Greetings Paulo Roberto Almeida, Table of ContentsH-Diplo: New posted contentH-Diplo: New posted contentH-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable Review 16-14 on Edwards, _Prisoners of their Premises_H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum Roundtable Review 16-14 George C. Edwards III. Prisoners of their Premises: How Unexamined Assumptions Lead to War and Other Policy Debacles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. ISBN: 9780226822822. 22 November 2024 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-14 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo Editor: Diane Labrosse Contents Introduction by Marika Landau-Wells, University of California, Berkeley. 2 Review by Don Casler, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 7 Review by Yuen Foong Khong, National University of Singapore. 11 Review by Caleb Pomeroy, University of Toronto. 16 Response by George C. Edwards III, Texas A&M University and University of Oxford. 20 Introduction by Marika Landau-Wells, University of California, BerkeleyGeorge C. Edwards’s Prisoners of their Premises: How Unexamined Assumptions Lead to War and Other Policy Debacles tackles a central question in the study of foreign policy making: how do we explain decisions that have observably catastrophic outcomes? Edwards’s argument is that a vital step in the making process–problem identification–provides significant purchase on this question. That is, in order to understand why leaders chose catastrophic action (or inaction), it is first necessary to understand what problem they believed would be solved by their actions, or what problem they ignored and so failed to address. Edwards traces the causal chain back a step further, as the book’s title suggests, by arguing that problem identification (in the affirmative or the negative) is at least partly a function of a set of premises that are held by policymakers. Over the course of three major case studies, Edwards finds that many of the premises held by policymakers in the situations he examines are, if not definitely false, then doubtful enough to have merited further scrutiny. These questionable premises persist even in the presence of disconfirming information for two reasons that Edwards dubs “limits on rationality” and “motivated reasoning” (2, 3). The implication Edwards draws from the case evidence is that had questionable premises received closer scrutiny (and been revised), policymakers might also have revised their conclusions regarding the presence/absence of problems, with knock-on effects for decisions made and not made. Prisoners of their Premises covers a tremendous amount of historical ground in service of establishing the connection between premises and problem identification. The book’s first chapter lays out the central argument, though not in a particularly formal way. This has the advantage of being more accessible to non-experts than a traditional “theory chapter” might be. But, as several of the reviewers note, the first chapter also leaves much unsaid on the state of the psychology and international relations (IR) literature. The book’s three primary cases center on decisions made during the Vietnam War between 1964 and 1965 (chapter 2), two decision points during the Korean War (chapter 4), and the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 (chapter 5). There are also a variety of mini-cases using both American and European examples, from the Embargo Act of 1807 to the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 (chapter 3). The final chapter (chapter 6) sets the stage for future work by enumerating what remains unknown about the premises relied upon in the service of problem identification. While “Problematizing Problems” is not as elegantly alliterative as the book’s chosen title, it might more accurately reflect both the book’s contribution and its explanandum. The logical back-tracing to argue for a theory of problem definition is a central contribution of Edwards’s book. Scholars have acknowledged the importance of understanding how problems are initially defined and the influence of problem definition on subsequent behavior.[1] But most grand theories of individual-level foreign policy making do not explicitly problematize the problem identification stage. Instead, these theories focus on downstream processes, such as the construction of the choice set (e.g., poliheuristic theory)[2] or the parameters affecting the ultimate option selected from a choice set (e.g., worldview, personality, cognitive and emotional processes)[3]. As the reviewers note, Prisoners of their Premises cannot speak directly to some of this work by virtue of its methodology, which selects on a specific type of choice outcome (catastrophic failure). Nevertheless, it poses a challenge to these literatures to offer clear articulations of their problem generating processes. In this H-Diplo|RJISSF roundtable, three excellent scholars working at the intersection of foreign policy making and psychology, Don Casler, Yuen Foong Khong, and Caleb Pomeroy,[4] offer their perspectives on Prisoners of their Premises. In the final essay, Edwards offers his reply. Collectively, the reviewers praise the book’s accessibility and its breadth. Casler says, “Edwards deserves credit for summarizing and synthesizing the vast literature on bias in decisionmaking, boiling it down to the two basic concepts of limited rationality and motivated reasoning.” The book’s coverage of history is also impressive. As Pomeroy puts it, “The narrative offers an interweaving of extensive historical material that only one of the field’s foremost scholars of the presidency could pull off.” In his review, Khong describes the work as “compact and elegantly argued.” Given that Edwards engages in the challenging task of premise documentation across time and space, Casler praises the fact that “Edwards does an excellent job of categorizing what the relevant and often interacting premises were.” There is also substantial agreement about where the book could have been more satisfying. Three themes emerge from the reviews. The first and most fundamental concerns the concept of a “premise.” At the outset, Edwards credits policymakers with “sets of beliefs about politics, policy, human nature, and social causality” of which he designates a subset as “policy-related premises” (1). But it is not entirely clear when a belief earns this particular designation and when it remains something less relevant to the question of problem identification. As Casler notes, “although referring to beliefs as premises absolutely makes for a catchy title, the analytic value of this move is somewhat unclear… [I]n practice, it is not entirely evident whether or how premises are distinct from the operational code’s philosophical beliefs… or instrumental beliefs...” Pomeroy expands upon this point of confusion: “Edwards uses the term ‘premises’ throughout the book largely as a catch-all for ‘assumptions about the world.’ But, I think the argument would have been strengthened by greater psychological specificity: by ‘premises,’ when do we actually mean to say ‘heuristics,’ ‘misperceptions,’ ‘prior beliefs,’ and/or ‘stereotypical images’?” In his reply, Edwards returns to the specific use-case of problem identification: “I chose the term ‘premises’ to represent fundamental assumptions that served as the foundation for the evaluation of the existence and nature of problems.” There is thus a tension between the narrow usage of “premise” that Edwards prefers and the constellation of concepts that the reviewers felt were invoked by the way “premise” is deployed. A second concern, which is shared by all three reviewers, is the extent to which the book’s case selection hampers its explanatory power. As Casler notes: “To establish that premises predict decisions, and often suboptimal ones, we would want to compare a set of such outcomes with a set of successes and see what policymakers believed in each case.” Khong puts the issue in more technical terms: “The exclusive focus on the link between incorrect premises and policy failure suggests that the work has a selection bias problem.” As Pomeroy notes, “[G]iven that much of the book’s argument hinges on the observation that these premises were detrimental to decisionmaking (and therefore, counterfactually, that decisions would have been improved in the absence of premises), more could have been done to establish ex ante rational baselines or expectations.” Whether rational base-lines are appropriate or not, the precise nature of the counterfactuals involved in Edwards’s thought-experimental approach are not fully specified. In his reply to these concerns, Edwards acknowledges the absence of foreign policy successes within the cases. He reemphasizes the book’s focus on “foreign policy failures, indeed, disasters” and argues it is still possible to understand these by looking at cases which share the common theme of false premises. This consistency is the crux of Edwards’s argumentative strategy: “The premises underlying the policy failures I analyze remain faulty, and they are so fundamental to determining decisions about the need for and nature of action that there is little question that they affected policy decisions.” How can we make sense of the reviewers concerns and the author’s conviction regarding the book’s analytical approach? It strikes me that the reviewers and the author are referencing fundamentally different inferential strategies in their commentaries. From a Millian perspective, the inferential approach used in Prisoners of their Premises is akin to Mill’s Method of Agreement, while the reviewers are hunting for the ingredients needed to apply Mill’s Method of Difference.[5] The Method of Agreement looks for a single similarity across otherwise widely varying cases with the same outcome. The Method of Difference relies on isolating a factor that differs between two otherwise highly similar cases with different outcomes. The Method of Agreement cannot yield the kind of comparative causal claim the reviewers are expecting, and for this reason has received criticism in some circles,[6] but it is up to readers to decide whether the book’s analytic approach is ultimately convincing. Finally, the reviewers are split on the novelty of the contribution offered by Prisoners of their Premises. From the perspective of the psychology and IR literature, Casler finds “there is not that much new ground broken here: few, if any scholars in these research programs dispute the idea that erroneous or unquestioned assumptions are responsible for lots of bad policy outcomes.” With respect to the case studies themselves, Pomeroy notes: “While Edwards is probably correct that IR research has yet to use the term ‘premises’ as a theoretical description of the aforementioned preconceptions (x), IR research does point to the existence and consequences of these preconceptions in each of the book’s three primary cases.” But Khong demonstrates that there are other audiences and use-cases for the ideas put forward in Prisoners of their Premises. Khong’s innovative review applies the book’s framework to the contemporary tensions between the United States and China to ask: “What might be the underlying premises of Biden’s belief that the US needs to defend Taiwan?” The working through of this example demonstrates that Prisoners of their Premises can achieve its goal of bringing problem identification to the forefront of the conversation on foreign policy decisionmaking. This roundtable discussion highlights a number of ways in which that conversation can advance, though some readers will need to reorient around Edwards’s chosen terminology and revisit their own assumptions about where the study of decisionmaking begins.
