The Russian invasion was a rational act

by John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato

This is just a chapter of their How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy book, which has just been published. Took the authors two years and nine months of non-stop work to finish it. Honestly, I can’t wait for my copy to arrive.

Summary:

– It is widely believed in the West that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was not a rational act.

– These claims all rest on common understandings of rationality that are intuitively plausible but ultimately flawed. Contrary to what many people think, we cannot equate rationality with success and non-rationality with failure.

– Rationality is not about outcomes. Rational actors often fail to achieve their goals, not because of foolish thinking but because of factors they can neither anticipate nor control.

– Also, rational policies can violate widely accepted standards of conduct and may even be murderously unjust.

– What is “rationality” in international politics? Rational states aggregate the views of key policymakers through a deliberative process, one marked by robust and uninhibited debate.

– There is solid evidence that Putin and his advisers thought in terms of straightforward balance-of-power theory, viewing the West’s efforts to make Ukraine a bulwark on Russia’s border as an existential threat that could not be allowed to stand.

– The Russian decision to invade was also the product of a deliberative process, not a knee-jerk reaction by a lone wolf.

– Not only was Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine rational, but it was also not anomalous. Many great powers are said to have acted non-rationally when in fact they acted rationally.

– Examples: Germany before WW1, Japan in the run-up to Pearl Harbour. In both cases, the key policymakers relied on credible theories of international politics and deliberated among themselves to formulate strategies for dealing with the various issues facing them.

– While there are irrational exceptions (Chamberlain in 1938, the USA in Iraq in 2003) most states are rational most of the time.

– If non-rationality is the norm, state behaviour can be neither understood nor predicted, and studying international politics is a futile endeavour.

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“All of this is to say that Western policymakers would be well-advised not to automatically assume that Russia or any other adversary is non-rational, as they often do. That only serves to undermine their ability to understand how other states think and craft smart policies to deal with them. Given the enormous stakes in the Ukraine war, this cannot be emphasised enough.”

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John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago

Sebastian Rosato is Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame