Ideology over strategy, some thoughts

Some thoughts about ideology and strategy after watching this video.

Fareed Zakaria says the US has made a strategic error with Russia

In the video, Fareed Zakaria mentioned that the United States has allowed ideology to trump over strategy in how it deals with Russia. Yet, is that really something to be avoided?

 

I think that, in the end, ideology will determine the strategy that a nation adopts. The difference is in when we allow ideology to come into the decision-making process.

 

In the decision-making loop, and I will use the OODA loop here for illustration, there is the part when you collect information and form an understanding of the situation. This is the Observe and Orient part of the OODA loop. It is critical that we remain open-minded in these two stages. Why? Because if we allow ideology into these two stages, it may tint the information collection process and make us only see the things we want to see. It may filter out possible situations by making us think the situation is how we want to see it. A simple example: if we believe that China is infringing on human rights, we will end up trying to pursue information to that extent and may end up ignoring information to the contrary. If we think that authoritarian China is bad, we may end up assessing all its actions in a negative way. This ends up filtering away important information that gives us a more complete and accurate assessment of the current situation.

 

And without a complete and accurate assessment of the situation, any strategy built upon it is doomed to fail. Because it will be out of sync with the real world. And we will then fall into the loop of trying to fix that strategy, going back to the same tinted Observe and Orient stages, coming up with another strategy that is out of sync, and keep repeating that mistake.

 

But that does not mean ideology has no place in the decision-making process. On the contrary, it has everything to do with it. Just not in Observe and Orient. Once we have an understanding of the current situation, we formulate options for our actions to achieve our goal. And what is our goal? Well, that's where ideology comes in. Ideology helps to define the end state we want to achieve. From amongst many possible options, ideology will also help us in selecting on option to act on. That is the strategy we will adopt. Thus, ideology helps to guide us in the Decide and Act stages.

 

There is a deeper debate about ideology, though. This lies in the realm of defining an end state, about what we want to eventually achieve. It is a very difficult debate because we often have conflicting ideologies within ourselves. For example, the belief in the free market and capitalism versus the belief in basic human rights. When they are in conflict, which do we choose? At the national level, there is the national goal of pursuing prosperity for its citizens, but at the same time, the goal of pursuing national ideology like free speech. When they are in conflict, which do we choose? It is this choice that impacts the definition of the end state we want to pursue in decision-making and the strategies we adopt.

The difficulty therefore is in the weights we assign to different ideologies within us. When we give them equal weights, we usually end up trying to pursue all of them equally, and end up being unable to reach our goals as we have failed in prioritising our resources. And so, we really need to ask ourselves: what is our priority in the various ideologies that we pursue?