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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Why did Volodymyr Zelensky doubt that Russia was preparing a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022? Why did British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain decide to 'do business with Herr Hitler' in Munich in 1938? And how was it that Israeli elites dismissed intelligence warnings of the Hamas attack in 2023? Had they not learned their lesson from the Egyptian‒Syrian attack on Yom Kippur fifty years earlier?
In all these cases, smart decision makers misjudged their adversaries, largely because they failed to understand how their enemies' actions and strategies were shaped by different values and beliefs to their own. We may think such beliefs are irrational merely because we do not share them. They may appear confusing and ill judged. But as Beatrice Heuser ably shows in this pithy book, strategy making is a tricky business, marred by bias, irrationality, bureaucratic politics, colliding government interests, and complex procedures and structures. Assessing our adversaries as not only irrational but also illogical is a dangerous game that can lead to flawed and, on occasions, catastrophically bad decisions. This book explains why.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Preface
Notes
Introduction
Notes
1. The Rational/Irrational Actor Fallacy
Rationality versus logic
Notes
2. Our Biases
Mirror imaging
Materialism bias
Confirmation bias
Denial
Overconfidence or optimism bias
Notes
3. Knowns and Unknowns (and How We Use Them)
Too little or too much knowledge
Methodological fallacies
Notes
4. Flaws and Quandaries of Strategy Making
A many-tentacled octopus?
Bureaucratic politics
How to know what’s best
Notes
Epilogue
Notes
Select Bibliography
List of Figure
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Attitude to the Us
List of Boxes
Introduction
Box 0.1
The Eve of the Second World War
Chapter 1
Box 1.1
The Kosovo Crisis, 1998–9
Box 1.2
The Tito–Stalin Quarrel, 1948
Box 1.3
The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962
Box 1.4
Curveball and Gulf War of 2003
Chapter 2
Box 2.1
Stalin’s Failure to Expect Barbarossa, 22 June 1941
Box 2.2
Iraq’s Invasion of Kuwait and the First Gulf War, 1990–1
Box 2.3
The Early Crusades and Crusaders’ Motivations
Box 2.4
The Yom Kippur War, 1973
Box 2.5
Pearl Harbor – The Japanese Attack on the United States, December 1941
Chapter 3
Box 3.1
Protest Movements and Binary Bias
Chapter 4
Box 4.1
Teasing Your Ally: De Gaulle’s Flirtation with the USSR, 1966–7
Box 4.2
The Falklands War, 1982
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Begin Reading
Epilogue
Select Bibliography
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For my daughter, who told me to write something useful for a change. I hope it may be, to somebody.
Flawed Strategy
Why Smart Leaders Make Bad Decisions
BEATRICE HEUSER
polity
Copyright © Beatrice Heuser 2025
The right of Beatrice Heuser to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6671-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024937185
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
This book was written for the Bundeswehr’s General Staff College in Hamburg, the support of which I gratefully acknowledge. I had vital access to the University of Glasgow’s library facilities, again something to be thankful for.
I want to express my profound gratitude for pertinent and highly useful feedback from several friends and colleagues, including especially Professors John Baylis, Samuël Kruizinga and Paul Schulte, who went through the whole text and pointed out many shortcomings. I also want to thank most warmly Dr Gill Bennett, Thomas Boehlke, Ambassador Dr Valerie Caton, Dr Jack Harding, David Harrison, Dr Rob Johnson, Professors Andreas Lutsch, David Yost and Eitan Shamir, Wg Cdr Harold Simpson and Dr Tim Sweijs, all of whom spotted flaws and pointed me to additional readings and considerations. All remaining mistakes are mine alone.
As always, I must thank my wonderful husband for his patience with me that has allowed us to clock up our thirtieth wedding anniversary as this book was being written. It is a never-ending mystery to me how he put up with me for so long, and my most ardent wish is that he will, illogically and irrationally, continue to do so.
