be like ourselves.”⁶ The concept of projection—of ascribing one’s own attributes to others—goes back to Freud. To psychoanalysts, it is a defense mechanism: a transferring of unwanted or undesirable attributes to maintain a favorable self-image.⁷ It is easy to see what such projection might have to do with American exceptionalism; preserving a pristine image of America as better than any other nation encourages the sloughing off of undesirable attributes onto others, which worsens American misperceptions of the others.

One does not have to assume a national neurosis, however, for America’s unusual status to contribute to Americans’ misunderstanding of foreigners and foreign countries. Americans, living in a country that is so different from any others, simply have not had the experience, including domestic experience, to know any better. There has not been enough variety in the domestic experience to know better. Louis Hartz wrote of Kennan’s observation, “It is peculiarly easy for us to judge others by ourselves because, especially since the Jacksonian upheaval, we have been so much alike.”⁸ The judging involves not only an expectation that other nations ought to emulate an American ideal but also a perception that their starting point is not fundamentally different from America’s. That gets to yet another psychological mechanism that is frequently displayed in international relations: the tendency to overestimate the influence of internal characteristics on another’s behavior and to underestimate the effect of the situation that the other person or nation is in.⁹ Because America’s situation is unique, Americans have more trouble than most in understanding the situations of others.

IMPACT ON POLICY

A myopic American public prone to mental laziness and laden with misperceptions about the outside world would be of little importance to anyone other than students of public opinion if the misperceptions did not affect U.S. foreign policy. The United States has large bureaucracies, after all, charged with using hard facts and analysis to deliver to policy makers accurate pictures of the foreign problems they must confront. But on the big U.S. foreign-policy decisions over the past several decades—those dealing with major departures such as going to war or redirecting grand strategy—the bureaucracies and in particular the intelligence agencies have had almost no influence.¹⁰ Far more important have been the conceptions that decision makers bring with them to the job and involve their sense of how the world works and their preconceptions based on past personal experiences.

The policy makers’ inbred patterns of thinking constitute one of the links between policy and the array of perceptions and misperceptions the public exhibits. Policy makers are American citizens, too. They grew up in the same culture and were shaped by the same peculiarly American circumstances and history and national experience as other Americans. They naturally tend to look at the outside world in many of the same ways. Although they may have more of an obligation to act on fact than does the average opinionated member of the general public, their heavy high-level responsibilities make the mental shortcuts all the more attractive and even necessary, and so they too tend to use oversimplification and to cling to general images they already hold.¹¹

Another link between American public opinion and U.S. foreign policy is that policy makers must operate in a climate of opinion that sets significant limits to what they can do or even say, regardless of whether they would have shared the tenets of that opinion in the first place. Elected policy makers could not have attained and held power without having been responsive to American public opinion. Walter Lippmann made the point more bluntly sixty years ago: “With exceptions so rare that they are regarded as miracles and freaks of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.”¹² Although this pattern might appear in any democracy, Kennan observed that foreign policy is especially likely to be subordinated to domestic politics in the United States, where the constituencies are not parliaments but instead “particularly aggressive and vociferous minorities or lobbies.”¹³

Whether vociferous minorities or other threatening elements have shaped a broader popular perception or not, that perception can acquire a significance for policy that goes beyond the mere counting of votes or the placating of a lobby. The perception becomes part of the statesman’s reality for any of several reasons, such as maintaining national morale, regardless of whether the perception is true or the statesman believes it is true. In debates about the U.S.–Soviet military balance in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, an influential line of argument was that much of the American public had come to believe that the strategic balance had shifted in favor of the Soviet Union and that this was reason enough for the United States to respond with enhanced military programs of its own, whether the actual U.S.–Soviet balance had shifted as much as the public believed or not.¹⁴

