One possible exception to my "weakness is not as useful as Schelling would like us to believe" rant centers on irrationality. There is a lot of literature out there that suggests that it's actually useful for most states to appear a bit irrational in many situations. Not North Korea irrational, mind you. Just enough for specific purposes. The classic case I had to teach in a class on war a couple of semesters back is nuclear deterrence: under a lot of definitions of rationality, it's pretty much never rational to launch a nuke - yet for nuclear deterrence to work, states have to believe other states really will launch that nuke even though it's not rational. A little bit of (perceived) irrationality is key. Yet another case where an apparent weakness is useful!
I'm unconvinced of this, however. I don't think it's actually irrationality that's at issue in these cases. I think what's actually in states' best interests is to convince other states that their preferences deviate somewhat from an ideal model of "normal" preferences, such that it might be in their best interests, as they define them, to do something that would be irrational under a more standard or ideal preference set.
Possibly this seems like an overly fine distinction, but I think it's important. Convincing other states that you're irrational means convincing them that you might do things even though you know they're not in your best interests, and even though we all know they're not in your best interests: in other words, that you're fundamentally unpredictable and crazy. When faced with an unpredictable and crazy partner, bargaining and cooperation become difficult or impossible. Nobody's making trade deals with North Korea.
But convincing other states that you have a slightly unexpected set of preferences doesn't imply that you can't be predicted or will do things you know aren't in your best interests. It just means, basically, that other states need to understand what you believe your best interests are in order in order to predict how you'll behave - and in turn, that they probably have to pay attention to what you're saying your preferences are in order to understand this. That gives you the leverage to shape their expectations of your behavior, and hence, how they behave toward you. But it doesn't suggest you can't be predicted or cooperated with productively. It just gives you a bit more leverage over the set of expectations under which cooperation happens.
I'm not going to argue that the DPRK isn't irrational at times, because that's clearly a lost cause, but I do tend to think that they're less irrational than they appear, partly because it's so damned hard to get information about the country's internal politics and situation. If we knew better what was going down in Pyong'yang, its actions would certainly appear different. So I tend to think that the DPRK is somewhere between actually irrational and having an unusual set of preferences, in point of fact, and I tend to think that on the whole its actions are predictable to a certain extent.
ReplyDeleteOh, I quite agree. My point is more that, even if it's (partly or entirely) a choice on North Korea's part to display irrationality, most states don't ultimately find it in their best interests to display the type of irrationality that North Korea does.
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