A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival’s Mind

Shore (What Hitler Knew), a historian of international relations at the Naval Postgraduate School, takes strategic empathy—“the ability to think like your opponent”—and applies it to analyses of 20th-century wars and international conflicts. His subjects include Gandhi’s extrication of India from the British Empire following WWII; German Foreign Minister (and later Chancellor) Gustav Stresemann’s diplomatic successes in the 1920s; Stalin and Roosevelt’s dealings with Hitler in the 1930s; and North Vietnamese leader Le Duan’s decades-long shaping of the war with the United States. This history, as interpreted “through an alternative lens,” is deeply researched, well argued, and often convincing. Shore shows, for instance, how North Vietnam’s “strategic empathy for America,” led by the generally underappreciated Communist Party Secretary Le Duan, was an important factor in North Vietnam’s “final triumph” over the United States and South Vietnam. Although Shore’s writing occasionally becomes convoluted and is prone to an overreliance on supposition, he offers an intriguing and fresh interpretation of some of recent history’s best-known and most important global conflicts. (Mar.)