Contributors: George C. Edwards III is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Jordan Chair in Presidential Studies Emeritus at Texas A&M University. He is also a Distinguished Fellow at the University of Oxford. A leading scholar of the presidency, he has written or edited 27 books on politics and policymaking. He was editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly for 24 years and general editor of the Oxford Handbook of American Politics series. Professor Edwards has served as president of the Presidency Research Section of the American Political Science Association and held senior appointments at Oxford, the University of London, Sciences Po-Paris, Peking University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Marika Landau-Wells is an Assistant Professor in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she was also a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. For 2021–2022, she was a W. Glen Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Don Casler is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studies topics at the nexus of international security and international political economy. He has held fellowships at Brown University and the University of Notre Dame. His work has appeared in outlets such as the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Politics, Security Studies, and World Politics. His research has received awards from the American Political Science Association and International Studies Association. Yuen Foong Khong is Li Ka Shing Professor of Political Science at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. Among his publications are “How Not to Learn from History,” International Affairs, 95:5 (September 2022) “Power as Prestige in World Politics,” International Affairs, 95:1, January 2019; and Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton University Press, 1992). Caleb Pomeroy is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, jointly appointed to the Department of Political Science and Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. He was previously a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, as well as the Diana Davis Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Security at Dartmouth College's Dickey Center.
Review by Don Casler, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignIn Prisoners of their Premises, George Edwards addresses several critical and persistently vexing questions for students of public policy and decision making: Why do otherwise capable and dedicated individuals often make disastrous choices when devising policy? Why can’t ostensibly well-intentioned people deal with challenges to their worldviews or change course when facing failure? The answer, according to Edwards, lies in premises, or more precisely, decision makers’ “beliefs about how the world works as it does and why it does so.” As the book’s title suggests, decision makers bring a set of preexisting notions about “politics, policy, human nature, and social causality” to the table when they assume positions of power (1). These premises are difficult to change because of two unfortunate features of human psychology: cognitive limitations and motivated reasoning. The former refers to the mental shortcuts that humans use, of necessity, to process information in a complex world, while the latter invokes the human propensity to make that information fit with the way that we already think. The upshot is that decision makers tend to see problems where they don’t truly exist while ignoring or minimizing those that do. By engaging in a thought experiment (“What if we knew little else about the influences on decision makers aside from their core premises regarding a policy?” 8), Edwards amasses an impressive volume of evidence from prominent twentieth- century foreign policy choices in the United States and other nations to point out the persistent influence of (typically faulty) beliefs held by people whose decisions are influential for matters of war and peace. There is a lot to like in this account. The basic intuition is straightforward and pulls together key strands of research on the psychology of decision making in an eminently intelligible way, while the evidence is presented in a systematic, easy-to-follow format. However, I was left with some lingering questions about the book’s intended audience, the scope of its theoretical contribution, and its approach to case selection. Prisoners of their Premises rightly begins with the compelling puzzle outlined above: people who are otherwise generally qualified to hold positions of power often make self-destructive choices, typically with terrible consequences for themselves and others. While this observation certainly bears repeating—especially as we watch Russian President Vladimir Putin double down on his ill-advised invasion of Ukraine—the book does not always make clear who needs to hear it. Nevertheless, we can infer a few possible audiences. On the one hand, Prisoners of their Premises was published with a respected university press, so presumably the academic/scholarly communities who study foreign policy and political psychology are one set of potential readers. Yet as discussed further below, there is not that much new ground broken here: few, if any scholars in these research programs dispute the idea that erroneous or unquestioned assumptions are responsible for lots of bad policy outcomes. On the other hand, the book is about decision makers and the blunders they often commit, so perhaps the policy practitioner community is another relevant audience. The concluding chapter, which is appropriately entitled “No Silver Bullet,” discusses how decision makers might reevaluate their premises and enumerates potential agents of change in those beliefs. But after encouraging policymakers to persistently question their assumptions and subject them to rigorous analysis, Edwards concludes that there is “no simple solution to the problem of faulty premises,” which is not exactly actionable advice (108). Thus, because the book never explicitly indicates who it is speaking to, it is not necessarily easy to pin down its precise contribution. For instance, two of its subsidiary premises (pun intended) are that international relations (IR) scholars have not attempted to “isolate the role of officials’ premises in their decisions” (x) and that “although decision making is the most important role of political leaders, it is the one we understand least” (7). On the first issue, scholarship by Robert Jervis and fellow scholars of political psychology in international relations have paid significant attention to beliefs as a cause of decisions.[7] Though Prisonersof their Premises carefully and thoroughly engages with Jervis’s work at various points, this first premise is almost surely a bridge too far. On the second matter, IR has recently experienced a renaissance, or so-called “behavioral turn,” in which psychological theories about beliefs, as well as their heterogeneity among decision makers, have returned to the fore.[8] Recent scholarship has established predictable behavioral tendencies among individuals along a litany of dimensions including epistemic motivation, nationalism, time and risk preferences, hawkishness, and self-monitoring, just to name a few.[9] While we can never claim to understand everything there is to know about decision making as an activity that political leaders perform, we do already know quite a bit—and perhaps more than Prisoners of their Premises acknowledges. Nevertheless, Edwards deserves credit for summarizing and synthesizing the vast literature on bias in decision making, boiling it down to the two basic concepts of limited rationality and motivated reasoning. The book also spells out the practical consequences of these biases, which lead decision makers to invent problems that do not exist and ignore or misdiagnose the ones that do exist. For new or early students of political psychology and/or international relations, the first chapter offers a welcome and laudably succinct introduction to what these biases are and how they operate. Instructors of these subjects could certainly do worse than to make it required reading among advanced undergraduates, master’s students in public policy, or first-year graduate students. At the same time, the actual argument that Prisoners of their Premises advances is quite familiar. Cognitive limitations and motivated reasoning are longstanding and well-understood concepts in both political psychology and international relations; Jervis covered them both, along with their connection to decision making, extensively in Perception and Misperception. Scholars such as Rose McDermott have made significant strides in integrating Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s insights from prospect theory into our study of how leaders behave.