School of War - Ep 272: Beatrice Heuser on Why Leaders Make Bad Decisions

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

Beatrice Heuser, Distinguished Professor at the Brussels School of Governance in the Free University of Brussels and author of Flawed Strategy: Why Smart Leaders Make Bad Decisions, joins the show to discuss decision-making and strategic thinking. ▪️ Times 02:58 Economists and strategy 07:59 Acting rationally vs logically 15:00 Mirror imaging  20:01 How should we study strategy? 27:17 Denial 32:18 Strategic intelligence failures 36:15 Hidden causes 38:57 Everyone does it Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

One of the fun parts of making School of War is that our topic, warfare, has inexhaustible dimensions and parts, so that on some episodes we can talk about infantry tactics in the modern battlefield with a young and extremely thoughtful Marine Infantry Officer, as we did in our last episode. And then for the very next show, we can talk with a distinguished professor about strategic decision-making at the highest level and the kinds of mistakes that even great leaders are prone to make. That's what we'll do today with the great Beatrice Hooser, who, along with past guests, like Lawrence Friedman and Andrew Lambert, is one of the titanic figures

of contemporary strategic studies. This is really a lot of fun. Let's get into it. It is for 50s for once of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the rain situation in the ground. We should fight on the beaches. We should fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show. today, Professor Beatrice Hoosier, who is Distinguished Professor at the Brussels School of Governance, the Free University of Brussels, with an extraordinary career leading up to that, but of course still underway, author of many books, a major figure in strategic studies and the study of international relations.

And the most recent book is called flawed strategy, why smart leaders make bad decisions. Professor, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you very much for having me. Whenever people say I want to distinguished a long career, I only say I'm old. that means I've done lots of things. But you can be old, but not distinguished. I guess it's hard to be distinguished, but not old.

Lots of people are. Lots of people are. So let's get right into the subject. The book opens with a brief critique of the way in which we speak about rationality and rational actors in the conduct of international relations and questions of strategy.

This has been a theme of this podcast, by the way. We've had a number of episodes on this over the years. So the issue may not. be novel to our listeners. But it would be a treat to have you, ma'am, talk us through where the problem sort of started. Because in the book, you identify as one place you might start telling the story, the entrance, that seems like a neutral word, the entrance of economists into the discussion of strategy and international relations at the dawn of the nuclear era. How did the economists start causing us a bit of trouble in terms of thinking clearly about strategy?

I think they did cause us a bit of trouble, but they've moved beyond what they caused trouble with, initially. They've moved on now while the social scientists haven't realized this. I think originally there was this idea of a homo-economicus, somebody who goes all over town to see what the cheapest, but most perfumable coffee machine is and then buys that one and spends a lot of time on comparing things in a very rational way. When in reality, we fall prey to advertising and the fact that there is time pressure, and there's only this one, which seems to be in the sale, even though we haven't discovered the fact that there's a cheap one in the back of the store. So the reality of this homework in economics is somewhat different

from the theoretical, a very, very rational person who weighs up different decisions and weighs up different costs and benefits. I think if I may just continue on this thing that I call rationality and how I distinguish it from logic, and I think that's important, and I think it's useful. If you look at the way in which a rationality or rational and logical is used, in common parlance, you could see, define something as rational, if it can be scientifically trusted or if you can verify it, for example, it is irrational to believe that there's going to be cold, spells and winter. It's a matter of experience. It's empirically testable, etc. But if you, for some reason, are in a different part of the world, in the tropics where you don't have a proper winter,

it would be rational to assume that there is no, there's only warm spells, et cetera. On the basis of whatever you say rationally or even irrationally, you can still operate logically. So, for example, if you assume that the world is flat and it has, well, there's some boundary out of the ocean somewhere, it would be logical not to sail too far away from land because you might fall over the cliffs, over the edge. That's logical rather than rational because it could be rationally proven that the earth isn't falls round. So I've always thought about this,

