A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind (5 page)

Gandhi understood that Indians would never receive justice or freedom without agitating for it. Yet because he viewed most British leaders as honorable, he cooperated with them when prudent, as he did most notably in 1931 on the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. The slow pace of reforms never made him lose heart in British liberalism. He could not have pursued nonviolence for decades without an unshakable faith in the British conscience.
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In the end, Gandhi’s movement triggered even more than his nation’s freedom. It sparked a wave of decolonization that ended the age of empire and transformed the world. His nonviolent methods inspired national liberation leaders from Ghana to South Africa and beyond. His ideals empowered those fighting for equality in America as well,
from César Chávez to Martin Luther King Jr.
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Although these global repercussions could not have been foreseen, the success of Gandhian nonviolence for India was, in fact, foreseeable, given what this episode revealed about Churchill in particular and the British leadership as a whole. If, in 1920, you had wanted to predict whether nonviolence could help win India’s independence, the Amritsar pattern break contained some vital clues.

If the years immediately following World War I proved turbulent for India, in Europe they were bringing even more unrest. Our next leader of interest must be considered a remarkable man because of the complex and dangerous relations he navigated while in office. After the horrors of World War I, when the guns of August had fallen still, it soon became apparent that Europe was again at risk. Revolutions and political violence became the norm, and international antagonisms threatened the shaky peace. In the wake of such a devastating global conflict, the premium on properly assessing one’s opponents rose substantially. Amid extreme upheavals, a German statesman emerged who helped set his nation back on course toward stability and strength. Had he lived long enough to combat the Nazis who eventually replaced him, modern history might have taken a dramatically different turn. Unlike Gandhi, who had lived for several years in Britain and gained a firsthand sense of the people and their politics, Gustav Stresemann had far less familiarity with the new and violent Soviet regime. Yet he could hardly afford to misread it, for at the same time that Russia’s rulers were supposedly cooperating, they were also working to overthrow him.

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Arming Your Enemy

Stresemann’s Maneuver, Act I

FROM FLAPPERS AND THE
Charleston, to speakeasies and the Wall Street boom, America’s roaring twenties are remembered as a time of exuberance and hope. Having emerged from World War I as the world’s largest creditor nation, the United States enjoyed a decade of economic growth. But Europe’s 1920s stood in shocking contrast. Devastated by the Great War, Britain and France had lost a generation of young men. The Russian Revolution had unleashed fears of contagious unrest. And nowhere on the continent was the situation more unstable than in Germany. The decade’s early years brought invasion, hyperinflation, political assassinations, and revolts across the nation. Throughout the tumult, one of the few steady hands was Dr. Gustav Stresemann.

Squat and stocky, a lover of good food and wine, Stresemann never saw fit to exercise. He consumed his work like his meals, spending long hours and late nights at his desk. There was an intensity to his manner, whether opining on high literature or dissecting political alignments. So much of his passion shone through in his face. His personal secretary once described his boss’s “watery and bloated skin” as merely the frame around his piercing eyes.
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Born in 1878 to a lower-middle-class beer distributor in Berlin, Stresemann developed into something of a
Wunderkind
. By the age of twenty-one, he had already earned a doctorate in economics, writing his dissertation on the bottled beer industry. He landed his first job in Dresden, representing the organization of chocolate manufacturers for the state of Saxony. As a lobbyist
for industry, he became closely tied to politics. In 1906, he won a seat on the town council, and the following year he stood for and won a seat in the German Parliament as a member of the National Liberal Party. When World War I came, a weak heart left him unable to serve. Later he would suffer from kidney disease. His overall ill health condemned him to die in office, much too young and far too soon to check the spread of extremism.

