Dominic Tierney
“[Fatalism] is something we all do,” he says. “We distance ourselves from bad outcomes and claim credit for good ones. So imagine the psychological pressure on a leader inching toward war to believe that it is not their fault.”
The stakes for understanding this frame of mind could not be higher. If China were to initiate a war against the U.S., notes Tierney, it may be because Chinese leaders think they were backed into a corner. That’s why Tierney advises a potentially surprising strategy: Convince your adversary they have more power and agency than they think.
This is the topic of Tierney’s next book, The Iron Dice: Fatalism and the Road to World War III (MIT Press), which looks at how fatalism can trigger war. And it won’t be the first time that Tierney, a former contributing editor at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, has joined high-stakes debates about international conflict.
After earning his undergraduate degree and doctorate at Oxford University — where one of his fellow students was the future U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan — Tierney joined the Swarthmore faculty in 2005. Early in his career, he was fascinated by a strange paradox: Why does the U.S., with the world’s most powerful military, keep losing wars?
American military history up to World War II is an almost uninterrupted march of victory. The era after 1945, though, tells a very different story, with a string of stalemates and defeats like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. “Americans don’t like to think about it,” says Tierney. “The idea of losing is a threat to national identity. It is remarkable just how little discussion there is of Afghanistan. It’s like asking someone about their mortality. People just want to change the subject.”
But it’s worth thinking about loss because there are many different ways to lose a war, says Tierney, and some are better than others. Modern wars often take place in a murky quagmire of guerrilla war, civil conflict, and foreign intervention. “War isn’t a football game,” he says. “There is no scoreboard, no referee.”
In his 2015 book, The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts (Little, Brown and Company), Tierney argued that leaders should be prepared to salvage tolerable losses from unwinnable conflicts. “The book was meant as a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ guide for presidents,” Tierney says. Teaching at Swarthmore, he says, fuels this sort of work. Conversations with students, many of whom have worked as his research assistants, have opened lines of inquiry and helped him think about international affairs in new ways.
“It’s an incredibly fertile place to teach,” Tierney says.
And there’s never been a more important time, he adds, to be teaching students about the psychological triggers of war, or the perilous misconceptions that can bring nations to the brink of catastrophe.