it started in a way with me thinking about Hitler. People used to say he was completely irrational. Well, there was actually a lot of rationality. There was a lot of logic about what he did. He had a completely irrational set of ideas, but on the basis of these bizarre ideas about race and superiority of some races and this bizarre idea that the Jews were at once

incredibly dangerous but also very inferior, which you can't be true both of it. He built this strange logic seeking their extermination, etc. But it was logical within itself. It was irrational, but logical. And I think this is important, and I'll stop there, I think this is important because you should not assume that decision makers are always illogical, even if you don't understand or don't agree with the premises on which they build their logic. The premises on which they build The locket may involve a life after death and some sort of, what is it, spaghetti monster in space or something like that. But logically on that, they can be acting in a way that is almost predictable or largely predictable. Given that there are lots of other factors involved, it might be not a total prediction.

But that's why I think it's important to distinguish between somebody who is, he may be irrational, but can still be logical as an actor and somebody who is neither rational or logical. Yeah, that's a very helpful distinction because it's funny when I, when I, when I, I first picked up and started looking through your book, I couldn't help but think of another short book that was published just, I think, a couple of years ago called How States Think by John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosado, which treats basically the same subject matter, but in a very different way. But it's funny for all that I think you disagree with those two authors and we can talk about in what ways. I mean, beginning with the title of their book, which I will confess graded on me a bit because my first thought was, I don't think states do think.

It says state's not really a thing that thinks. Well, we can expand on that. But it's funny. There's a point of agreement, sort of. Maybe you'll tell me I'm missing a nuance here because at the center of their argument is lots of people, in particular liberals of various stripes, tend to point to the hitlers of the world. You can include in the category, the Putin's, et cetera, and say, well, they're just

the kind of crazy people who do things that are contrary to their own interest. And Mearsheimer and Rosado assert, no, no, not really. The invasion to, the decision to, the decision to. to invade the Soviet Union in Hitler's case. Similarly, this one seemed to me to be less plausible, but the decision to declare war on the United States after Pearl Harbor with no asks of the Japanese or anything like that as part of it. Actually, those are rational, and they work pretty hard to demonstrate that in the book, or at least they work to demonstrate it. And so you sort of agree with them there, even while disagree on other points. This is where I would say they were

logical rather than rational. Yeah. They're not rational in the sense of if you weigh the forces on both sides, It was so incredibly unlikely that the access powers would prevail against the industrial capacity and the manpower of the alliance, including America, that it doesn't seem to me to be a rational decision from that point of view, but from the point of view of, say, the Germanic race, now the arian race has to assert its superiority, and the unadulterated Japanese race is our ally because they're unadulterated and they're not mixed in any genetic way. And therefore, we're now on the winning march. And therefore, we now have to also attack all those. other sources of Judaism, et cetera, because say they saw America very much as a basis of Judaism, then you have to attack it. That makes logical sense. Yeah, so I guess actually then you disagree, and that's an important nuance because I think their point would be, I mean, it's been a couple of years since I've read it, but I'll do my

best to do it justice, that I guess in some ways at the core of their argument is you can be rational but wrong, just the fact that you're wrong doesn't make you irrational and that Hitler was wrong that declaring war on the United States was, I'm just trying to be careful how I phrased this. It was rational, it was the function of a rational theory that declaring war on the United States was the best shot or a reasonable shot to defeat Germany's great power enemies, even if it was, of course, ultimately catastrophic.

Well, there I would say logical, given his belief system, rather than rational, because I think that he would still, we have to argue how his belief system was rational, and I wouldn't agree. There is no scientific evidence that you can muster up to say, you know, the Germanic race was inherently so superior that it could make up for the quantitative superiority of the entire industrial complex of America and the entire population of America, simply because it had, I think, purity or whatever. There's no rational, there's no scientific reason to believe that. There's no scientific evidence of this. So he still had this what I call irrational assumption because there's nothing scientific that could prove it, but he acted logically on this irrational assumption.

