His Friend = My Tribe.

https://twitter.com/JayHulmePoet/status/1649372766204723200?s=20

Reminds me. My advisor @OhioState Classics convinced me to double major (instead of just minoring) in Greek and Latin by telling me that “learning Ancient Greek is easy.” To anyone who has studied Ancient Greek, this seems untrue. But, perspective is everything.

“Thing is,” he added, “your brain is convinced that it doesn’t need to know ancient Greek, because if it did, it would have learned it by now. So, all you have to do is beat your brain into submission until it gives up and remembers.”

Greek and Latin—a short, but true story

In 2015 I wrote an op-ed in @RCDefense on the West’s failure of moral imagination re Russia’s “sudden and surprising” aid to the Assad regime. https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2015/10/13/blindside_-_us_foreign_policy_108572.html#!

My basic premise holds. Politics is a moral enterprise; good strategy demands we escape myopic views of what others want or will do. We (i.e., the West) were blindsided because we couldn't imagine Putin doing something we wouldn't do. It wasn't rational in our calculation.

But that's not how strategy works. Strategy is interactive. As the saying goes, the enemy gets a move. 

What we think is irrational, might be perfectly rational, or moral, for our rivals.

The problem is not new, and I am hardly the first to draw attention to it. H.R. McMaster refers to it as strategic narcissism. What is needed, he suggests elsewhere is strategic empathy. I quibble with the term, but the basic logic is the same as my own. https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/03022022_statement_for_the_record_-_hr_mcmaster_final.pdf

Namely, by drawing our attention to the moral component of war and politics (something even hard core realists like Clausewitz and E.H. Carr did), we can begin to see the world, the strategic landscape, as they do. The ends and means are never the same for competitive rivals.

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/lukemperez/5QEe8ie