By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Why Stronger States Are More Fearful Than Weaker Ones

A basic premise unites most foreign policy thinking: power begets security. Because no global police force can respond in times of trouble, states must accumulate power to ensure their safety. They must build strong militaries to protect their homelands and defend vital international interests. They need to nurture robust economies to fund those militaries and withstand financial pressure. These notions have motivated strategy for centuries, including the policies of the world’s two most powerful countries today. U.S. President Donald Trump is pursuing a military buildup and economic self-sufficiency to deter adversaries, a policy his advisers call “peace through strength.” Chinese leader Xi Jinping, meanwhile, is plowing money into the People’s Liberation Army and the manufacturing sector to make his country “self-reliant and strong.”

Power can indeed bolster security in purely material terms. But security is a psychological phenomenon, too. Leaders and citizens alike want large militaries to feel safe, not simply for their own sakes. Yet almost no psychological research supports the idea that feelings of safety align with objective statistics about material power. In fact, the evidence shows the contrary: power makes people more skeptical of others' intentions and thus heightens anxiety. The strong, it turns out, are far more likely than the weak to skip careful, reasoned analysis when making decisions. Instead, they assess threats from the gut and shoot from the hip. While the weak know they must think critically to navigate their surroundings, the strong imagine they can rely on stereotypes and other mental shortcuts to get by. As a result, the powerful view the world in bleak and oversimplified terms, breeding suspicion and anxiety.

Stronger countries, like more powerful people, tend to be more insecure than weaker ones. Their leaders and citizens imagine or exaggerate threats. They think impulsively. And they are easy to trigger. As a result, they are more likely to support starting and escalating wars than individuals who feel their state is feeble.

Today, the world is characterized by renewed great-power competition, particularly between the United States and China. Each side is trying to acquire more power than the other, in large part to feel safer. But this strategy is likely to have the opposite of its intended effect. Should Washington grow stronger, it will become more convinced that Beijing is a menace. If Beijing becomes more powerful, it will view Washington’s actions in its neighborhood as more threatening. The result could be a vicious cycle: as each country becomes more capable, it will feel more insecure, prompting further military buildups that drive each side’s anxiety higher still.

To avoid this outcome, officials in both the United States and China—and, indeed, in any strong country—should try to neutralize the psychological effects of power. That means they should pause before making decisions. They should carefully evaluate all available evidence regarding a potential threat, rather than jumping to conclusions. In other words, they should reason as if they run weak governments, not strong ones.

 

Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears a Crown

One of the oldest and most dominant ideas in international relations is that power leads to security and weakness to insecurity. This premise anchored Thucydides’ analysis of the Peloponnesian War: “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm it inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.” But students of individual psychology have long understood that power may not generate rational views and behaviors. Or as Shakespeare’s Henry IV observes, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

Psychologists directly studied the effects of strength in the aftermath of World War II in an effort to understand how supposedly normal individuals could commit acts of great cruelty when they felt powerful. In the infamous 1971 Stanford prison experiment, for example, psychologists assigned study participants to serve either as a hypothetical guard or as a hypothetical prisoner and found that the guards quickly turned abusive. A decade earlier, Stanley Milgram conducted notorious obedience experiments in which participants were instructed to administer electric shocks to another participant. (In reality, that other participant was an actor, simply pretending to get shocked.) Milgram’s subjects continued to administer the supposed shocks when told to do so, even in doses that would have been lethal. These controversial studies provided initial indications that power can have corrupting effects on individual behavior—effects so corrupting that they inspired new protocols for research ethics in academia.

In the decades that followed, researchers such as Susan Fiske and Dacher Keltner started testing these intuitions rigorously and scientifically. Psychologists provided subjects with greater or fewer resources in a laboratory setting and measured their views, observed their interactions in groups, and watched their behaviors. They surveyed and analyzed the views and actions of bosses and subordinates in corporate settings, as well. The findings were striking: a sense of power appeared to activate impulsive and intuitive thinking writ large. People who felt powerful accepted more risk and exhibited more overconfidence, leading to greater financial losses in laboratory games. They were quicker to dehumanize others, engage in hypocrisy, and rely on racial biases when interacting with members of marginalized groups. They were less empathetic and saw others as threatening. In one study, for instance, subjects played a cooperation game involving the division of a communal pot of money. Subjects who were randomly assigned to a powerful "manager" position were more likely to view their teammates as untrustworthy and thus more likely to feel that teammates should be punished to deter selfish behavior. The study, the experimenters wrote, suggested that power activates “Hobesian” thinking marked by a tendency “to distrust others and therefore rely more on deterrence as a punishment motive.”