The consequences he drew are logical. So this is really complicated and nuanced and interesting. So when we think about decision makers trying to formulate and execute good strategies in the face of adversaries, It's not just so straightforward as to assume that all of your adversaries are behaving rationally. At the same time, you're not proposing that we just reject it and assume that everyone is purely a function of their passions, an accident and chance and anything else we might grasp at. Rather, you could have situations where people are in a way, right, both. And also situations where people are in a way behaving, as you put it logically, but their premises are crazy. And so to really put yourself, quote, unquote, in their shoes, you have to reflect carefully

on their premises. Exactly, yes. So look at Putin, look at the invasion of the Ukraine. Perfect example. We all said, from our point of view, it seems to be an irrational assumption that it will somehow further the interests, as we define them, of Russia to forego all the benefits of open trade with the West, the cheap energy supply to the West, lots of income from the West, being able to have lots of exchanges with the West, sending your children to American universities, etc.

By having this attack. Now, from the point of somebody who says, all these material things are not the most important. The most important is the glory of Russia. And all Russians must feel this, because for them, it's a question of their identity that has to be reasserted, it has to be upheld and it has to be raised again to being that of the great power in the world. That is much more important. Now, we from our point police system would find that bizarre. But logically, having given that these were his premises,

he incurred all the costs of the war in Ukraine in the furtherance of this aim of restoring the great glory of Russia past to which belonged at having, integrating, the cradle of Russian civilization Kiev. It makes perfect

sense once you look at this historically and you say Kiev is the Rome or is the Jerusalem of the Orthodox Christianity, because that's where it all started, and we need to have that. That's part of our identity. And if you believe that further, then it is logical. From the point of view of this, there were people who were Russia specialists who said, of course he's going to attack. He said it in his article of June to 2021. He spelled that out. He said, this is the most important thing for me, and this is this, we have to follow this particular mission. That was implicit in that particular article. So there

were people who rightly predicted that there was going to be an invasion by simply taking seriously these different premises, which to us seem irrational, but which are simply very different from the way we see the world. Yeah, and in the case of Putin, just to stick with this example, I mean, it did strike me that part of the, and you talk about mirror imaging in the book,

but part of the widespread mirror imaging that was going on in 2021 into early 2022 was deeply rooted in the small L liberalism, liberalism as a kind of Westernism, as a kind of, you know, it was just a word. used to describe sort of modern politics in some ways. Just just the widespread conviction that

everyone is this. That is to say when, you know, leaders in the Biden administration were trying to understand Putin's actions, there was a kind of baseline assumption that, well, of course Putin wants material wealth for Russia. And that's why the fact that this war could be ruinous means that he's blustering because he couldn't potentially prioritize a goal above material well-being. that's sort of not within our ken. I mean, a little bit unfair, but only a little bit unfair. I mean, I think this is a deeply rooted notion amongst many Western policymakers that everyone in some way

is kind of a bit Western. And so when you get a Putin or I fear a Xi Jinping or a Khomeini are these figures who come up through really brutal authoritarian politics, but also either because of religiosity or other reasons, just are, I love your logical rational distinction, are sort of operating from just very different premises, is even if they could even potentially be brilliant. I mean, they're at least savvy enough to get to the top

of their rather blood-soaked systems. And for some reason, as obvious as this seems to me and as eloquently as you kind of outline this in your own way in your book, it doesn't seem to always get through, does it? Because we find it's so very difficult to understand. Think of it this way. The world is currently in the grips of a big, big battle between two sets of ideas.

And one of them is appealing to particularly world leaders. I don't know about the world populations, but definitely world leaders, saying you have been oppressed, you have been forced into a particular pattern that is a purely materialistic Western one, that has all these human rights, and particularly there's always emphasis put on the human rights that become completely a deviant because they're emphasizing the rights of the LGBT population,

who are those, are they're complete, to their perverts, etc. And what we should be fighting for is our traditional rights, and we should cast off this oppressive framework of Western legal inhibitions to that, human rights and international law, etc., all of which have been imposed supposedly by the West. Okay. And this is the bit at least where we realized that we had always assumed that because of our history and in the House case, it goes back, this idea that we want liberty, that we want freedom, is something that goes back for us to ancient Athens.