Preface
This book is a reaction to the preponderance of theories in the discipline of International Relations (IR) that are generally taught with the claim to offer monocausal explanations of how international relations – the reality – work. That this approach dominates the teaching of IR has frustrated me greatly for years. Manuals tend to prescribe this theory-centric approach: select a theory, write a chapter or more just about theory, write another chapter about methodology (most of which states the all too obvious),1 then take two or three case studies, see if they fit the theory, thus verify or falsify it, adapt it to fit the cases or discard it. This is usually formulated in terms of an ‘independent variable’ (whenever A) and a ‘dependent variable’ (then B), as one might in the natural sciences, for example with temperature and the volume occupied by gases. The original research on the case studies often constitutes a mere third of the work, sandwiched in between extensive discussions of theory of the sort that would have delighted medieval theologians. I see a glimmer of hope when students are encouraged to mix methodologies of research, or even test more than one theory against a case study. They are still taught, however, to select a couple of theories at most so that the result still looks reductionist. Students are shoehorned into this methodological approach, whether it is appropriate or not. Non-specialists will review their work – whether these are second or third examiners or annual reviewers of PhD students’ work – looking out for this methodology if they are unfamiliar with the contents. If the standard procedure of theory – the identification of an ‘independent variable’ and a ‘dependent variable’ – is not applied, they will then claim that the methodology is deficient.
But this monocausal methodology rarely if ever fits Strategic Studies or the analysis of an adversary’s intentions. Students of war and strategy have, since Carl von Clausewitz, recognized the interplay of interdependent variables in wars and tense relations between inimical parties, most famously in the Clausewitzian trinity of the passions, chance and deliberate policy.2 He and other authors identified many other variables besides. I, for one, have yet to find a variable that is truly independent in the context of war and strategy. Even artillery trajectories depend not on just one variable but on several: gravity, weight and speed. The imposition of the methodology described above is thus thoroughly confusing.
On another point, hardly a conference with practitioners goes by, nor a seminar teaching undergraduates, Master’s students or military officers at any level – including generals and admirals – without somebody raising the question of whether we are dealing with ‘rational’ adversaries. Depending on the answer to this, they will speculate as to whether certain strategic measures would ‘make sense’ when dealing with an ‘irrational’ adversary. What is meant by ‘rational’ in IR theory is whether, within the narrowly defined parameters of a theory, an actor is behaving as expected. It is always assumed, of course, that ‘we’ are ‘rational’. In other words, we endeavour to argue and write in a scholarly and thus rational way, using the same reasoning throughout (I guess that is what is meant by ‘rigorous’, another term often used in that context). Given the specialization of subjects in universities, however, at a guess 90 per cent of the students or practitioners I come across have not encountered critiques of rational choice theory, let alone studied psychology. As a result, one is forced to go over this argument every time. This book is designed to help do so.
The same applies to biases – irrational approaches – that we have ourselves. Such biases are studied and highlighted by psychologists, and several have also been discovered by historians in their specific historical studies, even if they have never read psychology.3 But biases do not feature much in the most important classic IR theories: realism, liberalism or liberal institutionalism, Marxism and, above all, rational choice theory. Even idealism, constructivism and critical theory assume a conscious choice of positions, rather than one generated by unconscious biases.4 The discussion of such biases will therefore form an important part of the analysis that follows.
While whether we can work out what adversaries think and how they might react to what we do, and whether we ourselves are being irrational, has practical implications, theoreticians in the field of IR in recent times seem largely to have lost interest in practical implications. Instead, most seem entirely focused on the Glasperlenspiel (Hermann Hesse), the purely academic activity of playing with theories, detached from reality, as though theories were what mattered, not whether one can give sound advice to practitioners.
