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East vs. West in Capacity to Die

This doesn’t really have anything to do with any current events, but I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while, since it provides some useful background in analyzing foreign policy.

A while back, I stumbled upon this insightful article by Charles William Maynes, president of the Eurasia Foundation and former editor of Foreign Policy magazine. The article is quite long, but well worth reading. It covers the various issues surrounding the use of force by the United States after the Cold War, but I just want to highlight one minor point:

Nor does greater precision in delivery of weapons necessarily clear the way for a more ready resort to force. It is not at all certain that others calculate the costs of resistance as U.S. policymakers hope they will. As advanced countries have repeatedly learned, in a struggle between the technically sophisticated and unsophisticated, there is often a mismatch in political determination just as large as there is in technical capability. The West in general has a high capacity to kill but a low capacity to die. The equation is often reversed among the targets of the West’s wrath. America learned about the differences between capacity and determination in Vietnam, the French learned in Algeria, and the Russians in Afghanistan. And that is the overlooked lesson of U.S. involvement in Somalia.

Emphasis mine. It seemed obvious to me in hindsight, but perhaps that’s because I’m an Asian American, and this difference is very much cultural in nature.

At the risk of overgeneralizing, the West tends to be more individualist, and the East tends to be more collectivist. The West stresses individual freedom and expression, even if it means questioning authority. The East stresses duty to your communities, such as country and your family, and not rocking the boat. It explains why many Chinese and Chinese immigrants remained very uncritical of China’s government, even after Tiananmen Square. There is a strikingly different value system at work here.

And this is at the root of why we are shocked and bewildered at kamikaze pilots, Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire, and suicide bombers. The behavior is alien to us. I’m sure the East is equally confused by our our military’s “leave no man behind” philosophy where we are willing to endanger a large number of men to save just a few (like in the movie Black Hawk Down), when of course, the logical thing to do would be to acknowledge that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one” (and it’s quite telling that we consider Spock’s sacrifice in ??Star Trek II?? to be extraordinarily heroic instead of merely logical).

And while there were many tactical mistakes in the Vietnam War (ignoring, for now, the decision to get involved in the first place), one of the main mistakes was our decision to fight it as a war of attrition. I recall hearing this on NPR a while back, but our basic strategy was to have our platoons scout about, wait to be attacked, and then bring in reinforcements and superior firepower to completely obliterate the attackers. Yet the Vietnamese were perfectly willing to continue their hit-and-run guerilla tactics even when the “run” part of the strategy failed miserably — something that our own culture could never stomach. This is why we didn’t recognize the foolishness of our strategy. We did not understand that the Vietnamese knew that they’d eventually win a war of attrition, no matter how good our kill ratios were (it also helped them that they had more at stake than we did, but that’s a topic for another time).

Of course, the lesson to learn is not that we cannot tolerate casualties, as Saddam may have miscalculated if he was indeed bluffing. D-Day would not have succeeded if that were true. The real lesson is to take into account cultural differences when trying to predict the actions of other countries (indeed, a similar cultural misunderstanding may have led to Saddam believing we would not oppose his invasion of Kuwait — though if you’re conspiracy minded, you probably believe that was intentional). And that, if possible, we ought to avoid a war of attrition with terrorists.