It's something that we found in the Declaration of Arboros in Scotland, It's something we found in the Duchy of Independence, it's something we found in the Confession Wars of Europe, et cetera. So freedom is something that goes way back in the European tradition before the French Revolution. It's something that people have fought for over and over again. And we suddenly find with great surprise, after having thought all the time that the rest of the world is just yearning to be freed from oppression, etc, that there are lots of people who at least accept the government because it gives order and stability that deprives them of most of their freedoms. And they're happy to have whatever it is that they regard as more vital, perhaps a little family life or whatever it is.

But we find that completely surprising. So for us, it's sort of material wealth on the one hand, yes. We don't quite understand how people would aspire to that. And of course, the Chinese model has actually given people greater prosperity over years. But they haven't preferred the other things for us, freedom, liberty, the right to express ourselves, to write to participate in government and all the rest of it, And in large parts of the world, this possibly hasn't really reached the great masses. But in any case, the leaders of these countries find that most uncomfortable

because it interferes with how they want to rule the country and how they want to run the country. So you can see that in this battle for the hearts and minds, particularly of the leaders of lots of states the world over, and remember, the majority of states today are not democracies. And the leaders there, therefore, are much happier to go along with the rhetoric. fights for their particular support by saying, cast off these Western rules, and they don't actually spell out, cast off human rights, although that is part of it, because whenever Putin and Xi Jinping say traditional way of life, that immediately says, not those human rights where

everybody has the right to do whatever they like and where they have, they can get married to somebody of their own gender, et cetera, et cetera. It means precisely, we want to go back to something which casts it off. But the words are not to use because I think there'd be more opposition if they actually said we've got to go back beyond the convention, human rights and the conventions of political and civil rights and all those things. Given everything you've just said, if I had as my task training the next generation of,

let's just stick with America because that's where I'm speaking to you from, but we could pick any Western country, or any country, really. But training the next generation of American policy makers are going to have something to do with world officials. Some of them maybe you're going to grow up to be quite important people. You would think that if everything you've just said is true, you might want to do a fair amount of reading about our own tradition, that is to say the Western tradition, understand our own premises.

You might want to, you know, read a bunch of history. But critically, you might want to read other people's traditions. I mean, if you think your career is going to involve a lot of work about China, you might prioritize reading a bunch of Chinese texts, in particular texts that are read by the Chinese Communist Party and its leadership, just to, give you. get to this issue of understanding their premises so that when they're behaving logically but not necessarily rationally by our lights, we can hope to deal with that with some degree of grasp of the underlying issues. It seems to me that actually instead, the international relations approach,

the social science approach, which actually dominates a great deal of introductory or advanced education in these subjects, prioritizes students' times in an entirely different direction. So speak to what people should be studying, but also speak to why. why people are studying what IR theory seems to prescribe them. Excellent. Basically, it's a way there is that there are two different approaches. You can, on the one hand, say, let's try to look at how all animal thoughts behave, and then there are certain patterns like what they procreate,

and then they will eat and they will fight each other for territory and things like that. Or you can say, I want to know about foxes, because I'm actually interested in foxes and foxes are bothering my hens. I have to do something about foxes. So in fact, you need to study foxes particularly, and it doesn't help you a great deal, simply to say, all I need to know about all animal species is that they fight for territory, they procreate,

and they want food, etc. If I want to catch a fox, if I want to keep a fox out of my henchum. And in the similar way, it's international relationship theory is all about all civilizations throughout time, and yes, there are patterns such as war and peace. There are patterns like cooperation and rivalry. but if you want to know about a particular adversary, you really need to home in on that particular adversary,

or even an ally, if you want to understand what makes your ally, and we Europeans have a great deal of problems at the moment with one of our favourite allies. So it's quite important to know exactly what's going on there. You have to go dive deep into their particular mentality, their particular way of thinking. And the best way to do that is literally to engage with their literature, with their speeches, with their history, the way they portray the history, the way they perceive their own, their own place in the world and all the rest of it, which you do by a deep study of that culture.