It should be said that this book is not the only one dealing with biases in strategic analysis. It is much to the US Marine Corps War College’s credit that it has included appendices in its Strategy Primer of 2021 – a manual giving guidance on how to formulate good strategy – that deal with (often false or misguiding) assumptions and biases.5 Sir David Omand, who spent most of his career in British intelligence, rising to head of the Government Communications Headquarters, has also dealt with such biases in his fascinating book on How Spies Think.6 In both cases, the hope is that by identifying biases, one might fight them, but it is clear that neither book is written with the hope of eradicating this human weakness. Nor can the current book present the reader with a recipe to avoid all errors of analysis. But it may go some way to deepening our understanding of why seemingly intelligent and well-informed leaders continue to make poor strategic decisions with outcomes that are at best ill-judged but with minimal repercussions and, at worst, will negatively impact the course of history and people’s lives.
Notes
1.
My favourite example is being asked why I didn’t set out to ‘generate new evidence’ (through interviews and opinion polls?!) when I tried to find out whether sixteenth-century military men thought of themselves as living in times of great military-technological transformation.
2.
Carl von Clausewitz,
On War
, trans. Peter Paret and Michael Howard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), Book I. On a discussion of this methodological approach, see chapter 8, ‘What Clausewitz Read’, in my
The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz
(Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger-ABC Clio, 2010).
3.
See for example my ‘Stalin as Hitler’s Successor’, in Beatrice Heuser and Robert O’Neill (eds),
Securing Peace in Europe, 1945–62
(London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 17–40.
4.
For a discussion of IR theories, see Scott Burchill, Andrew Linklater, Richard Devetak, Jack Donnelly and Terry Nardin (eds),
Theories of International Relations
(5th edn, London: Palgrave, 2013).
5.
US Marine Corps War College,
Strategy Primer
(Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Press, 2021), pp. 101–21. I shall refer to this from time to time to introduce further terms by which such biases are known.
6.
David Omand,
How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2021).
Introduction
War, just like a non-violent conflict that may turn into armed conflict, is a dialectic activity – between at least two parties. Each side tries, through a strategy of its own, to force the enemy to do its will, as Carl von Clausewitz put it. The point may come where the enemy is completely disarmed and has no choice other than to do our will. Short of such a situation, however, each side tries to influence the behaviour of the other until the other gives up, gives in, surrenders, agrees to an armistice or to some other form of compromise. Influencing the other side through strategy – the use of force and/or of non-violent means – assumes an action–reaction mechanism, in which we can somehow trigger reactions advantageous to us on the part of the enemy and avoid reactions that will be detrimental, perhaps even devastating, for us. Especially when confronted with an adversary armed with nuclear weapons, but not only then, strategy making is a precarious balancing act in which it is vital to anticipate an adversary’s reactions to one’s every move, both in times of crisis and actual war. In war, and to manage difficult relationships that could lead to war, we therefore need to understand what our adversaries think, want and do. We need to understand their strategies and their strategic reasoning. It is no good just to know what aims we have in mind, even if we have very smart minds. That is likely to lead to flawed strategy, bad decision making on the part of leaders that, at times, has serious domestic and international consequences.
Dealing with a nuclear-armed adversary is an extreme case, of course. Even armed conflict is extreme. Much more frequent are situations in international relations in which national leaders or representatives of a government or an international organization are dealing with one another in non-violent ways, negotiating over issues that might well lead to outcomes of mutual benefits, to ‘win–win’ situations, rather than ones in which one side imposes its will upon the other. But there, too, when differing approaches and attitudes meet, ‘the trick’ (as British diplomat Baroness Neville-Jones calls it) is to see where adversaries are coming from, and how they think and why.
The first step to understanding an adversary is usually to put ourselves in their shoes, to empathize, to imagine how we would think and do in their place. Often enough, however, adversaries do not oblige us by thinking or behaving as we would, leading to great puzzlement on our side. As in the fairy tale Cinderella, we might have to chop off toes or heels, that is, our own preconceptions and assumptions, for the shoe to fit.
