An Alternative Paradigm To State Rationality in Foreign Policy: the Iran-Iraq War

Abstract

A NUMBER of students of international politics, as well as most strategists and defense specialists, have assumed that states, or their elites, are rational. In practice, being has in fact been synonymous with being equally rational. The assumption of equal elite rationality is fairly explicit among choice and most game theorists (e.g., Riker and Ordeshook 1973; Bueno de Mesquita 1981; Zagare 1984; Ordeshook 1986; for an exception among game theorists, see Axelrod 1986).1 Bueno de Mesquita, for example, states that assuming that leaders of nations are strong, rational calculators of expected utility, I showed that nations initiate war only if there is expectation of a net increase in utility from was as compared to utility derived from maintaining status quo .. . (1983: 34). This position is somewhat different from that of Schelling who employs rationality as an assumption mainly because the premise of 'rational behavior' is a potent one for production of theory. Whether resulting theory provides good orpoor insight into actual behavior is... a matterfor subsequent judgment (1960: 4) [emphasis added]. The assumption of equal rationality of states has also gained impetus from emergence of Neo-realism (e.g., Waltz 1979; Gilpin 1981; Keohane 1984), a reworking of older Realist tradition (e.g., Morgenthau 1960; Carr 1946) and characterized by a conception of reified state as only meaningful actor in international politics. It is consequently unconcerned with either domestic politics or elite's role in foreign policy, despite substantial relevant literature of 1960s and 1970s (see Tetreault 1987). It is purpose of this paper to demonstrate that, in spite of some utility, there are fundamental conceptual and methodological difficulties involved with assumption of equal state and/or elite rationality and to offer an alternative paradigm which may have more explanatory value and interpretive capacity for actual behavior of states. The presentation will proceed through two major steps. The first will explicate

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 46 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.