[10] And although referring to beliefs as premises absolutely makes for a catchy title, the analytic value of this move is somewhat unclear. For instance, Prisonersof their Premisesseeks to distinguish its approach from the “operational code” framework developed by Nathan Leites and Alexander George.[11] But in practice, it is not entirely evident whether or how premises are distinct from the operational code’s philosophical beliefs (“about fundamental issues of history and central questions about the nature of politics and conflict”) or instrumental beliefs (“about the efficacy of various strategies for advancing…interests,” 7). Edwards instead focuses “on premises more directly related to specific policies”—yet the operational code framework does not preclude the possibility that philosophical and instrumental beliefs can pertain to discrete policy choices (7). Alexander George himself described the operational code as concerning “the problem of action” and “as a prism that influences the actor’s perceptions and diagnoses of the flow of political events, his definitions and estimates of particular situations.”[12] If anything, then, the effort that Prisoners of their Premises makes to differentiate itself from the operational code may undersell a major theoretical contribution, which is to make some practical use of a conceptual framework that, as Edwards acknowledges, has long languished.[13] Empirically, given its focus on decision makers’ beliefs, Edwards engages in the previously described thought experiment, asking what we can learn leaders’ behavior by simply examining the core assumptions with which they approached a given challenge. As the introductory chapter rightly notes, the most rigorous investigation of what role premises play “would require isolating their influence” (6). Short of on this ambitious task, Prisoners of their Premises surveys a series of key decisions about conflict and cooperation made by the US and other countries. For the central cases involving US military interventions in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, Edwards does an excellent job of categorizing what the relevant and often interacting premises were. The evidence presented is, unsurprisingly, consistent with the idea that premises predict decisions and that policymakers hardly ever challenge their core assumptions along the way. Though this is a fair conclusion to draw from the evidence, Prisoners of their Premises looks explicitly and exclusively at what it describes as prominent foreign policy disasters, with the subtext that faulty or flawed premises were responsible for such unfortunate results. In selecting on this sort of outcome, however, the book may limit the explanatory power of its argument. To establish that premises predict decisions, and often suboptimal ones, we would want to compare a set of such outcomes with a set of successes and see what policymakers believed in each case. As Richard Betts has argued, this is a tricky but worthwhile exercise so long as we acknowledge that the choices about what strategy or policy to pursue in any given situation are essentially gambles based on subjective estimates about the risks and stakes involved. Betts reminds us that we ought not to praise decision makers for great foresight or judge them too harshly in hindsight. For instance, during World War II, German Führer Adolph Hitler and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill both rolled the dice on multiple occasions. Hitler’s decisions to invade the Soviet Union and declare war on the United States led Germany to strategic ruin, but his beliefs about the conflict were not necessarily unreasonable: a preventive attack on the Soviet Union made sense before its power increased; the British would not settle so long as there was hope of Russian resistance; the Soviet Union would be easier to defeat than France; and the US would take a long time to fully enter the war, while Germany would get credit for keeping its Axis treaty obligations. By contrast, Churchill’s decision to keep fighting in 1940 led to Britain’s finest hour, but his beliefs about the conflict were not necessarily reasonable: he assumed that the German economy was relatively weak; that the unproven technology of strategic bombing could knock out German industrial capacity; and that American intervention was a given, and soon to come.[14] In other words, Hitler held fairly logical premises that produced decisions which led to Germany’s eventual defeat, whereas Churchill harbored fairly illogical premises that yielded decisions which led to Britain’s ultimate victory. To reveal my own premises, though I myself am perfectly willing to believe that premises often constrain decision makers in ways that lead to poor or even catastrophic outcomes, the thought experiment in Prisoners of their Premises does not set up a research design or select cases in a way that allows for full evaluation of the argument. These critiques notwithstanding, Prisoners of their Premises is a thoughtful tome that cements our understanding of the role that beliefs play in foreign policy decision making. Here’s hoping that it prompts readers to question some of their own assumptions.
Review by Yuen Foong Khong, National University of SingaporeIn a blurb for Prisoners of their Premises, I wrote:
In this H-Diplo discussion of Edwards’s book, I will seek to elaborate on the last sentence of my blurb by articulating and critiquing the premises that are likely to inform US decisionmakers as they contemplate a not-so-hypothetical future conflict—a conflict with China in the Taiwan Straits. Applying Edwards’s insights to a future event, whose outcome is unknown, I argue, is a hard but appropriate test of their applicability and utility. Such a “test” by putting the analyst in the ex-ante position similar to that of decisionmakers, where one has to rely on premises whose concordance with reality are assumed rather than proven, should help showcase the promise as well as limitations of Edward’s approach. Prisoners of their Premises focuses systematically on three wars: Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq (2003). Relying on classics as well as recent secondary literature on these wars, Edwards’s re-examination of the US decisionmaking that led to these wars is deftly executed. In each of the cases, he extracts the key premises or assumptions that informed US decisionmaking, shows how these premises were at variance with reality, thus leading policymakers to concoct a strategic problem where none existed (Vietnam and Iraq 2003), and oftentimes, also ignore or underestimate the enormity of their tasks (Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq). Unsurprisingly, such unvalidated premises and error-prone assumptions led to bad and costly decisions that failed to achieve US objectives. China was the major adversary in two of the three wars in which US policymakers failed to achieve their objectives because they were imprisoned or locked in by their faulty premises. The return of US-China geopolitical rivalry in the last decade and its growing intensity in recent years have led some to predict that another US conflict with China, where the latter will be the antagonist, beckons. It is likely to be over Taiwan, when and if China chooses to use force to achieve its reunification imperative. President Joseph Biden has said on four occasions that the US will defend Taiwan in the event of an unprovoked attack. US Air Force General Michael Minihan predicts a US-China war over Taiwan in 2025, while former Chief of the Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Philip Davidson believes that China is likely to attack before 2027.