Under the influence of economists who have exerted a strong influence on Strategic Studies ever since we entered the nuclear age, most literature on strategy still assumes ‘rational actors’ on both sides of a conflict. Strategic Studies is usually seen as a sub-discipline of the study of the interaction of governments. For that is the essence of the discipline we call International Relations (IR), even though it is rarely about the relations between nations unless they are engaged in ‘total’ wars with one another where the whole of the nation is mobilized. Key IR theories, especially those derived directly from game theories, assume that decision making is a predictable game. Economists assume that there is a Homo economicuswho will choose which espresso machine he will buy, or which university to apply to, by doing extensive market research, his decision guided only by applying criteria such as cost, customer satisfaction feedback on the machine, or the university’s standing in league tables. Key IR theories assume that similar cost–benefit criteria are applied when decision makers ponder whether to invade another country or to use nuclear weapons. Strategic concepts such as deterrence, dissuasion, coercion, compulsion or the whole notion of crisis management are built on the assumption that one is playing a game of chess or a similar highly rule-bound game – hence the importance of game theory, imported from economics – in which moves are expected to produce rational, calculable responses. In reality, such theories and concepts are built on sand: they are profoundly challenged by adversaries holding fundamental beliefs which we do not share, not to mention the many considerations they may have that we have not thought of.1 Moreover, as we shall see in the following chapters, the processes of arriving at decisions collectively are in themselves obstacles to the pursuit of a single logic, or rational reasoning.
By contrast, historians exposed to IR theories are usually astounded by the claim that these theories can provide monocausal explanations.2 Historians since Thucydides have been aware that strategic decisions are not made based on a single issue. Strategy making is all about prioritization, weighing expected consequences and choosing what one thinks might be the lesser evil. Moreover, historians are all too aware that, of course, emotions and notions of pride and reputation colour and distort decision makers’ thinking. Already, Thucydides evoked ‘fear, honour and interest’ as the three great factors motivating humans to go to war. Therefore, what outsiders might see as rational cost–benefit calculations are so often squeezed out by blind fury, fear and interests, clearly not those of the nation as a whole.3 This lesson was learned a long time ago by those who read Ivan Bloch’s work written on the eve of the First World War that explained how utterly irrational and self-destructive it would be for the prosperous, commercially interconnected European states to go to war with one another,4 or Norman Angell’s argument that it was a ‘great illusion’ to think that any nation could benefit truly from such a war.5
Diplomatic historians – historians burrowing deep into government archives, often with a view to understanding the origins of a particular war or the obstacles to making peace – have long been aware that decisions are made at the highest level with incomplete knowledge about what an adversary has in terms of means, what he intends to do or what the comparative costs and benefits would be to one’s own side if one tried to stop his expansionism now or later. The very title of a recent bestseller on the origins of the First World War, The Sleepwalkers,6 sums this up neatly. And the debate about whether Britain and France would have been better off if they had refused Hitler’s demand for the Sudetenland to be ceded to neighbouring Germany by Czechoslovakia in late 1938, rather than declaring war on Germany a year later when Hitler invaded Poland after the Wehrmacht had occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia and turned its east into a ‘protectorate’, is continuing.7
Box 0.1: The Eve of the Second World War
After the First World War, a democratic Germany had gradually gained the confidence of its neighbours until the economic crisis following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 led to the rise of the extreme left and right. Hitler, heading the racist National Socialist (‘Nazi’) Party, came to power in Germany in 1933. While successive French governments were wary, British governments continued to show goodwill towards Germany, hoping that condoning Hitler’s piecemeal dismantlement of Germany’s limitations imposed by the post-First World War peace treaty signed at Versailles would appease him.
In 1936, Germany annexed the Rhineland – according to the Versailles Treaty, this was to remain demilitarized – and then, in 1938, Austria – a separate state. Hitler then demanded that Czechoslovakia cede the Sudetenland to Germany, a mountainous region along the Czech–German border, in part populated by German speakers of Austrian culture. The British Prime Minister Sir Neville Chamberlain and, persuaded by him, the French head of government Edouard Daladier, at a conference in Munich in September 1938 pressed the Czech President Edvard Beneš to comply with Hitler’s demands.
