The Fundamental Attribution Error (2-21-25)

Glenn writes:

Noah Smith is a very good writer and a very bad analyst of international affairs. He seems to spend a lot of time huffing and puffing himself into a fit about the notion that there is a “New Axis” of unmitigatedly belligerent totalitarian powers cartoonishly hell-bent on overturning the U.S.-led liberal international order and unleashing tyranny on the people of the world. The main thrust of his writing over the past several years seems to be that the United States needs to totally reorient its economy and society in order to fight “Cold War 2” against the New Axis.1

You can generally ascribe Smith’s errors to either of two common perceptual biases in U.S. national security thinking:

The Fundamental Attribution Error: Smith tends to impute the malfeasance of U.S. adversaries to their inherent nature, while chalking up U.S. and allied behavior to circumstance.

Threat Inflation: He treats any challenge to U.S. hegemony or international security from a U.S. adversary as if it’s the end of the world, and when evidence is ambiguous, he interprets it to that effect.

Yesterday, Smith reposted an article he wrote last year, “Japan, South Korea, and Poland need nuclear weapons immediately,” that illustrates both of these errors very well. He argues that, although it is unfortunate that more democratic countries would need to acquire nuclear weapons, it is necessary for them to proliferate because they face intolerable threats to their security from the insatiable revisionist Sino-Russian Axis and they can’t trust the United States to defend them. Moreover, because U.S. adversaries are already developing nuclear weapons with the help of Russia and China, controlled proliferation to U.S. allies would not be exceedingly costly to the international order.

Smith is wrong on both counts. There is no evil Axis, and it does not pose a looming threat to the survival of U.S. allies in Europe and Asia. There is also no Russian or Chinese conspiracy to undermine the global nonproliferation regime and spread nuclear weapons to U.S. adversaries — more of a paranoid delusion than a serious assessment of the facts about international security.