[15] Chinese leaders believe that the US is already engaged in the encirclement and containment of China. There is no better time to pop the question posed by Edwards and mentioned above: what are the premises underlying the definition of the problem and why should we accept them? The question needs to be posed in terms of both the US and China, but for the purposes of this discussion, we will focus on the former. What might be the underlying premises of Biden’s belief that the US needs to defend Taiwan? We might have asked the same question without Prisoners of their Premises, but Edwards’ book-length treatment of how unexamined and taken-for-granted premises have led to America’s failed wars and his point about the necessity of interrogating the premises reinforce the value and urgency of asking the question. In what follows, I will spell out three different underlying premises that may inform US decisionmakers contemplating why the US should defend Taiwan, the purpose of this exercise is threefold: (i) to apply Edwards’ insights to a future, hypothetical situation; (ii) to demonstrate the utility of his approach, and (iii) to spark a conversation on how best to interrogate and judge the validity of policymakers’ premises and assumptions. Defending Taiwan, Premise 1. Is it about the epic contest between democracy and autocracy, in which democracies such as the US cannot be truly secure in a world where autocracies such as China, Russia, and Iran represent an alternative order? Critics of this hard-to-validate premise can usefully take a leaf from Edward’s analysis of Iraq and Vietnam and view it (premise) as an instance when decisionmakers assume a problem (worthy of going to war over) where one does not exist. Moreover, the premise also runs the risk of underestimating the enormity of the task. Can the US win? And even if the US defeats China, what follows? Will China descend into an post-invasion Iraq (2003) like chaos and create even greater economic and security turmoil in the region and beyond? The very fact that we are able to raise questions this structured way testify to the utility of Edwards’ approach. Defending Taiwan, Premise 2. If fighting on the premise of winning the democracy versus autocracy struggle is problematic, what about Taiwan as the strategic-symbolic crux of the US-China competition for hegemony in East Asia? As the established hegemon, the US cannot afford to “lose” Taiwan to the rising challenger, China, who is seeking to displace the US as the regional hegemon. The premises here are (i) it is vital for the US to maintain its hegemonic position in East Asia (or as President Donald Trump put it, “When I came in we were heading in a…direction that was going to allow China to be bigger than us in a very short period of time. That is not going to happen anymore”[16]), and (ii) the battle over Taiwan (when and if China uses force without provocation) will decide who will reign as the regional hegemon. This would be the Thucydides’s Trap come true,[17] with Taiwan as the focal point of the conflict. Those who argue that US hegemony is a force for good and that the US has a good chance of winning might find them acceptable, while those who are skeptical about US hegemony and worry about the US losing are likely to find them unconvincing. Defending Taiwan, Premise 3 focuses on the US need to act to preserve a rules-based international order where the unprovoked use of force—such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or a Chinese attack on Taiwan—must be resisted, This would be reminiscent of President Harry S. Truman’s presumptions about the necessity of resisting aggression and containing the spread of communism in making his decision to defend Korea in June 1950 (56-60). For Truman, it was necessary to resist aggression because, going by the experience of the 1930s, aggression unchallenged would whet the appetite of the aggressor, leading to graver incidents later, including a world war (58). Those who are skeptical about these presumptions can point to the inappropriateness of the 1930s analogy: the histories of how Taiwan came to be detached from China and those of the nations attacked by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler in the 1930s are drastically different. Moreover, unlike Germany, China has repeatedly made known that Taiwan is the core of its core interests, implying that while Taiwan’s reunification is not negotiable, its other interests are. As a long-time observer of how American decisionmakers have relied on “the lessons of history” in US diplomacy, I wager that in a future China-US military standoff over Taiwan, the 1930s analogy or “no more Munichs” argument is likely to be the key historical analogy invoked on the American side. The premise is that China’s President Xi Jinping is like Hitler’s Germany and appeasement (in Taiwan) would only embolden China to further aggression. The policy implication is to fight now rather than later. The Korean case involves two decisions—the June decision to intervene to “save the South” and September decision to march North to unify “Korea as a democratic nation” (61). It was the latter decision that brought China into the war and the focus of Edwards’ analysis. Edwards does a solid job of pointing to the faulty premises that led the US to expand its war aims and led it to ignore overwhelming evidence (pp. 64-66) that China would enter the war. Edwards is more ambivalent about the June decision. He argues that three premises informed US decisionmakers: first, North Korea was controlled by Russia and Russia was not keen on a war; second, it was vital to resist aggression, and third, it was necessary to contain the expansion of communism (56). According to Edwards, the first premise was wrong; he is also ambivalent about the second and third premises. Is Edwards implying that it would have been strategically wiser for the US not to have intervened to save South Korea in June 1950? Edwards either elides the question or suggests that it was unwise to intervene when he references Ernest May, who pointed out that the US “did not have to choose to go to war” because it “had no special obligation to South Korea” (60). It is not clear why Edwards bases a future US decision to go to war over Taiwan on premises two and three (and referencing either the Munich or Korean analogy). I hope I have succeeded in demonstrating the relevance and importance of Edwards’s work through the preceding discussion of the premises informing the Biden administration’s policy on the China-Taiwan issue. I look forward to Edwards’s responses. Such a discussion can only deepen our understanding of the value, as the challenges, of interrogating the premises of major decisions. I will conclude by raising a question about Edwards’s selection of cases. The exclusive focus on the link between incorrect premises and policy failure suggests that the work has a selection bias problem. That is, by examining only cases of failures, Edwards stacks the argument in favor of decisionmaking pathologies. If one begins (and ends) with failure, it is both tempting and easy to reason back to the decisionmaking process to identify cognitive or bureaucratic processes or other factors (such as personality quirks) that contributed to the failure. One way to address this problem is to include some analysis of a major American foreign policy success that can be attributed to sound and correct premises. In Groupthink, Irving Janis pointed to the Marshall Plan and the Cuban Missile Crisis as two major cases of US success and claimed that in both cases, groupthink was absent.[18] Hence the superior policy outcomes. For those who agree with Janis that the Crisis was resolved successfully (and in the United States’ favor),[19] it would be worthwhile to examine the premises that informed the decisionmaking of President John F. Kennedy and the Executive Committee’s (ExComm) decisionmaking. Such an examination might reveal initial premises that were sound, or were challenged, and how debate on these premises led to a clearer definition of the problem, stakes, and dangers. For example, was Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s definition of the strategic threat that “a missile is a missile” and that it mattered not whether it came from Cuba or Russia accepted by the ExComm, and if so, did it help facilitate the choice of the naval blockade instead of the “surgical” air strike option? Finally, a discussion of the premises and analogies, including Kennedy’s absorption of Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of Augustargument about the importance of giving adequate room to diplomacy as opposed to relying on military plans[20] could have enriched the book even further while strengthening its case about the importance of sound and examined premises.