Now, I am not saying, and none of the culturalists are saying, that this cultural dimension is the only one that's important. We all acknowledge that geography is massively important, that economic factors are massively important, that it is massively important whether you have a large population or whether you're tiny little Belgium. So obviously these big factors count, but the cultural thing will explain to you why foxes are out at night and whereas lions are not out at light.

I don't know whether they are, but I'm saying, if you want to have something specifically about a particular country, a particular culture, you really need to home in all that. And of course, there are all the other factors, but if you want to understand why that particular nation or that particular leadership suddenly goes to war, when you wouldn't have done so, then look for the different, the things that are not common to all. humanity for those that are not the factors that are simply easily containable in some theories about how the world works. Say a bit about those theories, though, because we have a lot of listeners in the US military and just others in general who may not have had the pleasure of taking a formal international relations class. Instead of what you just outlined, what does it look like when you are indoctrinated or introduced

to be less pejorative into this world of IR theory? Yes. Well, that is lucky because they have a much more. sane and natural approach for the whole subject. I think the theories, it's very much now about this whole social sciences approach, which very often tends to be quite monocausal. You know, there's a theory somebody says, I think it's all about oil. Let us reconfigure the entire world around whether these wars and clashes and competition are around sources of energy. And then they look out for that and it said, if you do that, you immediately start with

a confirmation bias. If you do that, you will always look for evidence that, you will always look for evidence that you, that what you say is true, you might find no evidence and then you falsified the theory. Hooray, but you still haven't got any closer to the real reasons for what's going on. So this confirmation bias, I don't understand at all how that has made, established itself so firmly in the social sciences, this whole approach in which the great majority of essays, undergraduates, essays, MA thesis, and indeed PhD thesis, seems to operate, which is to say, here is this body of theory. This is the liberal school. This is the realist school. This is the constructivist school, or whatever. And they're now going to embark on stunning case studies and looking at whether

these theories are concerned. And usually they start with one. Fortunately, there is a rise now with a multi-se theory approach where they say, well, it's a bit of this and it's a bit of that. That's much more reasonable because the series in themselves tend to contain a grain of truth in the sense that there have been cases where people act in that particular way, which is why people come up with that theory in the first place. But it doesn't explain all of what you're seeing in the world. And it doesn't explain those cases, particularly where people act on, as we discussed earlier, ideas that drive them, the thoughts that drive them that are not fresh for. May I give you a little example? I'm just reading a very good thesis. I'm not to tell you

who it's by, but it's a very, very clever thesis, which is going to make it into a book, I'm sure, which looks at why French strategists on the eve of the First World War, and in fact, German strategists as well, were so totally obsessed with the idea of the offensively, the of forces of autosis or course. And how it came about that they thought that this was the only option they had, that they absolutely had to go that way because it was part of the way in which their nation functioned and it was the Napoleonic ticket for success. And you had to apply it, leading to millions of dead unnecessarily, because very little was achieved by this offensive or tors. So if you look at, you know, we would now, from our point of view, say, well,

surely they must have realized that running up against this massive increase of firepower that hadn't been there to that extent in the Ponyonyonyonyards times had changed everything. But they didn't because in the middle there was something else and other experience, their defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, which they attributed to the lack of their own offensive spirit and the lack of their own initiative, et cetera. And as they identified that as the key element that had made them lose, lose, they thought that they had to compensate for that now, and they were in denial. And that's an interesting point.

