This podcast will be going off air for the latter part of November and all of December due to paid family leave and the addition of a new member of the family, but I plan to be back in 2020 with fresh content, raring to head into the primary election cycle. I’ve got some content lined up for that that I’ll be excited to dive into.
Between now and then, I’ll be devoting future podcast episodes to unpacking some of the major themes and ideas from Episode 7 related to foreign policy and international relations. I’ll be doing this not only to further develop the ideas of that episode, but also because I’ll be focusing on international politics and foreign policy both in my teaching and research this semester.
Overview
To kick off this extended sequence on international relations, then, I’m going to spend the next two episodes broadening the discussion on IR theories I introduced last episode – realism, liberalism, constructivism – by first introducing an additional theory this week: Rational Actor Theory. Next week, we’ll look at a particular story in the news and consider how these different theories inform our understanding of it. For both of these episodes, I’ll use President Trump and his foreign policy forays as a case study, which brings me to today’s main topic
Main Topic: Is Trump a Rational Actor?
Leading Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden have both described President Trump as “irrational” in the last month, and that’s probably a more charitable used by the many Democratic candidates to describe the President’s behavior.
So, it’s clearly a topic of interest, the apparent rationality of the President, and that’s as it should be. I mean, a cursory reading of Article II of the Constitution reveals a list of critical duties the President must execute. As American citizens, whether we vote for the guy or not, it would probably help to know if the President is in fact approaching his duties with some level of rationality, right? Just because we’re a democracy doesn’t mean we want the lunatics running the asylum.
So what does it mean to, in fact, be rational?
Well, the dictionary definition is (according to Merriam-Webster), “having reason or understanding” and “irrational” is conversely defined as “not endowed with reason of understanding.” Simple enough, right?
But there’s something missing in these two general definitions: Expressing what an individual has reason or understanding of. In other words, what must an individual be able to reason about and/or understand in order to be considered rational? Who gets to define and set that bar of knowledge and cognitive ability? And, once that bar is set, how do we measure an individual’s ability relative to that measuring line? These are the sorts of questions that behavioral and social scientists are very interested in, and in the discipline of political science, it’s given rise to the development of Rational Actor Theory.
In the international relations (IR) theory world, one of the most well known articulations of the interactions of rational actors in a conflict scenario is from Graham Allison and his analysis on the 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis. Fundamentally, Allison’s rational actor model takes the individual actor as the main unit of analysis. That actor is the key decision-maker in a given conflict scenario. In the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the actors analyze would be US President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Kruschev. For purposes of this podcast episode, though, we’ll update Allison’s analysis to look at Donald Trump’s highly personalized approach to foreign policy.
Rational Actor Theory posits that actors are rational, meaning that to the degree of information they have on hand, they have an ordered set of preferred actions and outcomes. This assumption does not presume complete and perfect information, only that an ordered set of preferences exist for each actor.
Additionally, rational actor theory assumes that the order of priority is based on minimizing costs and maximizing gains, ostensibly for the political entity the actor represents, not necessarily their individual person, and this could be a potential point of digression with President Trump.
So in President Trump’s case, his recent cancellation of bringing Taliban leaders to Camp David to hammer out details on a final peace deal in Afghanistan could be seen as a rational decision in that the decision was a response to a recent Taliban attack that killed an American service member.
To simplify the situation, President Trump had two bits of information: an American service member was killed in Afghanistan and the Taliban was responsible. If negotiating with such a group was already distasteful (or not a preferred step), news of this action would have made it less preferable especially as Trump prepares for a coming reelection campaign, and his base is heavily pro-military. In other words the benefits of hosting a peace conference at Camp David with the Taliban could have generated some significant political blowback that Trump may have judged to be of greater import than the possibility (not the promise) of finalizing a peace deal.
Potentially, rational actor models can be generalized to all crises on the basis of its simple assumption of ordered preferences that govern policy options open to leaders, and provides a general method in ordering those options based on probability of success. However, it’s the very simplicity of the model that some critique noting, that it’s a helpful way of organizing a historical narrative, but it doesn’t really make it’s assumptions clear as to why decision makers are the best unit of analysis. The lack of clear assumptions make testing hypotheses difficult.
Conversation Starters
So, is Trump a rational actor? First, how would you answer this question prior to listening to this podcast? What did you base that assessment on? His words? His actions? Both?
Now, let’s bring this down to the personal level? If people had to determine your rationality based on your words and actions, or a selection of them? Could they find evidence of irrationality? Likely they would, which drives home the helpfulness of rational actor theory’s concept of rationality: ordered preferences based on on-hand information. It’s not about what amount of information is available generally, but what information has been consumed at the point of evaluation and decision-making.
In relationship to Trump, and the presidency in general, what do we or should expect of our presidents in terms of information consumption? Trump could be perfectly rational, but if he’s low information rational, then he could be making technically rational decisions on incomplete information. So, it may satisfy the conditions of rationality, but not the conditions for wisdom or good decision-making.
The spoken and written word (podcasts and reading)
Graham Allison’s profile on the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s website contains links to several articles that are worth taking a look at from one of America’s leading IR scholars.
I only unpack the individual actor-level model of Allison’s analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he uses two other models, and all three are critiqued by Bender and Hammond.
I’ve referenced the Bombshell and Net Assessment podcasts in the last episode. Try listening to the most recent episodes of each podcast, and guess what interpretive frameworks the speakers are using to evaluate the global political environment.
The last word
“And thus, the actions of life often not allowing any delay, it is a truth very certain that, when it is not in our power to determine the most true opinions we ought to follow the most probable.”
Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method
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