From The American Conservative:
Anatol Lieven explains how strategic empathy is supposed to work:
This kind of empathy has very valuable consequences for foreign policy. It makes for an accurate assessment of another state establishment’s goals based on its own thoughts, rather than a picture of those goals generated by one’s own fears and hopes; above all, it permits one to identify the difference between the vital and secondary interests of a rival country as that country’s rulers see them.
A vital interest is one on which a state will not compromise unless faced with irresistible military or economic pressure. Otherwise, it will resist to the very limit of its ability, including, if necessary, by war. A statesman who sets out to challenge another state’s vital interests must therefore be sure not only that his or her country possesses this overwhelming power, but that it is prepared actually to use it.
American policymakers are notoriously bad at understanding how other governments perceive things and the reasons why they act in the way that they do, and we have seen on many occasions how this failure to understand the other side’s thinking has led us into one crisis after another. Our leaders often fail to grasp that they are threatening another country’s perceived vital interests, because they frequently deny that the other government has any legitimate interests at all. Instead of trying to see an issue from the other side, our leaders will often insist that there is only one acceptable way of seeing it and it is invariably the same as ours. If the other government responds angrily to this approach, they are then deemed hostile and “revisionist” rather than a normal state reacting as any other state would. Practicing this kind of empathy does not mean agreeing that the other government is right, but it does mean acknowledging what their actual position is rather than projecting one onto them.
H.R. McMaster likes to talk a lot about practicing strategic empathy, but in fact he refuses to understand how other governments see the world. He prefers instead to imagine that they are all driven to achieve ideological, expansionist goals just as he is, and then he warns about the aggressive intentions that he has imputed to them. This is exactly the opposite of what Lieven is talking about, and it is nothing more than reading his own hawkish inclinations into everyone else’s worldview. If McMaster were willing to see things as the Russian government or Chinese government did, he would understand that they perceive aggressive U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War as a threat, and at least some of their conduct over this same period has been in reaction to American overreaching. But McMaster doesn’t understand this at all. Instead, he insists that the behavior of other states has nothing to do with US actions whatsoever, because to admit this would be to acknowledge that an interventionist foreign policy can create more problems than it solves.
Very good points indeed. US wars in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and South/Central America all show projection of the aggression of US tyrant demagogues upon their victims, so as to pose as protectors in he US. But tyrants are incapable of any kind of empathy, so the problem is teaching the US people to recognize them as tyrant demagogues, controlled by unregulated money power, which has destroyed all branches of the US government and mass media. The empathy of the few in the US can only teach a few resisters; the problem of economic tyranny will ultimately be solved by force in the US, after generations of decline.