Review by Caleb Pomeroy, University of TorontoIn a February 2002 press briefing, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously warned of foreign policymaking’s “unknown unknowns,” those areas of ignorance about which we are unaware. I would argue that in this book George Edwards powerfully shifts our attention to “unknown knowns,” those knowns so taken-for-granted that they hardly enter conscious awareness.[21] In many ways, Prisoners of their Premisesis not a traditional psychological IR book on foreign policy decisionmaking. Readers will not find a psychological theory adapted to international relations for the first time, nor explicit hypotheses tested. Instead, the book presents the reader with an important (and intriguing) thought experiment: how much can we explain about infamous foreign policy debacles by virtue of leaders’ premises alone (8)? The answer, according to Edwards, is quite a bit. The United States’ wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq 2003 receive the bulk of empirical attention. So too the reader encounters, inter alia, US President Thomas Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807, pre-World War I French military preparations, German Führer Adolf Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. In my read, Edwards does not revise or overturn the conventional historical wisdom so much as show that leaders’ premises go surprisingly far in explaining that wisdom. The narrative offers an interweaving of extensive historical material that only one of the field’s foremost scholars of the presidency could pull off. It is a seamless interweaving at that—a straightforward and convincing application of political psychology to elite decisionmaking. I found this no-frills journey to be surprisingly refreshing, and the accessibility of the book means that it will appeal to readers beyond the field of foreign policy decisionmaking, from diplomatic historians to general audience readers.Indeed, the book is most convincing on the grounds of historical breadth. Even for those readers who are the least predisposed to the argument, it is the ubiquity of premises—across time, place, and political ideology—that makes Edwards’s case so compelling. One potent example of this breadth is the seeming persistence of threat inflation in US foreign policy, from fears that the “loss of any single country” in Southeast Asia would “endanger the stability and security of Europe” to President Lyndon Johnson’s observation that Communists would “chase you right into your own kitchen” (19, 14). The former Vietnamese diplomat Luu Doan Huynh sums it up well: “If I may say so, you [Americans] were not only wrong, but you had, so to speak, lost your minds” (15). While this history is not necessarily new, it is a convincing reminder that IR scholars still need to do a better job of separating security competition from irrational fear–fear that gets a lot of people killed in the process.[22]Still, scholars of psychological IR can ask for more on two fronts. The first covers the nature and content of these premises. Edwards uses the term “premises” throughout the book largely as a catch-all for “assumptions about the world.” But, I think the argument would have been strengthened by greater psychological specificity: by “premises,” when do we actually mean to say “heuristics,” “misperceptions,” “prior beliefs,” and/or “stereotypical images’? For example, in the context of the Korean War, the book argues that one premise held by top US officials was that the “Soviet Union controlled China’s foreign policy” (61). But, given that this point is relatively well-established in the decisionmaking literature on Korea, what do we gain by labeling this point a “premise” as opposed to, say, a “misperception’?[23] Similarly, the book makes the somewhat uncontroversial claim that Cold War US leaders held the premise that “[i]t was necessary to contain the spread of communism” (56). But, did this premise result from US leaders’ images of their Soviet enemy?[24]Or, was this instead a deterrence heuristic that functioned as a decisionmaking shortcut?[25] Perhaps this preconception was, in fact, entirely rational given assessments of the strategic environment? Similar remarks could be made about US leaders’ mistaken assumptions about an impending fall of dominos in Southeast Asia or that “Iraqis would greet Americans as liberators” in 2003 (12, 92).[26] While Edwards is probably correct that IR research has yet to use the term “premises” as a theoretical description of the aforementioned preconceptions (x), IR research does point to the existence and consequences of these preconceptions in each of the book’s three primary cases.[27] Therefore, it would have been helpful to see clearer statements of how the book’s argument diverges from extant work. The stakes are not merely semantic–labeling something a “premise” versus “misperception,” say. While the book’s conclusion is correct that “there is no simple solution to the problem of faulty premises,” clearer diagnoses of the underlying psychological mechanisms would aid the development of effective remedies (108). For example, remedies for prejudicial stereotypes about outgroups might differ from solutions to eliminate misguided heuristics from the decisionmaking process. Without a precise diagnosis of these premises, it is hard to determine decisionmaking solutions. This point on conceptual clarity dovetails with a second potential critique on methodological grounds. In general, there is little engagement with alternative explanations throughout the book, both psychological and non-psychological explanations. In my reading, the primary alternative explanation comes via groupthink in the case of Korea (72-77). But, it is not readily apparent why groupthink is the obvious competing explanation and, in fact, I would have imagined that premises and groupthink often go hand-in-hand. Both groupthink and premises point towards perceptual and decisional conformity in an otherwise overwhelmingly complex world. Relatedly, given that much of the book’s argument hinges on the observation that these premises were detrimental to decisionmaking (and therefore, counterfactually, that decisions would have been improved in the absence of premises), more could have been done to establish ex ante rational baselines or expectations.[28] Of course, these are basic issues that face all scholars of decisionmaking and political psychology. These critiques aside, I think the book points to three interesting and important questions for scholars moving forward. First, a remarkable feature of the book is the ubiquity of premises across time and leaders. This begs a question that is engaged only in the final pages of the book: what are the origins of premises? The psychology of decisionmaking literature typically treats bottom-up, individual differences (e.g., personality types) and situational/structural factors (e.g., relative state power) as independent phenomena that compete to explain foreign policy.[29] There could be an individual differences argument that certain types of individuals tend to seek and obtain leadership or decisionmaker roles, and those same types of individuals are also more predisposed to a reliance on premises. If so, individuals vary in their tendency to rely on premises, but we just happen to observe a lot of those individuals who rely heavily on premises at the highest levels of decisionmaking. Alternatively, given the striking ubiquity of premises across time and administration, perhaps situational factors beyond the leader predictably shape leader psychology.[30] If so, then even the most rational leaders might consistently face certain pressures in the international environment (or the office itself) that tend to activate a reliance on premises. While psychological IR has many studies of leader differences, we have surprisingly little work on the ways in which situations shape leaders. A second area of inquiry that is revealed by Edwards’s analysis is the potential Eurocentric nature of “rationality.” I was struck by the fascinating quotations that allude to an empirically-observed, ethnocentric understanding of rational decisionmaking. Edwards explains that “[i]t is natural to assume that foreign leaders are rational as Americans understand rationality, so Americans frequently misread the intentions of other countries” (44-45). Further, speaking of Egypt’s attack on Israel in 1973, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger explained that “our notion of rationality did not take seriously the notion of starting an unwinnable war to restore self-respect” (52-53). Edwards later quotes from Alexander George and Richard Smoke’s work on the Korean War, who found that “estimates of Chinese intentions…were based on a faulty premise—namely, the belief that the Chinese leaders were calculating their interests in much the same way we did” (62). The location of a “rational baseline” is often central to psychological IR research–some theoretical expectation for how leaders ought to think and behave, versus how leaders actually do think and behave. But I struggle to recall research in IR that empirically examines cross-national variation in notions of rationality.[31] This, of course, could be a problem: perhaps we are using the wrong metrics to assess optimal decisionmaking in the first place. After all, the gospel of Adam Smith and Thomas Schelling did not fall from the heavens. Rather, rationality as a concept was constructed in a specific time and place, and it was a rationality understood from the vantage point of the (typically) white, male, European experience. Although this Eurocentrism has long existed as a metatheoretical critique, I think Edwards’s quotations from the highest levels of decisionmaking suggest that behavioral IR scholars might productively turn this critique into an area of active empirical inquiry.[32]Finally, the book urges examination of US decisionmakers’ premises regarding contemporary China’s reemergence. Although the book does not offer explicit engagement with this question, it does provide relevant warnings against the misuse of historical analogies over time. Edwards shows that the (often World War II) analogies that Cold War US leaders relied upon were, at best, uncomfortable fits to reality. This should serve as caution against the reflexive use of Cold War analogies, which were not particularly accurate at the time, to understand China today. As terms like “deterrence” and “containment” are back in fashion, it is worth asking whether the threat inflation that pervaded Cold War US foreign policy is rearing its head once again. As China reemerges and scholars debate the return of great power politics, how can US foreign policy avoid falling victim to the same premises again?
