Month: July 2022

Part 4. Mental escalators of violence in US policy and media makers. Part 4B. A competitive, threat-orientation towards international relations: Psychological patterns described by Lakoff, Spranger, and Allport

False Bias #2. Life Is Competition; the Goal Is to Beat Adversaries and Stay on Top. Let’s take a look at actual, representative lines from Damon Wilson’s 2019 testimony, two years before he became president of the National Endowment for “Democracy,” and three years before Russia’s military action in Donetsk, Lugansk, and Ukraine. As we do so in this and the next several essays, I’ll point out several biases that I find in Wilson’s way of thinking, a pattern of thinking common to many of the minds that are forever leading our foreign policy. These biases of thought—cognitive biases—skew the mind and allow only certain perceptions of life, international relations, and human dynamics. I write about them at greater length and with more examples in my unpublished works, but I’ll provide some condensed ideas here.

This summer blockbuster lived up to the hype. In Madrid this week, NATO allies substantially boosted their forces in Eastern Europe, struck a deal to invite Sweden and Finland into the club, and dropped a once-in-a-decade strategic concept that strove to break new ground on China and climate change. What do these developments mean—and which ones flew under the radar? How will history judge this consequential gathering? From Madrid to Washington, our experts are here with answers.

This one was a decade in the making. On Wednesday, NATO released its new Strategic Concept—a sixteen-page document of dry diplomat-speak sketching out the Alliance’s future path as it takes on threats posed by Russia, China, climate change, and more. But what were the allies really saying amid all the jargon? And what did they leave out? Experts from the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative carefully combed through the document and dropped their insights in the margins.