They'd like to follow up with Unimaud. They were in denial about the effects of firepower. So they were quite irrational in their belief and their faith in this offensive spirit, where we would say, surely you must have noticed that the firepower was against you. But they weren't. They were so driven by some other experiences that they'd internalized. Well, just because you invited, I will ask you to reflect more on this notion of of denial, which seems hard to account for in any, you know, scientific or quantifiable way.

I've experienced, I mean, we all probably as individuals are in denial about this or that. I've experienced it as a policy matter when I served in Afghanistan. And I was just witness to a fair amount of denial about the nature of Afghan politics and the nature of the possible in any reasonable time horizon within Afghan politics. So I know it can be a factor in international affairs because I've seen it with my own as it were. Say more about what it meant here at the dawn of the First World War and just how do we account for this question of denial? Having said earlier that we should then give more allowance to our adversaries for being logical despite the fact that they may hold what we think

as irrational beliefs, we should at the same time realize that we could be quite irrational and illogical because this whole bit of the whole approach of denial is one in which we say or which we feel very, very strongly, that we're very comfortable in a certain situation or we're happy about a status quo and want to cling to it and are so disinclined to accept evidence that shows us that we really have to change our approach very, very fundamentally, that we really pretend that it's not happening.

And I always give you, I find it a most dramatic thing to think about. Looking back in the 1930s, when particularly in France and in the United Kingdom, people, the third majority of people, really didn't want to have a rerun of World War I. and they thought that they could do just about everything. They thought that surely everybody must share this view and surely one could make concessions so as to make sure

that those who had been, they'll give them a rough deal at the end of the First World War, perhaps given their rather liberal views about this, could now be satisfied in their way, in their attempts to reverse some of that settlement, that they didn't see that something had gone over the edge in Hitler's Germany, where it was simply set on a path that couldn't be stopped because of the leadership it had,

where everybody was so strongly thinking, believing that you could somehow rescue that world of peace, and that they were blind to the reality of what was going on under their nose. There's a little thing that we always need to remember about Nazi Germany. A lot of the time, when you look at international relations, you sort of see the buildup to the First World War, sorry, the Second World War, as one in which, first of all, the Nazis said they wanted to reverse. the Versailles Peace Treaty, they wanted to annex German-speaking territories, the Ruud, they wanted to have the Rhineland, they wanted to then have Austria, because it was also German-speaking,

then they wanted to have bits of German-speaking population in Czechoslovakia. Okay, and everybody would say, yeah, that's sort of almost reasonable. But what was going on, in Germany, within Germany, in 1933, 34, there were already concentration camps in which people were tortured to death in very large numbers. And there were already then people who were writing about this and who fled Germany and said, look, this is happening. And so the terrible things happening within Germany, it's true that there was a bit of a pause afterwards in 1935, but in 1936 you had the racial wars coming out.

People should have realized what's going on in Germany was horrendous. But people were so, you know, their worldview was, this is a sovereign country, they do within their country what they like, and therefore in denial. And I think we see that very, very much today. it's extraordinary to what extent we were all thinking even with the Ukraine when Russia starts meddling in eastern Ukraine

and sending in Little Green Men, etc. And we just didn't want it to be true. We were so happy with having a prosperous Russian next to us and exchanging with them. I taught it in Gimel in Moscow still in 2016, I think it was, we had conferences with them. Some of them seem to be very reasonable people. And we thought they must think like us

and this is the denial of differences. It's the denial of, you know, Everybody must think like us. It's this sort of basic assumption, which even in itself is wrong. Not to freelance as a psychologist here for a moment, which I'm obviously not. But I just, the way you frame it makes me want to try this thought out. There's something about the nature of denial, at least a thread that connects some of the examples we're talking about, where the denial occurs almost even though you actually do know the thing that you don't want to know.

