Dominic Tierney discusses his recent article, “The Iron Dice: Fatalism and War.” National leaders often exhibit fatalism, or the belief that events are guided by forces beyond their control. Fatalism can help leaders avoid responsibility for costly outcomes and protect their self-image. Drawing on case studies from World War I and II, Tierney shows how fatalism can be an important cause of war, especially when combined with a perceived window of opportunity. Fatalism is more likely in regard to bad outcomes, when war is seen as imminent, and in nondemocratic regimes.
Guests:
Dominic Tierney is Claude Smith Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College.
International Security Article: Dominic Tierney “The Iron Dice: Fatalism and War,” International Security, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Summer 2024), pp. 51–90.
Originally released on October 10, 2024
Jeff Friedman:
Hello everyone. Welcome to the International Security Podcast. We're produced by International Security, a quarterly journal edited at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and published by MIT Press. Each episode of the podcast highlights a piece of research from the journal.
I'm Jeff Friedman, Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. Today we're speaking with Dominic Tierney. Dominic is the Claude Smith Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College. His recent International Security article is titled “The Iron Dice Fatalism and War.” The article describes how military leaders often hold fatalistic beliefs.
It shows how those beliefs have shaped major conflicts such as World War I and World War II, and explains how those dynamics have important implications for contemporary events such as the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine and the prospect for conflict between the United States and China.
Dominic, congratulations on the article. Thanks for joining us.
Dominic Tierney:
My great pleasure to be here.
Jeff Friedman:
To start off could you just define for us what fatalism means in the context of this article?
Dominic Tierney:
Sure. So fatalism refers to the belief that one has little or even no capacity to control direct events, perhaps because of structural forces, bad luck, accidents, or even God's will. Something like that. Psychologists talk about either having an internal locus of control—that means you believe you have agency to control things—or an external locus of control—it's outside forces. So fatalism refers to an external locus of control. You cannot control events.
Jeff Friedman:
And what's a good example of a leader in war believing in this external locus of control?
Dominic Tierney:
So fatalism is actually quite common among leaders in history. Take an extreme example: We know we think of Hitler as directing World War II and causing World War II, but he believed he had no responsibility for World War II. He even said Germany was fated to fight until the last drop of blood.
Or more recently Putin claimed he was not responsible for the invasion of Ukraine and the Ukraine war. He said the showdown between Russia and these forces cannot be avoided. Russia framed it as almost like a natural disaster, like an earthquake that was beyond their agency. So he said, this is not a war about which he was responsible.
Jeff Friedman:
Yeah, there's a really [interesting] connection to Hitler. Hitler obviously had a particular ideology. Are there other ideologies that are prone to that sort of thing or is fatalism only a product of individual leaders in the way they personally see the world?
Dominic Tierney:
So I think non-democracies often have ideologies that are more fatalistic. We think of communism or fascism or ideologies that are racist or theocratic are more prone to this. But it can happen in any system. But I think there are certainly certain systems where it's more prevalent.
Jeff Friedman:
I want to get back to the autocracies part, because I think that's particularly important for thinking about contemporary events, later in the conversation. Just before we move on to talking about how fatalism impacts world events, I just want to ask if this is always irrational. In some contexts it probably is true that leaders don't control as much of world events as they would like to.
So how do we distinguish fatalism in your view, from, let's say, an appropriate appreciation of the limits of a leader's power?
Dominic Tierney:
Yeah, so fatalism, just to be clear here, can be perfectly rational. So a leader may believe that they have no control over events and they really don't have any control over events. In other words, they process information in a fair way. They then accurately conclude that they have little capacity to direct outcomes.
Take an extreme example, right? If an asteroid is coming toward the earth and someone was fatalistic about the outcome, that's completely rational. A computer might come to that conclusion. But as maybe we will unpack a little bit, sometimes leaders believe they have no control, when in fact they do have significant control. And that suggests there could be other kinds of non-rational forces at work.
Jeff Friedman:
Okay, so let's talk about why this is important. When leaders have this irrational fatalism, how might that affect the way they make military decisions and the way they act in the lead up to war?
Dominic Tierney:
So what psychologists have found—and there is an enormous literature on this idea of the internal external locus of control, thousands of articles, this is a huge part of psychology—and what social psychologists have found is that the feeling that you have control is critical for your mental health.
So one of the strongest findings in social psychology is that fatalism is associated with depression. At the extreme you can actually get what's called learned helplessness, where people basically just give up. So this is really fundamental, believing you have control and for leaders if they believe that they don't have control, then they might come to see the enemy as solely responsible for the conflict. They can get a sort of very tunnel-vision view of what is going on. Whereas leaders who believe they have agency will be more engaged and trying to find solutions.
Leaders that are fatalistic are likely to be more passive. I'll give you an example of this. Back in the 1970s King Faisal of Saudi Arabia believed that God had fixed the moment of his death to the second, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. So when his security detail wanted to talk to him about security planning and so on, he said there's no need. I don't care. God's already decided what's going to happen. So no need, and shortly afterwards he was assassinated by one of his relatives. It can lead you to be quite passive in situations where really you should be more active.
Jeff Friedman:
And one of the article's big arguments is that kind of passivity can raise the chances of war. On the surface that's ironic in the sense that you think that doing less might make conflict less prone. Tell us how that can make the chances of war more likely.
Dominic Tierney:
Yeah. So this fatalistic attitude where you believe that it's outside of your hands, right? What is happening is perilous in a crisis situation because if leaders believe that conflict is certain because of, let's say structural forces or fate, or even God's will, then they may fail to pursue paths that are in fact open that could take them out of this crisis.
So leaders who are fatalistic, for example, are not going to worry so much about whether victory is even feasible, right? After all they think they have to fight, so they just have to do it. They're not going to worry about the ethics of war because again, it's forced upon them. It's not their responsibility, so [they] don't need to worry about moral concerns.
And there's a particular danger when leaders are fatalistic and they believe in what's called a window of opportunity. So if they believe that they have the edge now, but that edge may not last for very long, and they believe that at some point they've got to fight because, you know, these structural forces, then war can become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, right? They believe they have to fight, and it's better now than later—well, the logic of fighting soon becomes overwhelming.
Jeff Friedman:
Let's get into some examples of that. As I mentioned at the top, the article—there’s many examples. The big two case studies are World War I and World War II. I thought maybe we could focus on World War II a bit. The crux of that case study is showing that. Japanese leaders had beliefs that were more fatalistic than their American counterparts. Just give us some sense of what that looked like. How were Japanese leaders more fatalistic about the origins of that conflict than their American counterparts?
Dominic Tierney:
Sure. By 1941 Japan and the United States are increasingly on a collision course. And what is striking is that Japanese officials adopted a mindset that was truly extreme fatalism about conflict with the United States. They believed that war was unavoidable because Japan's enemies, especially the U.S. but also the British and so on, were conspiring to strangle Japan. And Japanese officials believed they had no responsibility and no real agency in this situation because war was forced upon them.
And so you see these officials in Tokyo using these extreme deterministic metaphors. So one of them said Japan was like a fish in a pond from which the water was gradually being drained away. Another one said—tried to capture Japan's plight as, Japan was a patient who suffered from a serious illness that could only be saved by a dangerous operation, the operation being attacking the United States. But again, very fatalistic. There's no real alternative to doing this. The war minister even said that during a man's life, he might find it necessary to sometimes jump off the cliff edge, right?
So this is not language that sort of says, oh, the war's going to be a cakewalk. It's this is going to be a costly, difficult thing, but we have no alternatives. There's no path out of here. And they felt that the war was just being forced upon them, and this mindset itself raised the odds of war. It meant they started ignoring questions of how they might even hope to beat the United States, a country that was 10 times as powerful as Japan. And Japan even knew that.
It meant they became more paranoid. It meant they rejected information suggesting there were any other ways out of this conundrum. And then crucially, when the Japanese officials believed that there was a window of opportunity where they had at least some chance against the United States, combined with this idea that war was inevitable, you just see how the logic comes together that leads Japan to what was a catastrophic decision, of course, to launch the Pearl Harbor attack.
And you mentioned the U.S. as a sort of counterpart. When you look at American officials, they weren't perfect decision makers, right? They sometimes had all kinds of racial blinders and things like this, but they never or very rarely used this kind of fatalistic language that the Japanese were using. They were running around trying to find solutions and trying to avoid war. And I think that the fatalism was a critical cause of the Pacific War.
Jeff Friedman:
There's so many good examples of that in the piece. One of the things I also like about the piece is how you try to understand the extent to which these beliefs were rhetorical as opposed to genuine. Of course, particularly heading into negative events, you might expect some leaders to claim they have no agency, particularly to absolve themselves of responsibility.
But part of what you talk about in the piece is how these beliefs were genuine. They may have even have been subconscious. Could you just say a bit about how we know that. How do we know from the documents or the histories that these are genuine beliefs and not rhetoric?
Dominic Tierney:
Sure. Just like fatalism is sometimes rational, right? But can also be driven by other things that we can get to. It is sometimes just rhetorical. So you do find leaders in history who will self-consciously give a speech and say, oh, I have no control. I didn't want this. And they've just put it in the speech, and this is just spin to manipulate opinion. Or maybe they do it as a crafty stratagem with the adversary. They say to the adversary we have no control. But you, you could steer the car away and there won't be a collision.
But oftentimes I found that these beliefs, in the World Wars, for example, let's say Japan in 1941, they are genuinely held, these Japanese officials are not privately saying, oh, we got loads of options and, but let's pretend to be fatalistic. They really do have this mindset.
And so if you find consistency in public and in private it suggests that it's real. And then of course if the fatalism actually shapes the strategy that is followed, then it seems like these leaders do sometimes genuinely believe that they have no control.
Jeff Friedman:
And you've already touched on this a bit, but what do we think that Japan would've done differently heading into conflict had they not held these beliefs. Do we think they would've processed information differently? Would they have made different choices? What do you think at the margin these fatalistic beliefs are doing to structure behavior?
Dominic Tierney:
So if the Japanese had officials in Tokyo had a greater sense of their agency, then I think we would've expected to see a better debate in Tokyo about the menu of options. And I think that this was possible and plausible because not all Japanese officials were as fatalistic. So the military officials tended to be extremely fatalistic, but their civilian diplomats in Washington, DC, are sending telegrams back to Tokyo, urging continued negotiation and saying, America's serious about cutting some sort of deal.
FDR in 1941 does not want war with Japan. He sees Germany as the biggest problem. And so he wants to at least delay it, if not avoid it, and ideally see the breakup of the Axis and split Germany from Japan. So he is floating different trial balloons. He's even talking about giving a loan to Japan, if Japan would move away from the Axis, and freezing the conflict in China, and looking for some wiggle room here.
So if the Japanese leaders had been less fatalistic, they could have looked at these options and seen that there was a lot of room for Japan to pursue its national security interests, even as the officials in this imperialist system understood them. I'm not saying transform them into a democracy or something—even as they understood it, a lot of other options to avoid conflict. And crucially, the Japanese officials could have looked more in a more cool-headed way about what war with the United States looked like when the United States had 10 times the industrial capacity of Japan.
Jeff Friedman:
I think one of the things that's surprising at first about your argument is that psychologists also often tell us that leaders are prone to an illusion of control, that in many cases they overestimate their agency, that many leaders are prone to narcissism, prone to think quite highly of themselves. And so it's interesting in your article that we see the opposite, this fatalism, determinism. How do you square the fatalism you describe in your article with the other scholarship that exists on the illusion of control?
Dominic Tierney:
Yeah, so it's fascinating. So huge idea in psychology is the illusion of control, that mentally healthy people tend to exaggerate how much control they have over things that are completely uncontrollable. We'll all know this from, if you go to a sports match and you're in the stands and you're shouting for your team, people—you genuinely believe that somehow you can shape this match if, you know, from the stands. And people sometimes think that they'll win the lottery when they really don't have a lot of control over it. These kinds of things. So that's well established.
But what we find is that the illusion of control only really holds in regard to something that is positive. So if it is a positive, good thing, then mentally healthy people tend to exaggerate how much control you have over that outcome. When it is negative, then the bias goes in the opposite direction and people tend to downplay their degree of responsibility over the outcome. And so fatalism is almost like a self-defense mechanism against taking responsibility.
To go back to the sports example, there's a study I love from the 1970s that found, I think it was Cornell students who were cheering the Cornell team, the football team. What they found is that when the team won the fans would come out the stadium and say, “We won.” But when the team lost, they would come out and say, “They lost.” And so what you're seeing is when it's a good thing, you feel you are responsible. You're part of it. And if it's a bad thing, you distance yourself from it and claim: Nothing to do with me.