Hitler promised that this was his last territorial demand, but only weeks later he ordered plans to be drawn up to ‘finish off’ the rest of Czechoslovakia. In March 1939, these orders were carried out; the Wehrmacht invaded Czechoslovakia, which was now unable to put up a proper defence against the superior force descending from the western and northern heights of the Sudetenland. This finally persuaded Chamberlain and Daladier to stop appeasement and instead to draw a red line: if Germany now attacked Poland, its next victim, as German propaganda indicated, Britain and France would declare war on Germany. Hitler did not believe they would, proceeded to attack Poland on 1 September 1939 and was surprised when the British and French declarations of war were duly made.
Then psychologists, most prominently the Nobel prizewinning Daniel Kahneman, articulated their astonishment at the assumptions underlying rational actor theory or rational choice theory (these terms are used synonymously in the following).8 They have shown that, however smart we are, none of us are fully ‘rational actors’ as we are subject to a wide range of biases affecting our – and governments’ – interpretations of the world and our behaviour.9 As a consequence, smart leaders and their representatives sometimes make bad decisions.
Economists’ classical assumptions that all the actors in economists’ theories are rational have since been questioned fundamentally, and a rich debate has ensued between economists and psychologists, especially since the 1990s.10 Under pressure from this critique, even some scholars in IR have questioned the premises of much of their own discipline, especially the research focused on how to influence an adversary. For that assumes that this is predictable and calculable, sometimes even that we do not need to know more about the particularities of adversaries and can guess how they will react simply by imagining how we would react ourselves.
More recently still, a number of studies of deterrent statements and ultimatums have found that deterrence does not always work as intended, and that there are multiple causes for this, making the reaction to an act or posture designed to deter difficult to predict.11 Given that theories around deterrence, coercion and compellence occupy such an important place in Strategic Studies, this deals potentially lethal blows to the clay feet of ‘deterrence theory’, a colossus among IR theories.12 The variety of possible reactions to deterrence in a non-nuclear context in what we might call a ‘post-rationalist approach’ to deterrence theory is the discussion of Lawrence Freedman – himself one of the key contributors to the literature on deterrence – of possible deterrent steps and possible reactions on the part of regional players in the Hamas–Israel War that started on 7 October 2023.13 He argued that in this complex context, neat theories of deterrence may not work according to the textbooks. It is uncertain what strategic moves will ‘work’ to pacify the region: they might have one, or the opposite, effect.14 Scepticism concerning our ability to devise sure-fire strategies that will predictably compel our adversaries to behave in the way we want them to is thus in order.
In the following chapters, the realization that decision making is riddled with biases and irrational choices will be applied to analysis and decision making in the context of crises, when there is a danger of war or when one is actually at war. Chapter 1 is a further assault on the concept of the ‘rational actor’, using historical examples to illustrate how problematic it is. If this concept collapses, then with it should any notion that we can carefully control and calibrate strategies towards adversaries in a conflictual context. Indeed, we should let go of the notion that the way we think and act is the gold standard of ‘rationality’, and that our adversaries think like us and will respond to moves we make the way we would if we were standing in their place. Chapter 2 will turn to the many biases with which we, who like to think of ourselves as ‘rational’, interpret the actions of others, specifically in the context of conflictual international relations.
Chapter 3 will discuss problems we have with knowing what we need to know to make good decisions, and how to apply what we may know. Chapter 4 will discuss how policies are assumed to be arrived at, and how this often works in reality. It will shed light on the boundaries of choices we can make in the light of our limited abilities to predict, let alone to weigh up, future outcomes.
Finally, in the epilogue, I close with a summary of widespread fallacies and biases which the student, the foreign and security-policy analyst, the diplomat, the strategy maker but also the journalist or indeed the thinking citizen should guard against.
