Hubris at the top could start a major war

AS THE WORLD (including the self-styled peacemaker-in-chief in the White House) holds its breath for the announcement of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, spare a moment to ponder the growing risk of war, including world war.

- By Andreas Klutch

Even a cursory scan of today's major military powers suggests that both their leaders and policy elites are dangerously overconfident, and could — as in 1914, say — sleepwalk into disaster out of what international-relations scholars call mutual optimism.

If you're not worried yet, consider a study, the largest and most international of its kind, that comes to exactly this conclusion. Jeffrey Friedman at Dartmouth College just published the findings of surveys he's been giving (between roughly 2016 and 2022) to about 2,000 national-security officials from more than 40 Western countries — men and women, North Americans and Europeans, civilians and service members.

Friedman's questions took the form of statements to which the officials had to attach probabilities. A few samples: The United States is the only country in the world that has stealth aircraft. (The correct answer is no.) There are more active-duty military personnel in the European Union than in Russia (yes). Jihadi terrorists in the preceding years killed more people in France than in the US (yes). There are more refugees from Syria than from Venezuela (at the time, yes).

Starting in 2020, Friedman told me, he started asking every question in two versions. For example, half of the participants received this variant: "What are the chances that Boko Haram has killed more civilians than ISIS since 2010?" The other half got: "What are the chances that ISIS has killed more civilians than Boko Haram since 2010?"

As you've guessed, Friedman wasn’t after quizzing the officials’ knowledge, but after gauging what I think of as their “intellectual humility” (or its absence, hubris). And the data were clear: Participants were wildly overconfident.