Response by George C. Edwards III, Texas A&M University and University of OxfordI would like to thank Josh Shifrinson for commissioning this roundtable; Marika Landau Wells for introducing it; and Dan Casler, Yuen Foong Khong, and Caleb Pomeroy for their thoughtful and stimulating reviews of my book. I also want to express my gratitude to Diane Labrosse for organizing the roundtable. I am pleased that the reviewers, each one of whom is a skilled analyst, find much to praise in Prisoners of Their Premises, and I appreciate their reflections on the book’s contribution to our understanding of foreign-policy decision making. The reviewers also raise stimulating questions. Yuen Foong Khong, whose book, Analogies at War,[33] is a major contribution to the study of foreign policy decision making, wonders where I stand on the decision to go to war in Korea in 1950. I focus primarily on what happened after the U.S. entered the war, but I agree that doing so was the right decision. However, I think there should have been a serious strategic-level discussion of the premises underlying the choice to go to war. Instead, there was none. President Harry Truman made his decision without consultation. Decisiveness may be a virtue, but unilateralism rarely is. Both Khong and Casler raise the issue of selection bias, an important consideration in all research. They suggest that it would be useful to also examine the decisionmaker premises underlying foreign policy successes. I agree. It is always best to have variation in the dependent variable. My focus, of course, was to try to explain foreign policy failures, indeed, disasters. Would we have more confidence in the finding that faulty premises, particularly those regarding the critical problem definition stage, are the key to explaining policy failure if I also had included, say, the Marshall Plan and the Gulf War? First, there are decisions not to act. I focus on the failure to act when action is necessary—when a situation is incorrectly defined as not posing a problem, as in not anticipating surprise attacks or not planning for post-invasion Iraq—and show that a failure to understand the problem was at the base of these decisions. Policymakers routinely conclude in the face of potential crises that it is not necessary to do anything, and that there is no problem. Sometimes inaction is the correct policy. If decisionmakers arrive at such a conclusion based on premises that are consistent with reality, this strengthens my argument. If they employ faulty premises but are still correct about the absence of a problem, we could conclude that other factors were key to a decision not to act. Even if such a conclusion was correct, however, would we ever infer that misunderstanding the existence of a problem was not central to the failure to anticipate the problem? I do not think so. What about situations in which decisionmakers take action and their policies are successful? If the successful policies are based on premises about the existence and nature of a problem that were consistent with reality, these outcomes clearly support my argument. If policymakers take action and ultimately accomplish their goals, but they act on the basis of faulty premises, could we conclude that premises are not important? If leaders are forced into action by, say a military attack, they may ultimately succeed in defeating the enemy, but their nation may pay a high cost in blood and treasure for their faulty premises regarding the likelihood and nature of such an attack. Unfortunately, there are many examples, including cases I examine such as French leaders’ plans for the German attack in the opening months of World War I, and the Soviet Union’s response to Operation Barbarossa in World War II. The premises underlying the policy failures I analyze remain faulty, and they are so fundamental to determining decisions about the need for and nature of action that there is little question that they affected policy decisions. It is noteworthy that none of the distinguished reviewers in this roundtable challenge this impact. Caleb Pomeroy asks for “greater psychological specificity” in the meaning of “premises.” I certainly include some prior beliefs and stereotypical images in the “premises” I analyze. I chose the term “premises” to represent fundamental assumptions that served as the foundation for the evaluation of the existence and nature of problems. Fundamental assumptions are critical to problem definition, the first and essential step in policy decisions, and the focal point of my analysis. Leaders can decide to go to war without gathering and evaluating options, for example, but sane leaders cannot do so without thinking there is a need to do so—a problem to be solved. I differentiate premises, as I have used the term, from misperceptions, because the latter can occur at many levels of thinking.[34] Decisionmakers may misperceive fundamental issues, such as who controlled Chinese foreign policy in 1950, but they also do so with matters that are less central to basic decisions such as the skill of an adversary’s fighter pilots or the success of an air raid. The same concern arises with “prior beliefs” and “stereotypical images, which need not be of a fundamental nature. The power of premises comes from serving as heuristics (which I discuss in detail in chapter 1), but policymakers rely on hundreds of heuristics, few of which affect policy at a basic level. Thus, I employed “premises” to keep our focus on the fundamental. Pomeroy also asks for clearer diagnoses of the underlying psychological mechanisms of premises in order to develop effective remedies. My focus is on showing the deleterious consequences of faulty premises, but his suggestion is well worth exploring and may be a critical next step in analyzing premises. Once we understand the power of faulty premises, we are better positioned to offer remedies and have a greater incentive to do so. He also suggests that “remedies for prejudicial stereotypes about outgroups might differ from solutions to eliminate misguided heuristics from the decisionmaking process.” I briefly address the source of premises (105-107), and there is much more research that needs to be done on this question. At this point, it seems to me that the core remedy for a faulty premise begins with evaluating its accuracy, whatever its source. Pomeroy emphasizes the necessity of considering alternative explanations. This is an important matter, and I am happy to deal with it. I address in considerable detail Irving Janis’s argument that groupthink was the explanation for the failure to anticipate the Chinese intervention in Korea in 1950[35] and find it wanting. Is groupthink the same as faulty premises? No. Janis makes clear that certain conditions of high stress trigger groupthink.[36] The theory is that groupthink leads to conforming behavior for coherent groups that need a source of security under stress. The conforming behavior resulting from shared premises, however, typically occurs before there is stress. Even during the Korean War, the worst decisions by US leaders were made while the United States and its allies were enjoying their greatest success. President Lyndon Johnson was not under intense pressure to expand the US role in Vietnam in 1964–1965. He was at his most popular and had considerable leeway. Similarly, President George W. Bush was high in the polls and under no widespread pressure to invade Iraq in 2003. There are many other factors in addition to the limits of human rationality and motivated reasoning that can influence decisions, including personality characteristics such as personal insecurity, distortions in the information and options presented to decision makers resulting from bureaucratic politics and bureaucratic structure, the organization and management of advisory processes, interactions among advisors and between them and the principal decision maker, an official’s personal style of decision making, and decision makers’ ethical and normative beliefs. There is no doubt that each may influence decision making at one time or another. I offer a common explanation for policy failures: faulty premises. There is no broadly applicable competing option for these national security disasters. The alternative explanations offered for the cases I analyze tend to be either shallow (Bush’s mendacity) or idiosyncratic (Johnson’s unique character and making style).[37] In every instance of which I am aware, I address these alternative explanations. Finally, Professor Pomeroy asks for establishing reasonable expectations for decisionmakers. Such baselines would certainly be useful, but they would be difficult to establish. On the one hand, one could argue that we should expect high-level officials frequently to be prisoners of unexamined premises, because that is what history teaches. Conversely, it is reasonable to ask these decisionmakers to engage sensibly with the evidence presented to them, seek more information when necessary, and, most importantly, challenge their own premises. As George W. Bush wrote about the invasion of Iraq, “We all should have pushed harder on the intelligence and revisited our assumptions.”