Fiske, Keltner, and their colleagues, of course, were mostly studying how power affects individual thinking in controlled environments—a far cry from the high-stakes world of foreign policy decision-making. In theory, even the research they did in corporate settings shouldn’t neatly apply. States, after all, generally have many institutions and bureaucracies designed to foster deliberation among competing voices. Yet my research found that the psychological literature was in fact highly relevant. Policymakers in powerful states felt more insecure and acted with more aggression than those in weaker ones. One might hope that these effects would be tempered in democracies, where public opinion could constrain a leader's worst impulses. Ordinary people who feel their country is stronger also have higher threat assessments and are more supportive of hawkish policies than those who feel their country is weaker. Democracies are therefore just as vulnerable to this kind of thinking.

In fact, the United States might provide the clearest case study of how an increase in a country’s power drives an uptick in fear. At its founding in the 1780s, the country was materially very weak. Its economy was crippled by war debt. It was surrounded by dozens of capable, sovereign Indian nations. The southeastern Choctaws alone possessed a military force ten times as large as the United States' standing army. Even the U.S. founders were unsure if their fledgling nation could survive. But rather than panic, they assessed the strategic environment carefully and adopted diplomacy as the primary tool of statecraft. U.S. President George Washington regularly hosted and honored Indian delegations, just as he did European dignitaries, and paid these nations for land cessions. Dreams of enjoying “full security,” warned Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, were “too visionary to be a rule for national conduct.”

Yet as the United States ascended to hegemony in the Western Hemisphere over the course of the nineteenth century, its calculus shifted. Decision-makers concluded that Indian nations were not potential partners but intolerable threats. They relied more heavily on racialized stereotypes that portrayed Indians as warlike and irrational. The government therefore decided it had no choice but to attack them. In 1890, a religious movement known as the “Ghost Dance” sought to reunite participants with their ancestors’ spirits to resist the United States’ westward expansion and cultural assimilation. The Lakota people's practice of this dance so concerned U.S. elites that President Benjamin Harrison dispatched the largest mobilization of military force since the American Civil War to Pine Ridge Reservation. The result was the Wounded Knee Massacre. Rather than feeling safer with strength, the United States literally began chasing ghosts.

Some of this aggression was driven by opportunity, not fear. With growing power, Washington could simply acquire more land than when it was weaker. But decision-makers made clear that the expansion was also driven by the perceived threat of Indian nations. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians,” the future president Theodore Roosevelt infamously remarked in 1886, “but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” To quote the historian Ned Blackhawk, U.S. officials felt that their “emergent racial order” was “under constant threat” from Indians in the West.

 

Power Corrupts

The end of World War II brought about another massive increase in American power. Before the war, other governments could at least claim to be Washington’s equals. But afterward, the United States had no true peer. France, Germany, and Japan had been torn apart. The United Kingdom avoided invasion, but it had suffered heavy casualties, and German bombings had damaged its cities and industrial centers. The Soviet Union was closer in stature, but it, too, was exhausted: it suffered around 27 million military and civilian deaths, compared with fewer than 500,000 for the United States, and a number of its major cities were left devastated by German advances. Its economy and military paled in comparison with the United States industrial might, blue-water navy, and network of overseas bases.

The United States, however, did not act as if it were the most secure country in the world. Instead, leaders in Washington fretted more than they had before the war. From almost the moment Japan surrendered, U.S. officials began worrying about communist governments. In 1950, the Departments of State and Defense drafted NSC-68, a memorandum that called for a massive increase in peacetime defense spending and the development of the hydrogen bomb. “In the ascendancy of their strength,” the document declared, the United States and its citizens “stand in their deepest peril.”

President Harry Truman quickly made the memo the lodestar of American Cold War strategy. Less than three months after its release, Truman had U.S. troops flood the Korean peninsula in response to North Korea’s invasion of its southern neighbor. Doing so was hardly a security imperative for Washington; the fight was a civil war. But primed for suspicion, American officials interpreted the North’s invasion as an attempt by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to start a chain reaction that would transform government after government into communist regimes (or what policymakers would later call “domino theory”), culminating in a world war aimed at the United States. “If South Korea was allowed to fall,” reflected Truman, “communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores. . . . If this was allowed to go unchallenged it would mean a third world war.” The far weaker British, by contrast, saw things more clearly. In Washington, “there are too many Puritan avenging angels” who want “to get on with punishing the guilty,” the British ambassador to the United States wrote in 1950. The American invasion, in other words, was an act of U.S. aggression—not one of self-defense. The Canadians, who were even weaker, went further in questioning Washington’s response. The most urgent threat to international security, they assessed, was not Stalin, but rather an American overreaction in Korea.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, bringing an end to the Cold War, the United States’ power became even more unrivaled. It was no longer merely the world’s most powerful country. It was the first uncontested global superpower in human history. But even this lofty status failed to ease U.S. fears. “We have slain a large dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of,” James Woolsey, the soon-to-be director of the CIA, declared in his 1993 Senate confirmation hearing. Other foreign policy officials issued similar assessments. And as with Korea (and later, Vietnam), they acted on them. A full quarter of all of the United States’ military interventions have taken place in the post-Cold War era.

