Empathizing with Rogue Leaders: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Bashar al-Asad

Abstract

The conventional wisdom regarding Iran and Syria is that these are belligerent states headed by hostile leaders. Rarely is an effort made to imagine how international politics are perceived from the Iranian or the Syrian perspectives, or consider how these perceptions are part of an interactive crisis in which the USA may be implicated as deeply as the regimes in Tehran and Damascus. In this article, we investigate the United States' ongoing crisis with Iran and Syria from the vantage point of their leadership. Our central research questions are: What kind of leaders are Ahmadinejad of Iran and al-Asad of Syria? More specifically, what are their cognitive diagnostic beliefs of the ensuing conflict and their prescriptive beliefs towards it? What is an appropriate strategy for the USA towards Iran and Syria? The answers to these questions speak to the conventional wisdom of Ahmadinejad and al-Asad as hostile and propose strategies for averting a dangerous escalation of the conflict. Our central goal in this article is to develop towards Iran and Syria `realistic empathy' as we consider it `the great corrective for all forms of war-provoking misperception'.