[38] Casler argues in his review that fairly logical premises can lead to disaster and that success can occur despite leaders’ illogical premises. The examples he offers, however, are of a subsidiary nature. The greatest mistake of German Führer Adolf Hitler regarding invading the Soviet Union was doing it at all, not in doing it when and how he did. In Prisoners of their Premises, I focus on the problem definition stage of decision making. I argue that the most important aspect of decision making is determining whether to do something rather than the how and when to do it. Top US officials lamented their focus on how to fight in Vietnam and Iraq rather than whether to fight.[39] The tragedy of Vietnam is not that the United States did not win but that it fought at all. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s greatest contribution was his resolution to fight Nazi Germany. His views of how to do so were often wrong, but they were also of secondary importance to the Allies’ ultimate triumph (once the United States entered the war, the prime minister was not in charge of grand strategy). The French were on the winning side in World War I and the Soviet Union in World War II, but they paid an unnecessarily high price for victory because of their faulty premises, as I mentioned above. Casler also suggests that Prisoners of their Premises “may undersell a major theoretical contribution, which is to make some practical use of Alexander George’s operational code.”[40] I appreciate the compliment, especially because I benefitted from decades of friendship with Alex and learned much from him. It is certainly true that his framework “does not preclude the possibility that philosophical and instrumental beliefs can pertain to discrete policy choices.” The simple fact is that it is difficult to create operational codes, which is why the concept has languished. In effect, I have lowered the level of analysis to focus on premises that are directly related to policies. Tying premises to policy choices is more useful for explaining decisions than applying an operational code for each participant in decision making. In addition, these premises are more easily observed. I suggest that it is not necessary to identify highly abstract master beliefs, which are the key to operational codes, to understand policy failures. Casler wonders if Robert Jervis (another longtime friend from who I also learned a great deal) and his fellow scholars have not alerted us that erroneous or unquestioned assumptions are responsible for many unfortunate policy outcomes.I am hardly the first author to think about the impact of premises. Useful insights are scattered throughout the literature on international relations.[41] My point of departure is to focus explicitly on the foundation of all decisions: identifying problems. Before officials gather information and consider options, and before they make choices among alternatives, no matter what their making processes, they must implicitly or explicitly decide whether there is a problem to solve and, if there is, what their goals are in dealing with it. Premises may also blind policymakers to problems that require their attention or cause them to underestimate the likelihood of problems arising. Problems, then, are the base of decision making. They do not, however, come defined. Officials must delineate them. I explore the impact of the premises that are already in decision makers’ heads before they begin considering their options and making choices. This orientation as well as an exclusive focus on premises appears nowhere else in the literature, as all the participants in this roundtable recognize. The point of my thought experiment is to see how far we can go in explaining disastrous decisions knowing one thing: the premises that policymakers hold about the need for action or inaction. It turns out, premises explain the basic policy decisions quite well. Finally, Casler questions whether asking for decisionmakers to reexamine their premises is actionable advice. It is rare for scholars to provide such advice, but I have tried. From President John F. Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush, high-level officials have regretted not reevaluating their premises about the need for action. Virtually every leader whose country has been the victim of a surprise attack feels the same. The implication is that they could have asked the critical question about the need for action or inaction rather than assuming it. I detail why it is difficult for anyone to challenge their own beliefs, but it is conceivable for them or those around them to do so. At the very least, they could (1) identify the premises underlying their decisions to act or not act, (2) rigorously evaluate the evidence in support of these premises, (3) and ask what evidence it would take to change their minds. Difficult? Of course. Impossible? No. In conclusion, I would like to reiterate my gratitude to Yuen Foong Khong, Caleb Pomeroy, and Dan Casler for their reviews of my book, and to the H-Diplo|RJISSF editors for organizing the roundtable. I found the reviews stimulating and especially appreciate the opportunity to clarify and explain my argument.
[1]Morton H. Halperin and Priscilla Kanter Clapp Arnold, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (The Brookings Institution, 1974); Donald A. Sylvan and James F. Voss, Problem Representation in Foreign Policy Decision-Making (Cambridge University Press, 1998). [2]Alex Mintz, “The Decision to Attack Iraq: A Noncompensatory Theory of Decision Making,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 37:4 (December 1, 1993): 595-618, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002793037004001; Alex Mintz, “How Do Leaders Make Decisions?: A Poliheuristic Perspective,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 48:1 (February 1, 2004): 3-13, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002703261056. [3] For example, Alexander L. George, “The ‘Operational Code’: A Neglected Approach to the Study of Political Leaders and Decision-Making,” International Studies Quarterly 13:2 (1969): 190–222, https://doi.org/10.2307/3013944; Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics.(Princeton University Press, 1976); Rose McDermott, Risk-Taking in International Politics: Prospect Theory in American Foreign Policy (University of Michigan Press, 2001); Rose McDermott, Anthony C. Lopez, and Peter K. Hatemi, “‘Blunt Not the Heart, Enrage It’: The Psychology of Revenge and Deterrence,” Texas National Security Review 1:1 (2017), http://hdl.handle.net/2152/63934; John D. Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision: New Dimensions of Political Analysis (Princeton University Press, 2002). [4] Don Casler and Dylan Groves, “Perspective Taking through Partisan Eyes: Cross-National Empathy, Partisanship, and Attitudes toward International Cooperation,” The Journal of Politics 85: 4 (October 2023): 1471-86, https://doi.org/10.1086/723994; Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton University Press, 1992); Brian C. Rathbun and Caleb Pomeroy, “See No Evil, Speak No Evil? Morality, Evolutionary Psychology, and the Nature of International Relations,” International Organization 76:3 (March 2022): 656-89, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818321000436. [5] Christopher Macleod, “John Stuart Mill,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2020 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2020), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/mill/. [6] John Gerring, Case Study Research: Principles and Practices (Cambridge University Press, 2007); Payam Ghalehdar, “Mill’s Method of Agreement and Method of Difference as Methods of Analysis in International Relations,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.701. [7] Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations (Columbia University Press, 1970); Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics: New Edition (Princeton University Press, 1976); Deborah Welch Larson, Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation (Princeton University Press, 1985); Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics (Cornell University Press, 1996); Jack S. Levy, “Prospect Theory, Rational Choice, and International Relations,” International Studies Quarterly 41:1 (March 1, 1997): 87-112, https://doi.org/10.1111/0020-8833.00034; Jonathan Mercer, “Emotional Beliefs,” International Organization 64: 1 (January 2010): 1-31, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818309990221; Keren Yarhi-Milo, “In the Eye of the Beholder,” International Security 38:1 (2013): 7-51; Yarhi-Milo, Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations (Princeton University Press, 2014). [8] Emilie M. Hafner-Burton et al., “The Behavioral Revolution and International Relations,” International Organization 71:S1 (2017): S1-31, https://doi.org/S0020818316000400. [9] Brian C. Rathbun, Joshua D. Kertzer, and Mark Paradis, “Homo Diplomaticus: Mixed-Method Evidence of Variation in Strategic Rationality,” International Organization 71, no. S1 (2017): S33-60, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818316000412; Richard K. Herrmann, “How Attachments to the Nation Shape Beliefs About the World: A Theory of Motivated Reasoning,” International Organization 71: S1 (2017): S61-84, https://doi.org/10.1017\/S0020818316000382 Kertzer, “Resolve, Time, and Risk,” International Organization71:S1 (2017): S109-36, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818316000424; Ryan Brutger and Kertzer, “A Dispositional Theory of Reputation Costs,” International Organization 72: 3 (2018): 693–724, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818318000188; Yarhi-Milo, Who Fights for Reputation: The Psychology of Leaders in International Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2018). [10] Rose McDermott, Risk-Taking in International Politics: Prospect Theory in American Foreign Policy(University of Michigan Press, 2001); Rose McDermott, “The Psychological Ideas of Amos Tversky and Their Relevance for Political Science,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 13:1 (2001): 5-33, https://doi.org/10.1177/0951692801013001001. [11] Stephen G. Walker, “The Evolution of Operational Code Analysis,” Political Psychology 11: 2 (1990): 403-18, https://doi.org/10.2307/3791696. [12] Alexander L. George, “The ‘Operational Code’: A Neglected Approach to the Study of Political Leaders and Decision-Making,” International Studies Quarterly 13: 2 (1969): 190-222, 191, https://doi.org/10.2307/3013944. [13] Stephen G. Walker, “A Cautionary Tale: The Operational Code Analysis as a Scientific Research Program,” in Progress in International Relations Theory, ed. Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman (MIT Press, 2003). [14] Richard K. Betts, “Is Strategy an Illusion?,” International Security 25:2 (2000): 5-50. [15] Dan Lamothe, “US General Warns Troops that War with China is Possible in Two Years,” Washington Post, 27 January 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/01/27/us-general-minihan-china-war-2025/; Miya Tanaka, “Ex-US Indo-Pacific Commander Sticks to 2027 Window on Taiwan Attack.” Kyodo News, 23 January, 2023. https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2023/01/018a26a02962-ex-us-indo-pacific-commander-sticks-to-2027-window-on-taiwan-attack.html [16] Cited in Alan Swanson and Alan Rappeport, “Chill Remains between China and the United States in Latest Trade Talks,” New York Times, 23 August, 2018. [17] See Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China escape Thucydides’ Trap? (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). [18] Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascos, 2nd edition, (Houghton Mifflin, 1982), Chaps 6 and 7. Edwards is critical of Janis’s claim that groupthink characterized US making in Korea, 72-77. [19] For a view on the Cuban Missile Crisis as less than a total victory for the US, see Dominic Johnson and Dominic Tierney, Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics (Harvard University Press, 2006). [20] On the relevance of Tuchman’s book to Kennedy’s thinking, see Robert McNamara, In Retrospect. Vintage Books: 1996, p. 96; and James Blight, Joseph Nye, and David Welch, “The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited.” Foreign Affairs. 66:1 (Fall 1987): 170-188. [21] Naturally, Rumsfeld overlooked this category in that briefing, naming only three of the logical combinations. [22] As Amitav Acharya points out, the US contributed to, and mainstream IR often overlooked, the “hundreds of conflicts and millions of lives lost” outside of Europe during this “cold” war. See Amitav Acharya, “Global International Relations (IR) and Regional Worlds: A New Agenda for International Studies,” International Studies Quarterly 58:4 (2014): 648. [23] See, for example, Robert Jervis, “The Impact of the Korean War on the Cold War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 24:4 (1980): 563-592; Richard Ned Lebow, Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crises (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 209; Jonathan Mercer, “Emotion and Strategy in the Korean War,” International Organization 67:2 (2013): 221-252. [24] Richard K. Herrmann, James F. Voss, Tonya YE Schooler, and Joseph Ciarrochi, “Images in International Relations: An Experimental Test of Cognitive Schemata,” International Studies Quarterly 41:3 (1997): 403-433. [25] Janice Gross Stein, “Building Politics into Psychology: The Misperception of Threat,” Political Psychology9:2 (1988): 245-271. For a related argument on the use of analogies to simplify making, see Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). [26] David A. Lake, “Two Cheers for Bargaining Theory: Assessing Rationalist Explanations of the Iraq War,” International Security 35:3 (2010): 7-52. [27] See, for example, Mercer, “Emotion and Strategy in the Korean War”; Khong, “Analogies at War”; Lake, “Two Cheers for Bargaining Theory.” [28] For more on methodological challenges in psychological IR, see Robert Jervis, “War and Misperception,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18:4 (1988): 679-681. [29] See, for example, Joshua D. Kertzer and Dustin Tingley, “Political Psychology in International Relations: Beyond the Paradigms,” Annual Review of Political Science 21 (2018): 319-339; James W. Davis and Rose McDermott, “The Past, Present, and Future of Behavioral IR,” International Organization 75:1 (2021): 147-177. [30] See Robert Jervis, “Do Leaders Matter and How Would We Know?” Security Studies 22:2 (2013): 153-179. On the first image reversed, see Kertzer and Tingley, “Political Psychology in International Relations,” 329-330. For examples of this type of argument, see Caleb Pomeroy, “Hawks Become Us: The Sense of Power and Militant Foreign Policy Attitudes,” Security Studies, forthcoming; Brian C. Rathbun and Caleb Pomeroy, “See No Evil, Speak No Evil? Morality, Evolutionary Psychology, and the Nature of International Relations,” International Organization 76:3 (2022): 656-689. [31] Though, for an argument that psychological IR should move away from explaining deviations from rationality, see Dominic DP Johnson, Strategic Instincts: The Adaptive Advantages of Cognitive Biases in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 2020). For more on the adaptive role of threat perception in particular, see Marika Landau-Wells, “Dealing with Danger: Threat Perception and Policy Preferences,” PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018. [32] See, for example, David C. Kang, “Getting Asia Wrong: The Need for New Analytical Frameworks,” International Security 27:4 (2003): 57-85; Acharya, “Global International Relations (IR) and Regional Worlds.” [33] Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965(Princeton University Press, 1992). [34] See footnote 9. [35] Irving L. Janis, Groupthink, 2nd ed. (Houghton Mifflin, 1982), chapter 3. [36] Janis, Groupthink chapters 2, 10. [37] See, for example, H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty (HarperCollins, 1997), 323-324; John P. Burke and Fred I. Greenstein, How Presidents Test Reality: Decisions on Vietnam, 1954 and 1965 (Russell Sage Foundation, 1989); and James David Barber, The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House, 5th ed. (Routledge, 2019), chapters 2-4. [38] George W. Bush, Decision Points (Crown, 2010), 242. Also see 268-270. [39] Edwards, Prisoners of Their Premises, chapter 2. [40] He cites Alexander L. George, “The ‘Operational Code’: A Neglected Approach to the Study of Political Leaders and Decision-Making,” International Studies Quarterly 13:2 (1969): 190-222. [41] See, for example, Nathan Leites, A Study of Bolshevism (Free Press, 1953); George, “The ‘Operational Code’”; Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 1976); Joseph de Rivera, The Psychological Dimension of Foreign Policy (C. E. Merrill, 1968); Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (Free Press, 1986); Janice Gross Stein, “Building Politics into Psychology: The Misperception of Threat,” Political Psychology 9 (June 1988): 245-271; Philip E. Tetlock, “Theory-Driven Reasoning about Plausible Pasts and Probable Futures in World Politics: Are We Prisoners of Our Preconceptions?” American Journal of Political Science 43 (April 1999): 335-366; Jack S. Levy, “Political Psychology and Foreign Policy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, ed. David O. Sears, Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis (Oxford University Press, 2003), 265-266. |