Prevailing public perceptions can become conventional wisdom that elites as well as the general public routinely accept. The statesperson’s natural tendencies to view the world in a certain way merge with his or her political need to stay within the confines that public perceptions set. The conventional wisdom in effect limits not only what the statesperson does and says but also what he or she thinks. This is what happened as the United States immersed itself in the Vietnam War. In the 1960s, a strong conventional wisdom, very difficult to buck, held that preventing a Communist takeover in South Vietnam was critical to checking a larger advance of worldwide communism. Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts note that nearly all opinion leaders inside and outside government, except for a few lonely voices, accepted this belief. “And the political trapping process,” they write, “kept almost everyone in line. Public doubters would be pounced on by the press. Bureaucratic skeptics would risk their careers. Various public figures vied with each other to explain the importance of Vietnam to the American people. And the people seemed to be believers too.”¹⁵

The U.S. foreign-policy decision-making process does a poor job of filtering out the effects of misperceptions about the outside world. The process is in one sense open, set within a democratic political system and thus vulnerable to all of the inaccuracies in public beliefs. It is in another sense closed, relying on small decision-making circles with a strong sense of mutual loyalty and thus vulnerable to the groupthink that tends to characterize such circles. Lyndon Johnson’s circle, in which major decisions on the Vietnam War were made, was one of the principal inspirations for psychologist Irving Janis’s development of the concept of groupthink.¹⁶ U.S. administrations’ decision-making styles have varied through the years, but four decades after Johnson’s decision to go into Vietnam a decision to launch a war in Iraq was even more closed—so closed that there was no policy process at all.¹⁷

In the United States, the heavy use of political appointees to fill positions at echelons below the top decision makers further weakens whatever check the bureaucracy may have on the decision makers’ oversimplifying, short-cutting thought processes, in addition to politicizing the bureaucracy’s output.¹⁸ The practice reduces overall professionalism in government. It also establishes a tension in which policy officials are inclined to perform end runs around the professional bureaucracy rather than to use it fully.¹⁹

Some observers have had difficulty finding direct evidence of public opinion influencing U.S. foreign policy.²⁰ But this difficulty almost certainly reflects how much policy makers share, internalize, and preemptively allow for public beliefs. The more common scholarly judgment is that public opinion has played a greater role in developing foreign and security policy in the United States than it has in almost any other country.²¹ Major changes in U.S. foreign policy most often involve the rejection of one conventional wisdom in favor of a different conventional wisdom.²² The influence of the American experience and American culture on American conventional wisdom matters a great deal because it profoundly shapes the perceptions and thus the policies of those who make decisions on behalf of the world’s superpower. This fact is too rarely understood; the textbook model of how government ought to operate—in which decision makers get their images of the outside world from an intelligence bureaucracy—is mistakenly assumed to be how it does operate.

PAST AND PRESENT ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN OUTLOOK

A combination of geography, history, and politics has carved the American prism. The process started with the nation’s happy circumstance of having grown up on a continent that is rich in resources, climatologically blessed, and separated by two oceans from most of the world’s troubles. This situation has in turn shaped a particular pattern of involvement with the outside world punctuated by wartime forays into other parts of the globe. The physical circumstances and the history have molded a distinctive domestic political experience, which in turn has become yet another ingredient in the culture that has molded the American outlook. The environment that surrounds the people of any nation influences their thinking insofar as it affects what they believe to be the nature of that environment, and their beliefs are shaped by their predispositions to view the world in some ways rather than in other ways.²³ But the predispositions themselves are in part shaped by the nation’s history and culture.

The combination of experience and environment colors in two basic ways how Americans perceive what is going on in the rest of the world. One way has to do with current circumstances: the environment of today. There has not been enough continental drift since the colonial era to change the most important geographic facts about the United States. Technology obviously has affected some of the implications of those facts but has not erased the most important ones. Current circumstances also include how the American political system works today and the unsurpassed power that the U.S. superpower wields today.

At least as important as current circumstances is the cumulative effect of the nation’s earlier history. That effect is intrinsic to the concept of culture, which involves beliefs and habits that are transferred from generation to generation. The experiences of previous generations of Americans have much to do with how today’s Americans think and how they perceive the outside world. The evolution of the national culture is analogous in this respect to the evolution of ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• 1. The American Prism
• 2. Behind the Ocean Moats
• 3. Abundance and Power
• 4. The Successful Society
• 5. Searching for Monsters to Destroy
• 6. Unending Misperception
• Notes
• Index