After the war, Stresemann emerged as a leader in the right-of-center German People’s Party, serving a mere 100 days as Chancellor, then assuming the role of foreign minister, a post he would retain until his death in 1929. Within a few years of taking office, Stresemann came to be seen by Western publics as a sensible statesman intent on establishing his country as a cornerstone of European stability. Coming to terms with Britain and France at a meeting in Locarno, Switzerland, in 1925, Stresemann pledged Germany to join the League of Nations, settle its disputes with eastern neighbors, and preserve the current arrangements in the West. In recognition of Locarno, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.
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Albert Einstein later praised Stresemann as a great leader, asserting that his finest achievement was “to induce a number of large political groups, against their own political instincts, to give their support to a comprehensive campaign of European reconciliation.” Einstein concluded that Stresemann was a “man of mind and bearer of an idea. . . . as different from politicians of the usual stamp as a genius differs from an expert.”
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The Locarno Agreement has been called the hinge on which the interwar era turned. It marked the true end of the First World War, and its collapse eased the way for the Second to occur. Despite its ultimate failure, the “spirit of Locarno” stabilized Germany’s international relations and reestablished Germany as an equal among the European powers.
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Given the series of crises that the Weimar government confronted following the war, maneuvering Germany back to strength was a remarkable feat, one that only a masterful strategic empath could pull off.

How did Stresemann do it? How did he succeed in sensing his rivals’ drivers and thereby help reclaim his country’s greatness? One way to answer that question is by focusing on Stresemann’s reading of the Russians: the pattern of Soviet behavior and their behavior at pattern breaks.

In order to restore his nation’s position among the great powers, Stresemann needed to balance dangerously delicate relations with Britain and France on the one hand and with Soviet Russia on the other. He had to manage this while simultaneously safeguarding his own position atop the Foreign Ministry. The keystones of his Western strategy were twofold: fulfill the terms of the Versailles Treaty (a policy dubbed “fulfillment”) and normalize relations with Britain and France. To bolster his bargaining position with the Western powers, he needed to foster ties to the Soviet Union through overt accords and covert deals. It was a daring strategy. Any moves too far into one camp or the other risked upending the entire endeavor. To advance along such a tenuous tightrope, Stresemann had to assess the drivers and constraints of his adversaries both East and West. While the drivers of Western statesmen were not always completely transparent, they were far simpler to assess than those of the Soviets. Gauging whether the Soviets wanted to ally with the German government or to overthrow it formed a crucial test of Stresemann’s strategic empathy. Fortunately, he possessed a true knack for learning how the other side thought and felt.

One of Stresemann’s contemporaries, Antonina Vallentin, tried to encapsulate the great statesman’s diplomatic aplomb:

The moment he sat down opposite a man, he was no longer confined within his own personality, he felt himself into the other man’s mind and feelings with such amazing accuracy that he could follow the most unusual trains of thought as quickly as if he had been familiar with them for years. He could thus forestall objections, and so startle his interlocutor by his intuition, that the latter found himself strangely disposed to reach agreement. . . . His sudden flashes of capacity for self-transference into another’s mind gave him moments of uncanny clarity of vision such as scarcely any statesman has possessed before him.
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Stresemann’s empathic gifts undeniably aided his sense of what drove others around him. Yet the traits that Vallentin described were not the only factors fueling Stresemann’s success. The Foreign Minister also possessed an acute capacity for recognizing the constraints upon his rivals. From the moment he assumed the Chancellorship through his
long tenure as Foreign Minister, he would need every drop of strategic empathy he could muster when dealing with the Soviets. The Russians played diplomatic hardball, and Lenin had skillfully selected the man to represent the Bolshevik regime.

