In the picture
Cover of John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato's book 'How States Think. The Rationality of Foreign Policy' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023) 280 pp.
John Mearsheimer was a black sheep in the American academy when, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he blamed the West for having provoked Putin's decision with the progressive enlargement of NATO towards Eastern Europe. When many described the Russian president's attitude as irrational, characteristic of a madman, Mearsheimer considered it fully rational, as it followed the logical principles of the balance of power theory.
In the midst of this discussion, Mearsheimer started to write a new book to answer the question of rationality in foreign policy decisions, in partnership with Sebastian Rosato. Both advocates of the realist interpretation of international relations, the former is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the latter at Notre Dame, Indiana.
How States Think' argues that, contrary to common belief, most states are rational most of the time. "For us," the authors say, "rationality is about making sense of the world - that is, figuring out how it works and why - so that we can decide how to achieve certain goals." Such decision-making by states, which are the actors in international relations, has both an individual and a collective dimension. On the one hand, for the final decision to be rational, the individuals involved in the process must base their judgment on what Mearsheimer and Rosato call "credible theories": theories from the field of international relations, both in the realist and liberal traditions, that have proven to make sense. Then there must be a collective process of aggregation of views through a deliberative exchange , including a "robust and uninhibited" discussion . "At summary, rational decisions in international politics rest on credible theories about how the world works and emerge from a deliberative decision-making process." It may happen that this discussion does not conclude with a convergence of positions; then, the decision is made by whoever has the greatest authority, without harming the rationality of the process, as long as there has been an open and sufficient discussion . Nor, according to the authors, does the rationality of decisions suffer from the fact that states operate in the midst of great uncertainty and that the information available to decision-makers is often deficient.
In their argument, they reject that the criterion of rationality of foreign policy decisions should follow the principle of maximization of expected utility, something that can be applied to economic decisions, especially when there are reliable data that can advise one decision or another. They also disagree with the warnings of political psychology, which, by placing so much weight on mental shortcuts, prejudices and instinctive or passionate actions, would rather indicate that there is never any rationality per se. Mearsheimer and Rosato accept the conditioning factors of individual psychology, but believe that these do not preclude a rational collective process. "While individuals surely employ cognitive shortcuts in their daily lives, this is not true of leaders in the domain of international relations," they assert. When the survival of the state is at stake, which the authors estimate the goal issue one, very rarely do top decision-makers settle issues frivolously. "Since international politics is a dangerous business, states think seriously about the strategies they adopt, which is to say that they are powerfully inclined to rely on credible theories and to deliberate about their every move.
To validate the claim that "rationality is the commonplace in international politics", the authors devote three chapters to analyzing grand strategic decisions taken by different countries since World War I, as well as other decisions taken at times of crisis. In their detailed analysis, they only find 'non-rational' the German imperial plan, prior to World War I, to build a navy larger than England's; Chamberlain's policy prior to lecture Munich; Hitler's 'scorched earth' policy when defeat in World War II was already clear; and the U.S. decisions to invade Cuba and Iraq.
The fact that, apart from these exceptions, the major foreign policy decisions are mostly rational, as the authors point out, allows the study of international relations. If irrationality were rule, then "the behavior of states can neither be understood nor predicted", and the study of discipline would be a "futile task".
This analysis rules out taking into account the success or failure of policies, as Mearsheimer and Rosato point out that rationality is about process, not outcomes. However, they point out that a state that pursues a rational strategy is more likely to succeed, since it has "a good understanding of international politics and has carefully considered how to proceed". Moreover, the high costs of failure lead to avoid acting irrationally.
The authors make an interesting contribution, establishing conceptual guidelines in a particularly slippery terrain that affects human subjectivity. However, separating the process of adopting strategies from result certainly simplifies the issue, but it is not certain that it clarifies it. For however respectable in their theoretical formulation, there are options that in certain circumstances may be quite unfeasible or ineffective, and their failure may say a lot about how un 'intelligent' - however endowed with internal logic - it was to adopt them.
The authors put the main theories in the field of international relations on an equal rational footing, because they recognize that, although they are realists, neither the realist nor the liberal theories, both in their multiple formulations, have imposed themselves on the others. But, for example, it could be said that neither the liberalism of George Bush's policy of extending democracy in the Middle East, nor Putin's realism in his aggression against Ukraine, in the event that in the end he does not gain territory or Ukraine enters NATO, was very rational, because of the evidence that it was bound to fail, (one might ask whether Putin would have invaded the neighboring country if it had been clear to him that the power in Kiev was not going to crumble as he thought: in any case, it would be as rational - because it has its logic - to invade as not to invade, a dilemma that the authors of the book do not deal with).
On the other hand, the authors separate rationality and morality. And although realist theory has generally separated both orders -the famous 'reason of state', an expression that is not used in the book-, it is not difficult to accept that there may be a threshold of adversity -crimes, deaths, pain...- that delegitimizes certain foreign policy decisions.