The Myth of Rational Action in IR
Why Most International Relations Theories Suck
Recently Vladimir Putin while discussing the context of the Ukraine war and situation in the world as a whole admitted that “while everything is stagnant, people want to hustle, because they die from boredom”, thus suggesting that his decision to invade Ukraine was undertaken because he wanted to shake things up a bit.
When people think of international politics, realists assume that states act in their own national interests and that is a correct assumption, the problem is that people have different conceptions of how to act in the national interests.
Most international experts have failed to predict the Russian invasion of Ukraine including yours truly. Here for instance is a short clip of the most acclaimed IR expert in the world failing to predict the invasion merely 9 days before it actually happened.
He conducted a “cost-benefit” analysis and concluded that there is no way that Russia is going to invade Ukraine. This I also have done when I argued that Russia will not invade Ukraine because of a series of assumption:
Russia had a better opportunity to do so in 2014
Russia wants to influence Ukraine internally as opposed to externally (Minsk agreements)
There isn’t much of Russian support for invading Ukraine and the Russian state TV is not generating support for invasion of Ukraine, but mocking people who are claiming that an invasion is immanent.
NATO expansion is a poor casus belli (adding Ukraine to NATO will also lead to conflict with Russia)
The war will cripple the Russian economy
Many Ukrainians will resist occupation and cause problems for Russia
Not enough troops for an invasion (this aged super good lmao)
I based it off the assumption that states act in ways the international politics incentivizes them to act, and if the disincentive is too high, they are just not going to act. Nothing is wrong with my arguments, but what if you operate in completely different parameters?
In a now deleted Substack article Anatoly Karlin supported a Russian imperialist thesis and argued that the invasion of Ukraine was completely rational from a Russian imperialistic mindset.
Dugin said the same thing:
The problem with a rational choice theory is that it’s a cost-benefit analysis of a potential action, it barely attempts to wonder why a desire for said action arises in the first place. Inner psychological predispositions come first and act as a basis for further cost benefit analysis. A rationale for engaging in selective acts merely acts as a superstructure for already existing desires such as gambling, hate, altruism, status acquisition or as in this case invading Ukraine.
When I started unlearning these assumptions, it came as no surprise that Ukraine, at the most opportune moment to negotiate a favorable deal—late 2022, after decisively embarrassing Russia in two major offensives—chose instead to reject diplomacy and escalate the war. They even enacted a law prohibiting peace talks with Russia until achieving total victory (funny enough, any negotiations undertaken now, from a weakened position, would be legally impermissible under their own legal framework).
And so, it is not the laws of international politics that we must study in order to explain state behavior, but rather the individual behavior of said states (and their leaders). Some states may value, jihad, liberalism, communism or any other mental virus above their own “rational interest”. Why does the support for Hamas among Palestinians keeps being so high despite it allowing Israel to commit what most regard as a genocide against them? That is certainly not rational, but maybe they value something else above rationality?
To make sure I don’t appear as a pro-Israeli here, I will add that most Westerners have likewise became shocked at the Israeli response to October 7th, but to people familiar with the innerworkings of the Jewish state and their attitudes towards the Palestinians that did not come as a surprise.
What I am saying is that ideology triumphs rational geopolitics *sometimes*. One of the new-left Israeli historians Israel Shahak argued that the main problem of Israel is that it was both a Jewish state and a normal state like any others. He lamented the Western explanation and excuses of Israeli actions to primarily be a property of “racism”, “capitalism”, or US imperialism as opposed to the entrenched Jewish supremacist ideology that prevents Israel from acting like any other normal state.
For some reason people look for motivations and driving behavior factors like culture, IQ and Big Five to explain individual human behavior, but forget to also apply a similar methodology in relation to state behavior (especially if we are talking about the behavior of a leader in an authoritarian state). A state’s actions are primarily driven by the characteristics of the people who run it, hence why there is such a massive global inequality in both output and in the ways that states handle themselves. So if we wish to truly explain a behaviour of any state under the sun, we must not conduct a cost-benefit analysis but rather study their mentality and the personality of the people running it.
Because at the end of the day, if a leader of a state literally suggested he invaded another state because he thinks it doesn’t exist and he also got bored, maybe we shouldn’t attempt to explain it by power imbalance or rationality.
