The Psychological Assessment of Political Leadersconstraints. The paranoid personality tends to view the adversary as
highly rational, highly unified, in total control of all his or her
actions. People or nations are never compelled to do things by virtue
of circumstances. Rather, their actions are always a product of their
negative adversarial qualities. For example, there is no such thing as
a "defensive" action by the adversary taken solely to protect their
own security—all actions of one's adversary are necessarily "aggres-
sive." The attitude toward the adversary's military capabilities is
oddly mixed. On the one hand, there is a tendency to exaggerate the
adversary's military capabilities as to the degree to which they
threaten one's own interests—the paranoid assumes that they do.
One can never safely assume that the adversary's military potential is
so small that it will never become a threat, even if it isn't one now.
On the other hand, the paranoid personality often exaggerates his or
her own capability to temporarily (though never permanently)
thwart the capabilities of this adversary.
The world is a conflictual place, and the source of conflict is the
evil nature or character of other nations or people. War would never
emerge in a crisis for inadvertent reasons; war occurs because of the
nefarious, aggressive motivations of the adversary. Under no circum-
stances is international conflict attributed to anarchy or even to an
absence of balance between forces in the system.
The information-processing style and cognitive heuristics of the
paranoid personality are closely associated with the belief system
described previously. There is often a heavy and very simplistic over-
reliance on historical analogies that reinforce this black-and-white
view of the world. In other words, when confronted with a new situ-
ation in world politics, the paranoid personality, like the narcissistic
personality, would tend to say, "This is like what happened to me."
Precisely because of the rigidity of the beliefs and the central
importance of the adversary image in the paranoid's worldview, this
individual is heavily biased in favor of worst-case analysis of almost
any incoming information. In fact, the information search pattern
will be exclusively tactical in nature because the long-term objec-
tives of the adversary are already known. The paranoid individual
will seek information on the probable military or political ploys this
adversary is likely to employ in this instance and the various coun-
ters to these ploys. An important related topic of interest will be