The Uses and Abuses of Strategic Empathy

Strategic empathy is an important concept, and we shouldn’t let militarists like McMaster get away with hijacking it.

Van Jackson recently had a very interesting conversation with Claire Yorke about the role of empathy in strategy and what strategic empathy is. Here he discusses how H.R. McMaster abuses the concept (starting around 20:35):

I heard [McMaster] say that if I was in China’s shoes I’d want revenge for a century of humiliation and I’d want to conquer the globe. What’s going on there when you say that?…[H]e, McMaster, is calling that strategic empathy, but that’s not empathy. That’s a rhetorical trick where you smuggle in assumptions about China having maximalist ambitions and worst-case intentions…so the McMaster-style usage of strategic empathy is this example of how superficial engagement with empathy as a concept can take you down the wrong kind of path. Or, you [referring to Yorke] said something about domination, a legitimating tool in order to support ends that are anti-empathetic.

Yorke concurs and adds, “Yeah, and it can be a projection. That’s the problem. If you can’t actually understand how the enemy thinks, you’re projecting it.”

This exchange lines up very closely with how I have understood McMaster’s misuse of the ideas of strategic empathy and strategic narcissism in recent years, and it is very helpful in drawing out the implications of why it is potentially so dangerous to confuse what McMaster is doing with a genuine attempt to understand how leaders in other countries see the world. McMaster doesn’t try to enter into the minds of foreign leaders, but settles for conjuring up the most extreme nationalist counterpart and then assuming that the entire leadership shares the views of his imaginary extremist. This obliterates any acknowledgment of diversity and complexity in the politics of the other country, and it imputes to everyone in the other government the views of a fictional zealot that McMaster has created in the name of “empathy.”

That is not an exercise in learning how to understand a potential adversary, but it is a way of selling your own aggressive policy preferences as a necessary “response” to their supposed world-dominating goals. If anyone complains that this ignores how the U.S. has contributed to worsening relations, McMaster attacks that attempt at reflection as narcissism and touts his own projection as the true insight into how their leadership thinks: “McMaster has a history of faulting others for the very narcissism that he displays.” As Jackson says, it is a rhetorical trick, and in this case it is designed to make McMaster’s reflexive militarism seem thoughtful instead of being a crude example of threat inflation and overreaction at their worst.

Back in 2020, Jon Askonas dissected one of McMaster’s attempts to use the concept of strategic empathy:

Never does McMaster try to get inside the heads of the actual leaders and decision-makers of the countries he is writing about.

The reason that McMaster doesn’t try to get into their heads is that he isn’t really interested in how they perceive things. He takes for granted that he already knows what they think based on his own ideological commitments and biases, and he simply assumes that people on the other side are just as obsessed with projecting power and dominating other parts of the world as he is. As Ethan Paul noted in his response to McMaster’s ranting about China, “McMaster uses strategic empathy as a symbolic exercise in self-validation.” Yes, I believe that McMaster does want to conquer the globe, but that tells us absolutely nothing about what the Chinese government intends.

Strategic empathy is an important concept, and we shouldn’t let militarists like McMaster get away with hijacking it and twisting it beyond recognition. As Zachary Shore says in A Sense of the Enemy:

But strategic empathy can be used just as effectively to avoid or ameliorate conflicts. It can be a means not for outmaneuvering the enemy but instead for making amends. Some differences can never be bridged, but many can. Understanding what truly drives others to act as they do is a necessary ingredient for resolving most conflicts where force is not desired. It is, in truth, an essential first step toward constructing lasting peace.¹

If we want to take that first step to lasting peace, we have to be on guard against arguments that impute the worst and most aggressive motives to other states in the name of “understanding” them.

1. Shore, A Sense of the Enemy: p. 189.