So in the Afghanistan context, which I know most intimately, everybody, I mean, you can't, you can't, live there for more than a week or two without seeing the shortcomings of Afghan politics. If you're a reasonably intelligent person, if you're speaking to Afghans, if you're meeting with government officials, et cetera, the problems are clear. But the problem with accepting the implication, the consequence, the logical consequence or drawing the conclusion that you might need to draw is that it's then going to compel you to do the thing that you just refuse to do. You just refuse in this case, maybe, I don't know what it would be, maybe admit defeat or admit that you're going to have to change your strategy

strategy radically or something like that. I don't know. In the case of the interwar period, if you accept the nature of Nazi Germany, which is before your eyes, it's before your eyes. Well, it means this is probably going to be a war. And that's what you refuse to do.

You refuse to fight another war because of World War I is such a tragedy. You're just not going to do that to the English people or the French people or whatever, ever again. And so even though you know, at the same time you refuse to know, maybe that's getting a little cute.

Absolutely. strange quality. The director of the NATO research division, Florence Gowl, has written a very impressive book, unfortunately so far over in German, which is about the future and how to deal with it. And somewhere in that book, she says, do you realize this just about every single major intelligence failure, you know, strategic intelligence failure of the last century and a half? Was one where people actually knew what was going to happen? but either the information was not passed up.

So this is the famous thing about 9-11, that the US president know it or not, or did he have seen that the warning several times that therefore didn't recognize it? She said everything was known, but that people refused to act on it. People refuse to take it seriously. There was denial.

And these are these examples that I have in my book where you look at why on earth. With so much intelligence coming into Moscow about how Germany was planning, Barbara Rosa, the surprise attack on the, the Soviet Union and Stalin not believing it and actually, when it actually happened, going into deep depression, pulling out of politics altogether for a week and not active. Or, you know, all these other, we had a Pearl Harbor, something that have been planned on, that have been taken into

exercise scenarios in the United States, even in the 1920s. And so many other things, all extraordinarily, if you think about the 7th of October, 2003 in Israel, you know, this is actually an anniversary of the people war, which was a strategic intelligence failure. And then Israelis have been so clever at devising ways in which they've tried to have a plan, a red team arguing against their interpretations and trying to interpret, have a systematic way of interpreting intelligence so that you would look at both sides and different possibilities. And yet they failed to take seriously information that was coming in on the eve of that. So it's something that is incredibly widespread.

It's not just our own culture, but it's something that is particularly, well, in this case, irrational and illogical in our side. So we have this major weakness as well. And it's not just that atmospheres may believe that the world is flat, but it is that we also, when we know that the world is round, we still act bizarrely on it illogically in this case. So human beings are much more complex and simply being irrational and rational or logical and illogical. There is this illogical element in all of us. There's an irrational element in all of us. And therefore, I think we should accuse all these terms with great caution. You know, the mistakes of mirror. imaging or the shortcomings brought about by denial, as you point out, as with everything else

in strategy, none of this is one directional. So this is inter, your own intellectual errors are interacting with the actions of your adversary, who, of course, if he's smart, is trying to figure out what your errors are and sort of lean into them as part of it. So this is the theory I've heard a number of smart people share with me about October the 7th in Israel, is not only is there the sort of denial and intelligence failures that you point out, but that Hamas, and in particular, Sinwar, who had had a lot of time in an Israeli prison to reflect on the nature of Israeli society and Israelis, sort of leaned into it with this question of worker permits over the years. This question of worker permits was this large-scale strategic deception,

which allowed the Israelis to conclude at a high level that, sure, Hamas, that they say they want to kill us all, and they sort of talk a big game. But they really need money. They really need money. And for that, they need the worker permit. They're willing to do violence for more worker permits, for more cash. And actually, we can work with that. We can deal with that.

Like, we get that. And so as a consequence, the genocidal stuff is sort of noise. And critically, we don't really want it to be true. Because if it is true, it means we're going to have to be serious about Gaza. We don't want to be serious about Gaza. We've got other stuff we want to be serious about. Absolutely. And particularly this idea that this materialistic interpretation is fascinating.

