Follow the Hawk
“We are fighting a war in Asia for an objective no one can define… " 1968
In 2007, psychologist and Nobel laureate in Economics Daniel Kahneman, recognized for his work on how emotions shape decision-making, wrote in an essay: “American foreign policy officials would likely view any concession made by the Tehran regime with deep skepticism.”
The date matters. By 2007, the Middle East was in freefall. The invasion of Iraq had already collapsed into civil war. The inability to articulate the war’s objectives, compounded by the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, had driven voters to hand Democrats their first midterm victory in twelve years and forced the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Yet, brushing aside the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, President Bush doubled down in January 2007 with the famous troop surge, deploying more than 20,000 additional soldiers.
By the time Kahneman published “Why Hawks Win,” the United States had spent five years prosecuting a war built on false premises: there were no weapons of mass destruction, no meaningful link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, and no society eager to welcome American forces with open arms. Rumsfeld’s 2002 quip had already aged into an epitaph: “I can’t tell you whether the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, five weeks, or five months — but it certainly won’t last any longer than that.”
Kahneman’s essay mattered because it explained how and why leaders consistently privileged hawkish positions, those favoring military intervention, over dovish ones advocating for diplomacy and negotiation. The cognitive biases he identified — risk aversion, overconfidence, and attribution errors were not abstract academic concepts. They were the very mechanisms behind the optimism of generals and politicians who blamed the deteriorating situation on everything except the intervention they themselves had engineered.
Kahneman was not arguing that hawks are always wrong. His point was subtler: hawkish positions receive disproportionate weight in the room. Overconfidence bias leads policymakers to overestimate the likelihood of military success, while attribution bias leads them to see an adversary’s hostility as inherent and fixed, rather than reactive or contextual.
Though Kahneman’s work is now two decades old, these same biases continue to convince us that our circumstances are unique, that the usual warnings simply don’t apply to us. Today, the cautions about how poorly equipped we are to understand our adversaries’ behavior are routinely dismissed. Each side tends to frame its own actions as a reasonable response to the other’s provocations. Kahneman was particularly concerned with the “illusion of control” bias, the tendency to exaggerate our own influence over outcomes that matter to us. He linked this directly to the decisions to launch the post-9/11 wars, grounded in the assumption that victory would be swift and clean.
A historian once wrote: “We are fighting a war in Asia for an objective no one can define… The conduct of the war and the policy perpetuating it rest in the hands of a president who has locked himself onto a fixed course and who, whether from personal pride or an inability to grasp what is happening, refuses to deviate, adapt, or change direction.” The year was 1968. The author was Barbara Tuchman, and she was writing about Vietnam.