Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations

Abstract

This book examines one of the most important subjects in the study of international security: how leaders tend to assess the long-run intentions of adversaries. Keren Yarhi-Milo develops and tests a novel framework for explaining this process, which she labels the “selective attention thesis.” The argument combines core insights from psychological and organizational theories of perception. To Yarhi-Milo, political leaders and members of intelligence organizations will tend to privilege very different factors in their efforts to anticipate others' international objectives. Yarhi-Milo asserts that political leaders will tend to rely on two types of information in the intention-assessment process: information that is particularly vivid (created most prominently from private, face-to-face interactions with other leaders) and information that supports elites' preconceived notions about the nature of the adversary (the most important preconception is whether leaders possess hardline or more accommodating views of rivals). Members of intelligence communities, in contrast, will tend to pay attention to more objective factors in assessing rivals' international intentions. To these individuals, organizational context is the key determinant in judging objectives. Because the preeminent goal of intelligence agencies is to prevent a surprise attack, the surest way of realizing this organizational objective is to concentrate on adversaries' military capabilities and what they can do in assessing what they will do.