H.R. McMaster

McMaster's diagnosis (developed in *Battlegrounds*, 2020) that the United States habitually defines the world only in relation to itself, assumes adversaries and partners are passive objects who will simply react to U.S. choices, and projects American preferences onto others. It produces wishful policy, short attention spans, and "the conceit that what we decide is what matters most." The corrective is **strategic empathy**. The scholarly literature treats this pairing as a serious analytic claim, not rhetoric: Yorke (2022, doi:10.1080/01402390.2022.2152800) reviews empathy as a strategic imperative and the cost of national hubris; Abbe (2023, doi:10.55540/0031-1723.3221) operationalizes the cognitive core as trainable perspective-taking.

Borrowed from historian Zachary Shore, the discipline of understanding the emotions, ideology, aspirations, and worldview that actually drive an adversary or partner, *on their own terms*, rather than assuming they want what we want. McMaster insists strategy must begin with the adversary's logic. Abbe (2023) argues the operative skill is perspective-taking (a cognitive, not merely affective, capability) and offers four ways practitioners can build it; Yorke (2022) cautions that empathy is "hard," demanding confrontation of one's own misperceptions and egos.

McMaster's organizing device in *Battlegrounds*: strategy is conducted across concrete contested arenas (Russia, China, South Asia, Iran, the Middle East, the cyber and information domains), each with its own history, actors, and logic that the strategist must master rather than abstract away. The corollary is that emerging domains become new battlegrounds; the space-security and counterspace literature furnishes contemporary arenas (EU hybrid-threat strategy, Mariani et al. 2024 doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2024.09.003; the US–China contest over the space order, He 2023 doi:10.1111/pafo.12221; cross-domain deterrence, Lindsay & Gartzke 2019 doi:10.1007/978-94-6265-419-8_8).

A recurring McMaster move: adversaries have their own agency, strategies, and continuous "vote." Policy that assumes the other side will conform to our timeline or incentives is strategic narcissism in operation. This is the lens that tests whether a space-security plan models a thinking, adapting opponent (counterspace, ASAT, norm-shaping) or a passive backdrop. The deterrence literature (Lindsay & Gartzke 2019) and the competing-orders literature (He 2023; Mearsheimer 2019 doi:10.1162/isec_a_00342) supply the adversary-agency frame.

McMaster's historical argument that the Joint Chiefs failed in Vietnam by not giving the President their honest professional military judgment, enabling drift, gradualism, and a strategy disconnected from the war's actual nature. The enduring methodological demand: strategy must rest on candid assessment of feasibility and the real character of the conflict, not on bureaucratic accommodation or optimistic process. Applied to space, this is the demand that architecture and acquisition claims survive honest feasibility and threat scrutiny rather than programmatic optimism.