Jeff Friedman:
Yeah, that's totally fascinating part of the article. Another piece of the article's argument is that fatalism is more common in autocracies, and that's another one that at first is surprising because autocratic leaders do actually have more control over policy than their democratic counterparts. So why do we think it goes the other way, that they actually believe they have less agency, they believe more in an external locus of control when they're autocratic leaders?
Dominic Tierney:
Yeah, so a big part of the argument is, this kind of really extreme fatalism, where people believe it’s God's will, it's much more common with autocratic leaders. Think Saddam Hussein or, Japan in World War II, Germany in World War I, Adolf Hitler. These kind of guys.
And it's very counterintuitive because of course these autocratic leaders actually have far more control, and you have Gaddafi calling himself the king of kings and this kind of thing. But when it comes to a negative outcome, like a very costly war, these autocrats tend to just turn on a dime and claim they had nothing to do with it and it wasn't their responsibility.
And there's several reasons for this. One, of course, is that precisely because the autocrat does have so much power, they're obviously responsible for the outcome. And so they need some sort of excuse and so they turn to these grand structural forces and say it was fate or it was God's will, it was not me. They also, autocratic leaders are personally prone to narcissism. And if anybody knows anybody who suffers from narcissism, one of its traits is just refusing to take responsibility for bad things.
And then autocrats, I think we hinted at this earlier on, autocrats often come from cultures that are quite fatalistic. They come from cultures where there's the belief in these kind of immutable structures that guide things. Think about like antebellum American society in the South where slavery is just part of God's will as laid down in the Bible, everybody's status is just determined by nature, or other systems like communism, very fixed, fascism, monarchy, right? Divine right of kings.
And so that kind of culture of a fixed, immutable structure can filter through into how leaders think versus democracies where really the core of democratic culture is agency. That's the whole kind of premise of democracy is, leaders have agency, they make choices, and then we hold them responsible through elections and you give them another term or kick them out. And the whole premise of that is that leaders have some agency and even citizens have some agency and we have some autonomy. And so that culture again filters through and makes elected leaders believe that they have at least some capacity to control events.
Jeff Friedman:
I thought that was a fascinating part of the article, this combination of the institutional element of the differences between these governments and the social-cultural ones. It's a really, and again, leading to that counterintuitive conclusion that autocratic leaders who literally have more control, believe they have less, is totally fascinating.
So far we've been talking a lot about historical events. For the last set of questions, I just want to zoom this back to contemporary policy. You start the article by talking about how fatalistic beliefs may have shaped Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Could you maybe just tell us about that? And also if there are any other conflicts today where you think fatalistic beliefs have played an important role?
Dominic Tierney:
Sure. So the fascinating thing is to compare how the Russian regime and Putin talk about the 2022 war in Ukraine with how they talk about 2014, where Russia did a limited intervention and occupied Crimea. So 2014 was basically a bloodless takeover of Crimea and almost cost-free for Russia. There was some mild sanctions, but Putin basically got away with it.
And the whole language of that was, this is our decision. Russia has agency. In other words, this is a good thing. And there was a kind of exuding some sense of control. When it came to 2022, very quickly, the language is different. And as the costs mount in Ukraine Putin starts talking about the war, as I said, as if it's just an earthquake is beyond his control, beyond anyone's control.
At other times he talks about it as something engineered by the United States, right? But not something that he personally willed, right? It's just something that the Russian people just have to do. It's just forced upon them. And he even said to grieving mothers that it's better for Russian young men to die on the front lines than to die of alcoholism at home. Again, this sort of just fatalistic, like, we're all going to die better to be a hero. And that may well have filtered through in the decision to invade, if Putin in 2022 concluded that a showdown with the West, a showdown over Ukraine was just inevitable. And if you believe that there was a window of opportunity before Ukraine moved too close to the Western sphere of influence as he saw it.
Then you see how that logic led him to believe that it was better now than later. And it’s self-fulfilling prophecy. I'll give you one other example from fairly recent history: A good one is Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. After 9/11, the United States of course, threatens to invade Afghanistan and basically gives some, dictates terms to the Taliban.
So you've got to hand over bin Laden and hand over al-Qaeda the leaders, or we're going to invade. Now the interesting thing is Mullah Omar doesn't go away and weigh his different options carefully, or strategize how are we going to defend against invasion? The sources suggest that he was just gripped by fatalism. He just felt completely trapped and didn't want to hand over bin Laden, wasn't sure what to do. And so he ends up just saying it's in God's hands, almost like King Faisal in the 1970s. It's in God's hands. And we know that wasn't just rhetoric because he literally just didn't plan any kind of strategy.