As in the nineteenth century, these adventures resulted in part from Washington’s substantial capabilities. A country that can deploy special operations forces around the world in 30 minutes and launch a full-scale ground invasion that topples regimes within days is more willing to start wars than one that can’t. The powerful do as they wish.

But these actions are also the unmistakable product of rising anxiety—specifically, the fear of what might result from inaction. Consider the invasion of Iraq. The country’s leader, Saddam Hussein, posed no threat to the United States. Washington’s intelligence reports suggested that he lacked weapons of mass destruction. But that did not assuage the concerns of the George W. Bush administration. In 2002, Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, warned that the costs of awaiting evidence of an Iraqi nuclear capability far outweighed the costs of acting now. “We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” she explained. U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put a finer point on it: “no terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.” Bush’s thinking was even less reasoned. “I don’t spend a lot of time taking polls around the world to tell me what I think is the right way to act,” the president said in the lead-up to the attack. “I’ve just got to know how I feel.” He was worried about Hussein, and that was enough. The result was innumerable civilian deaths, the radicalization of populations, the production of future terrorists, and a price tag of over $2 trillion.

 

Think Like the Weak

The United States is hardly the only country whose power has made it feel less secure. Moscow, too, has a lengthy history of power-induced fear. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union enjoyed an advantageous shift in nuclear and conventional capabilities relative to the United States, which was demobilizing after the Vietnam War. In response, it began to worry more about American influence in Afghanistan and thus embarked on an incredibly costly invasion of the country. Today, Moscow is no longer a superpower, but it remains both strong and insecure. In fact, a 2020 survey of high-ranking Russian elites and government officials—including people in the armed forces and security agencies—found that officials who felt that Russian power was on the rise were the ones most likely to view Ukraine, the United States, and NATO as threats. Russian President Vladimir Putin was not among those surveyed, but he seems to hold similar views. His decision to invade Ukraine was no doubt motivated in part by irredentism. Yet in speeches and treatises justifying the war, he has repeatedly expressed fear that Washington will use Kyiv to threaten Russian security.

And then there is China. Over the last 50 years, it has pulled off nothing short of an economic miracle. Western exploitation in the nineteenth century, Japanese aggression in the early twentieth century, and various reforms under Mao Zedong in the 1950s and 1960s all left the country materially weak and with good reason to feel threatened. Now, it is the world’s second-richest country and in possession of a massive and strong military. Yet China’s surge to superpower status over the past half century does not seem to have solved Beijing's fundamental security concerns. The country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has purged high-ranking officials from the party apparatus, ordered mass arrests of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region out of fear of domestic terrorism, and even restricted elements of Western culture in the Chinese media to quell perceived U.S. influence.

The world, then, might seem as if it is headed in a very dangerous direction. It will, after all, be hard for the leaders of these various strong countries to become less fearful. But they can make better choices by actively trying to think like the weak—which is to say, deliberately, empathetically, and realistically. It is something that a strong United States, at least, has some experience with. Faced with what he saw as rising Soviet expansionism and an incoherent, costly, and increasingly militarized U.S. foreign policy, President Dwight Eisenhower initiated a top-secret review of grand strategy design in 1953. In this exercise, teams of high-ranking officials studied three foreign policy strategies that varied in levels of aggressiveness. After reviewing their analysis, Eisenhower decided that a milder approach would work well and opted for a more cost-effective strategy of containment rather than a more expensive one of actively and aggressively rolling back Moscow’s influence.

Eisenhower’s exercise did not require a pricey restructuring of bureaucracies and institutions. It simply entailed careful, deliberative thinking. To avoid dangerous entanglements, strong states should do more of this. Such an exercise, for example, might steer Washington away from its current military buildup in the waters around Venezuela. According to Trump, striking boats, seizing oil tankers, and threatening to attack Caracas are all necessary to stop the flow of illegal fentanyl into the United States. But this is based on faulty reasoning. Fentanyl is perhaps the primary cause of American overdose deaths, yet there is no evidence that Venezuela produces fentanyl at any significant level. These operations thus do not bolster U.S. security. Instead, they risk starting a major new conflict that would consume massive amounts of American resources, easily pushing spending beyond what the recently passed, nearly $1 trillion defense budget provides for. And that enormous budget is itself unlikely to bring Washington a sense of peace. To people across party lines, the dollars devoted to the Pentagon are meant to shore up U.S. security. But the psychological math is perverse.

The Sword of Damocles, an ancient Greek parable, suggests that a life of power is fraught with ever-present danger. I suggest that the dangling sword is more often a delusion: threats are often a figment of power-induced imagination. The most worrisome situation would be one in which the US and China both feel that they possess a power advantage.

None of this means that governments shouldn’t make investments in their armed forces. It certainly doesn’t mean that they should abandon efforts to expand their economies. But it does mean leaders and analysts must abandon the idea that in foreign affairs, power reduces insecurity.

 

 

For updates click hompage here