* * *
There is a growing gulf between, on the one hand, the knowledge of academics working in the field of international history (especially twentieth-century international history) and the lessons that have been drawn by earlier generations from well-studied wars and crises and, on the other, what current practitioners and younger generations know about these events as they fade from living memory. Even students of International Relations – the discipline and especially its theories – may not have encountered these key wars and crises of the twentieth century if they have not taken a module on twentieth-century history. For non-specialists and for younger readers, therefore, textboxes such as Box 0.1 (p. 4) are included to summarize the historical context from which examples are drawn.
Notes
1.
Jean-Frédéric Morin and Jonathan Paquin, ‘How Does Rationality Apply to FPA and What Are Its Limitations?’, in
eisdem
(eds),
Foreign Policy Analysis
(London: Palgrave, 2018).
2.
Only a few, like Paul Schroeder, have engaged further with them, usually ending up disproving them, thus for example Schroeder in his ‘Historical Reality vs Neo-realist Theory’,
International Security
19(1) (1994): 108–48.
3.
Historians thus find it bizarre, to say the least, that IR theorists, 2,500 years later, claim to have discovered that ‘emotions’ play a role in strategy making.
4.
Ivan Bloch,
Is War Now Impossible? Being an Abridgement of ‘The War of the Future in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations’
, trans. from Russian (London: Grant Richards, 1899), online at
https://archive.org/details/iswarnowimpossib00bloc/page/n3/mode/2up?view=theater
.
5.
Norman Angell,
The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to their Economic and Social Advantage
(3rd edn, New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911).
6.
Christopher Clarke,
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
(London: Allen Lane, 2012).
7.
David M. Valladares, ‘Tragedy or Betrayal? Interwar Europe and British Appeasement’,
History: Reviews of New Books
48(2) (2020): 29–32.
8.
Following Renwick Monroe with Hill Maher, ‘Psychology and Rational Actor Theory’, p. 1.
9.
Daniel Kahneman,
Thinking, Fast and Slow
(New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011).
10.
See, for example, Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro,
Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).
11.
Tim Sweijs,
The Use and Utility of Ultimata in Coercive Diplomacy
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
12.
I concede that much good work has been done to refine our thinking about deterrence and how this can be optimized and tailored towards a particular adversary; see especially Tim Sweijs and Mattia Bertolini,
Dancing in the Dark: The Seven Sins of Deterrence Assessment
(The Hague Centre of Strategic Studies, March 2023).
13.
Lawrence Freedman,
Deterrence
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).
14.
Lawrence Freedman, ‘Israel: Beyond Deterrence’ (29 October 2023),
https://samf.substack.com/p/israel-beyond-deterrence?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=631422&post_id=138371301&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=1tjajs&utm_medium=email
.
1The Rational/Irrational Actor Fallacy
Historians have, at least since Thucydides, tried to explain decision making in war and peace in terms that would seem reasonable to their smart and discerning readers. This presumes a common logic and a common rationality guiding decisions to explain them in ways that make sense to the author and readers alike. Foreign Policy Analysis – now seen as an established toolbox meriting handbooks to accompany students through their modules on International Relations – generally assumes, not merely a logic common to humans even though it might be based on differing premises, beliefs, values and assumptions, but ‘rational actors’ on all sides.
The term ‘rational actor’ goes back a long way, at least to the father of economics, the great Glaswegian Adam Smith, who based his economic reasoning on the assumption that actors make choices based on cost–benefit analyses. As Herbert Simon, an early critic of the concept, noted, ‘practically the whole of classic economic theory is constructed within the framework of [rational actor] theory.’1 Nevertheless, it forms the basis of many contemporary domains which he tried to influence, including studies of information processing, problem solving, decision making, artificial intelligence and theories of organization and complex systems.
In economics, rational actor or rational choice theory supposes that:
The individual is the basic agent in society.
Individual actors pursue consistent and enduring goals that reflect their self-interests.
The individual identifies one main goal, and then decisions are taken in pursuit of that goal.
