The Missing Dimension title of this blog has been inspired in large measure by the recent all-but-total organizational elimination of the U.S. government’s capacity for strategic religious engagement with other countries. Whereas the original usage of “the missing dimension” was intended to convey the general absence of religious considerations in the practice of U.S. foreign policy, there is yet a third application of that title which should be recognized and acted upon. And that is the continuing absence of empathy as a fundamental ingredient in U.S. foreign policy.
Empathy, at its most basic level, is the act of identifying with someone else, of doing the hard work required to understand their point of view, and of looking at the problem in question through their side of the prism in addition to our own. The differences in question may have to do with any number of causes—ranging from the political and economic in nature to the religious and ethnic or perhaps even some unresolved wound of history—but in the course of making these determinations, commonalities will also emerge that can often provide a starting point for bridging the differences.
Although empathy is normally viewed through a personal lens and is often a critically important ingredient in peacemaking, it has broader implications for national security as well. Adversaries in today’s conflicts typically leave empathy out of their calculations, as each side dehumanizes the other in pursuing its political ends. Although a natural response, dehumanizing effectively condemns both parties to unending conflict until one side or the other capitulates. In other words, if one wants to resolve a dispute with minimal loss, it is essential to empathize.
Part of the reason many foreign policy and national security practitioners overlook the importance of empathy is because they associate the concept with weakness. It sounds like “sympathy” and lacks the perceived weight or gravitas of other terms like “power” or “justice.” Yet, by failing to take into account the reasons behind an adversary’s actions, we risk falling victim to the law of unintended consequences. That was certainly the case with the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979, and when former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was asked the most important lesson he learned from the Vietnam War, he said, “the need to empathize with the enemy.”
As McNamara further lamented in his book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam: “Our misjudgment of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area…” This shortcoming repeated itself in Iraq when the U.S. Coalition Authority’s attempt to implement a peace accord proved dead on arrival because it lacked any input from Ayatollah Sistani, the country’s leading religious figure.
Mindful of the above, empathy has played a major role in the efforts of the International Center for Religion & Diplomacy (ICRD) to bridge differences between adversaries through commonly-shared religious values. One of its projects that illustrates the power of empathy particularly well is that which it undertook in 2004 to reform the religious schools (madrasas) of Pakistan. It did so by working with madrasa leaders to expand their school curriculums and to transform their pedagogy in order to create critical thinking skills among the students and inspire greater adherence to human rights and religious tolerance. In its seven years of doing this prior to passing the baton to an Indigenous NGO, ICRD engaged more than 1,600 madrasas in facilitating this kind of transformation, including those that gave birth to the Taliban.
ICRD’s success with the madrasas stands in marked contrast to the failed attempts of others, including the government of Pakistan; and much of that had to do with empathy in the form of:
- conducting the project in such a way that the madrasa leaders felt it was their reform effort and not something imposed from the outside (which meant they had considerable ownership in the change process);
- inspiring them with their own heritage by building upon the little-known fact that during the Middle Ages, madrasas were without peer in the world as institutions of higher learning (it was European exposure to them that led to our own university system in the West); and going back even further to the early days of Islam, when a number of pioneering breakthroughs in the arts and sciences, including religious tolerance, took place under its auspices; and
- grounding all suggested change in Islamic principles, so the madrasa leaders could genuinely feel they were becoming better Muslims in the process.
As the above suggests, empathy lies at the very heart of strategic religious engagement. Indeed, showing respect for the religious values that the involved parties hold dear is one of the more effective ways to transcend barriers that divide.
For five years, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad didn’t support ICRD’s efforts with the madrasas, but they finally came to realize that what it was doing was every bit as strategic as anything else that was taking place on or off the battlefield. Bombs and bullets have their place, but more often than not, they exacerbate the cycle of revenge and unwittingly spawn the creation of more insurgents. However, winning hearts and minds by dealing empathetically with the ideas behind the guns becomes contagious and “the swamp” (of terrorism) slowly begins to evaporate.
In his treatise on The Art of War, renowned military strategist Sun Tzu in the fifth century BCE, strongly advises that more than anything else you must “know your enemy”—an unachievable ideal without the practice of empathy. Indeed, as he further notes, the “Supreme Art of War” is to achieve your objectives without resorting to conflict. With the latter as our overriding goal for the future, it is essential that we discard any stigma of weakness mistakenly associated with the terminology and recognize empathy as a critical ingredient of informed decision making.
In summary, it seems abundantly clear that in the absence of an empathetic understanding of other world views, the United States will have great difficulty advancing its interests in today’s evolving multi-polar world.
Douglas Johnston co-edited the landmark book "Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft," which was first published in 1994. The title of this blog series was inspired by that book.