Because apparently that's also something. I was talking to a China specialist yesterday. And he kept saying that Chinese people cannot for the life of them believe. Oh, sorry, China's leadership, can all the life of them believe. that we might be doing things or upholding human rights and like that for, well, purely altruistic purposes. Well, it's sort of second level altruistic purposes. It's on a primary first level it's altruistic, or the second level, if human rights are protected the world over, we benefit, yeah? So ultimately, I always say we benefit if we uphold that rule space as a natural order,

although the first step may be one that costs us, but that they can't believe this. And in the same way, the Russians have this thing. And apparently this is again something that is relatively common for authoritarian. regimes, that they deeply believe in conspiracy theories or they deeply believe in this particular line that seems to have conditioned generations and generations of particularly Russians, which is from the Giddegis. You remember in the Peloponnesian War where he says, well, the cause for or the trigger for the Peloponnesian War was this problem with Korchira, blah, blah, blah.

But the real reason that nobody articulated was that Sparta saw Athens growing and therefore was afraid. And ever since, people have been saying, ooh, what's the real reason behind this? Oh, there must be this hidden reason. And however much you actually come up and say, well, here is our real reason, our real reasons. We do want stability in the world.

We do want human rights because it benefits us ultimately, etc. They will say that there's actually something behind it. And change is a materialistic thing is much more credible than saying we have some sort of idealistic goals, even if they don't share them, but somehow perhaps even require respect because we are going beyond something which is entirely materialistic.

Materialism is something we all understand much more easily than somebody blowing themselves up for Allah, or being a suicide problem for any other cause. It's very difficult for us really to drop our lines around that, and therefore we assume it must be all about money, all about oil, all about the profit, that particular, some oligarchs made. But this point that you keep bringing this back to,

which is that, and I've been hard on the liberals, throughout this conversation, in a way, I count myself as one. But that we, we, Westerners, to use a synonym, we seem particularly prone to me to mirror imaging in particular. But your point is sort of, well, maybe I think that because that's what I see all the time. And it frustrates me, actually the authoritarian and the terrorists and the, you know, the millinerians and everyone else, they can do it too. Stalin did it on the eve of Barbarossa, which I, and how that operates is kind of fascinating. One of the most extraordinary cases of mirror imaging is actually Russian military authors writing about current military strategy or current military measures,

if you want to use a more, a wider term, they keep describing, they keep ascribing, just about everything that Russia does to wicked NATO in the West. And then what they do is you have this entire article, which they constantly, you know, since the early 2000s in particular, and particularly also going backwards to the color revolutions and saying, oh, look, this is what the West did. It's the CIA who inspired these revolutions. So they use all these measures, and they're all, you know, the word hybrid, gibritna and hybrid measures are used.

But it's all these nasty things that they do. And it's all these measures that are below the actual form of kinetic violence used in war that would classify it as war under international law. They're doing this. And then they keep describing things. And you say, all this sounds ever so much like exactly what they're. did in Ukraine from 2014 until 2022. You actually have a whole list of these are the measures you can take and then you can

adapt people and you can have propaganda and you can interfere with their electricity supply and you can all these things. And then it says, and if none of that works, then you can do a fourth-scale invasion, which is what they then do in 2022. But it's extraordinary because the whole thing is constantly ascribed to the West and you really have this, I call it the psychopathological prediction on the part of those Russian military authors because they keep describing in great detail. Russian measures and Russian ways of proceedings, always attributed to the West, always attributed

particularly to the United States and, of course, to NATO. Professor Beatrice Hooser, I really wish we had more time because I'm thoroughly enjoying this. Maybe you'll agree to come back sometime and keep pulling on some of these threads. But this has been a totally fascinating conversation, and I'm sure listeners will agree, and should they agree, they should certainly read your book, most recent book called flawed strategy, why smart leaders make bad decisions. Thank you so much for coming on school before. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you.