Georgi Chicherin stood in striking contrast to his German counterpart. Unlike Stresemann, whose father was a lower-middle-class beer distributor, Chicherin was heir to the refined traditions of Russia’s landed aristocracy. Tall and heavy-set, with a moustache and thin beard, Chicherin walked hunched over, as if weighted down by the knowledge contained in his capacious mind. Conversant in English, French, German, Italian, Serbian, and Polish, he could dictate cables in multiple languages simultaneously. He played piano expertly and studied the works of the composers he adored: Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner. Like Stresemann, Chicherin never exercised, typically working at his desk until early morning, and his health suffered as a result. Intensely introverted, his preference for books over people left him with long hours to absorb seemingly endless facts and figures.
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Riveted by history, he consumed volumes about the wider world. In 1904, he adopted Marxism, and with it came the zeal of the converted. His commitment to the movement had a passion that rivaled even Lenin’s. He gave all that he possessed—wealth, time, energy, and talent—to furthering the cause. Intent on renouncing the outward ostentation of his class, he lived in spartan accommodations and wore only a single yellow-brown tweed suit, never varying his attire. Chicherin’s convictions, coupled with his extraordinary breadth of knowledge and his aristocratic erudition, made him a brilliant choice by Lenin to lead the Soviet Foreign Ministry. The statesmen of Europe could not begrudge him their respect. He was, in short, a daunting opponent in diplomatic affairs.

One of Chicherin’s earliest impressions on the world stage came at the economic conference in Genoa, Italy, in 1922, when he stunned his Western interlocutors. The Bolsheviks had not only frightened Western states by threatening to spread revolution throughout the world; they had also earned Western ire by repudiating the Tsarist debts. Britain and France in particular had invested enormous sums into prewar Russia, and they fully intended to recoup those funds. The Bolsheviks maintained that the corrupt Romanov dynasty did not represent the Russian people’s will, and therefore the new communist regime was not bound
to honor Tsarist commitments. At Genoa, Britain and France pressed their case with the Soviet delegation. Chicherin responded by presenting the Allies with the Soviet Union’s counter-claims—to the staggering tune of 35 billion gold marks, a figure even greater than what the Allies claimed was owed to them.

To justify these counter-claims, Chicherin, along with his deputy Maxim Litvinov, conjured up an obscure precedent of international law. Chicherin drew British attention to the Alabama Claims Case, which followed the American Civil War. During that conflict in the 1860s, Britain had supported the South, even funding the building of southern warships, one of which was called the
Alabama
. After the U.S. Civil War concluded and the North prevailed, the American federal government sued Great Britain for damages inflicted on the North by those British-built ships. The United States won the case, and Britain paid. Chicherin then drew the obvious analogy. During the Bolshevik struggle for power against the conservative White Russian armies, Britain and her allies had supported the Whites, thereby prolonging the conflict. Chicherin asserted that Britain and her allies therefore owed the Bolshevik regime for damages inflicted during the Russian Civil War. The Soviets, rather conveniently, estimated those damages at an amount even greater than what the Tsarist government owed the West.

Britain’s Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, was, in a word, flabbergasted. He retorted that Britain had never billed France for its support of the British monarchy during the English Civil War, and France had not billed Britain for its support of the Bourbons in the French Revolution.
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Lloyd George’s protestations notwithstanding, the fact remained that the Allies had actively intervened against the Bolshevik government, backing anti-Bolshevik Russian armies, and even deploying forces of their own. The analogy remained, and negotiations stood at an impasse.

Although Chicherin had the capacity to rival Stresemann in diplomatic skill, Chicherin was hamstrung by the Politburo, the key decision-making body of which he was not even a member. Unlike Stresemann, who had tremendous latitude over German foreign policy, the Soviet Foreign Minister was forced to execute the wishes of his superiors. In fact, if Chicherin had had his way, the Soviet Union would have honored the Tsarist debts. He urged Lenin to do so, but Lenin was adamant. On May 2, 1922, Lenin sent a telegram to the Soviet delegation essentially
ordering his foreign minister not to grant any concessions to the West. The Soviet government would not even return any private property it had seized since the revolution. If Chicherin vacillated, Lenin threatened, he would be publicly disavowed. Before the message was sent, the Politburo removed the language about discrediting its foreign minister, but it retained the stern warnings not to compromise.
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There was nothing Chicherin could do.