And of course, the U.S. swept into Afghanistan, swept the Taliban out of power, and they fled towards Pakistan. And the war went terribly for the Taliban, at least at first. And part of that poor decision-making looks like fatalism gripping Mullah Omar in 2001.
Jeff Friedman:
If fatalism makes war more likely, I guess a lot of our listeners are going to be thinking in particular about how that affects the risk of confrontation between the United States and China. To what extent do you see signs of fatalism creeping into that interaction and, maybe related, what should policymakers do about this? So, a greater appreciation for the role of fatalism. If policymakers had that appreciation, what might they do differently in U.S. China relations?
Dominic Tierney:
So this has been a concern for me really ever since I started thinking more seriously about it, is the chance that fatalism could powerfully cause conflict between the United States and China. In other words, that leaders on either side could be gripped by the belief that war is inevitable. There's a lot of discussion about is war in fact inevitable? Is there a Thucydides Trap, for example, there driving the two countries together That's all important? But I want to add another piece, which is, it's not just about whether war is inevitable, it's about the belief that leaders have about whether war is inevitable and that belief itself can trigger a conflict that perhaps isn't inevitable absent that belief.
Now, I think that the danger of fatalism is particularly prevalent in Beijing. As a non-democratic society, they don't have the same open debate, don't have the same checks and balances that could filter out some of these really extreme beliefs. President Xi has tightened his control over the regime, got rid of term limits. That more autocratic direction is very dangerous for the emergence of these kind of beliefs.
So policy makers, American policy makers, should be keenly on the lookout for fatalistic attitudes coming to rise up in Beijing. The belief that conflict is inevitable. The belief that China is encircled, the belief that the United States is set on this and that China has no agency. The belief that crucially, there's a window of opportunity before perhaps China's power might decline because of demographics and other kinds of things.
And it's not easy for the U.S. or any other officials to counter those attitudes. These are based on some deep-rooted psychological dynamics, but you can at least avoid actions that might confirm those fatalistic narratives and perhaps impress on China that both sides have agency and maybe the United States should just be very self-conscious and sit down and say, let's both be wary of the emergence of these kind of fatalistic attitudes, and both recognize that we have responsibility as leaders to avoid a devastating conflict.
Jeff Friedman:
One of the things I really like about this article, it just has, as this conversation showed, it's got this mix of theory and history and current policy, psychological, social and bureaucratic factors. There's just so much wrapped up in this and you weave it together in a new way. So that’s part of what makes the article so interesting to talk about. For listeners who found this sort of thing interesting, do you have any suggestions of other books or articles that they could read moving ahead?
Dominic Tierney:
Sure. So there's tons of literature here. And really even the article is just skimming the surface. There are 6,000 essays just on the concept of an internal locus of control. So good luck reading all of that. But if you're interested in the history in Japan in 1941, I think Eri Hotta’s book Countdown to Infamy is really good and places some of these fatalistic attitudes in historical context. Ian Kershaw's book Fateful Choices also gets to some of this stuff.
Turning to the psychology, if you want to do a deep dive there's Mirowsky and Ross's Social Causes of Psychological Distress. That's quite readable and really gives you a nice overview of some of this stuff, or Alan Langer's classic work The Illusion of Control. But another great book is quite recent, a popular book but really goes into it, by Roy Baumeister and Tierney called The Power of Bad. And it's a trade book, a mass market book on negativity bias. And Tierney is actually a, I think a New York Times author, by the way, no relation to me. But Roy Baumeister is one of the leading psychologists on negativity bias. And The Power of Bad really helps to understand how good versus bad is a basic element of human psychology and can shape how we think about responsibility but also how we think about lots of other things as well.
Jeff Friedman:
Amazing. Thank you for that. And thanks to everybody for listening to the International Security Podcast, produced by International Security, a quarterly journal at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, published by MIT Press. If you like the conversation, please take a moment to rate and review us or share us on social media as that helps other people find the show.
I'm Jeff Friedman. The executive editor of International Security is Jacqueline L. Hazelton. Our producer is Monica Achen. Associate producer and technical director is Benn Craig. Thanks again to our guest, Dominic Tierney. See you next time.