In their decision making (or ‘choices’ made), actors possess all the information they need on available options, their costs, their benefits and the likely consequences of their choices. They will thus act in full knowledge of the causality and consequences of their choices.
If they have several options to choose from, they will choose that with the highest expected feasibility and utility in achieving their self-interested goals.
2
If all these premises are true, therefore, the theory is that actors’ choices can be predicted if one knows what choices are available to them.
Transposed to politics, and to the specific realm of International (or rather inter-governmental) Relations (IR), there are several problems with these assumptions.
There are few states where supreme decisions are made by just one individual. Even in many autocracies or monarchies, the chief decision maker is expected to listen to wise counsellors, and where these have power bases – running whole organizations or owning large territories or other assets – he or she can only get away with ignoring the latter’s advice so many times before they become disaffected and may attempt to rebel against perceived tyranny. Government decision making is usually, at least to some degree, collective.
Accordingly, the reasoning behind decisions tends to be influenced by multiple goals and interests, and veers away to a lesser or greater degree from the purely consistent and logical pursuit of one clearly identified goal and towards compromises. Moreover, not all actors act exclusively out of sheer self-interest.
As discussed further below, individuals and groups involved in decision making have multiple goals which might fluctuate in importance, are interrelated or interdependent.
Then, as noted in the introduction, in real-live situations decision makers rarely if ever have all the information they need to make the best choices in full cognizance of their consequences.
Given the multiplicity of goals and the limitations on means available to pursue them, plus speculations about the reactions of an adversary, and taking into account public opinion, allies and partners, and other such factors, the choices made are not necessarily those with highest utility in a purely technical sense, as the political implications of such choices may run counter to what is to be achieved. Just think of why no nuclear power, despite being involved in wars, has used nuclear weapons in war since 1945, even though physically they might have resolved many an operational problem quite decisively.
The very assumption that all actors would take decisions in predictable ways, based on prioritizing the same values, is misleading. Even when it comes to defining self-interest, opinions on what that might be can diverge. As political scientist William Riker put it, ‘what people want to do varies widely, ranging from private advantage, power over others, or greed for wealth, to the intention of helping others even to the extreme of wishing to sacrifice one’s own life … man is not always concerned with maximising income …’.3 Just think of the quest for ‘power’, assumed by so much political theory to be at the heart of politics. Power to do what? To achieve some sort of selfish gratification in being able to dominate others? Or to get good things done, overriding the inertia of bureaucracy? Out of blind devotion to a particular cause? To impose religious rules on secular societies, or to overcome selfish obstacles on the part of other actors to policies that would be in the objective interests of the polity as a whole (as, for example, to impose a speed limit of 130 km per hour on all German motorways)? Such devotion can be quite selfless and altruistic – from risking jail in protest against a tyrannical regime to becoming suicide bombers for a particular cause. To sum up, rational actor theory ‘does not apply consistently enough once we enter the realm of the political’, as Riker’s colleague Kristen Monroe put it.4
Nor can one always identify a single goal or isolate a single issue on which an adversary decides. Strategy making is about prioritizing some goals over others in a world where even the world’s most powerful country, the United States, has limited means. But this does not mean that the other goals – or problems that have to be addressed – disappear. A balance has to be found in meeting or deterring threats from different directions, or warding off military threats while tackling others that will devour huge parts of a state’s income. In today’s Europe, dealing with the budget deficit left by tackling the Covid-19 pandemic and investing in cleaner sources of energy to mitigate climate change have to be balanced against deterring further Russian expansionism and helping Ukraine defend against the Russian invasion, and coping with the influx of refugees from various parts of the world afflicted by war and other crises. Decisions made on any one of these affect what decisions can be made on the others.
In short, we do indeed find that the criteria for working out what an adversary wants cannot simply be those developed for economics, nor even for the parts of political science that deal with voters’ behaviour. We should experiment with other approaches while steering clear of further fallacies with their own distinctive roots.
