The Rational Actor Model

POLS3001 - Foreign Policy Analysis - Dr Charles

Miller
● Welcome to POLS3001!
● First three sessions cover theories of decision making
● Following sessions follow practical skills and external determinants of
foreign policy decisions up until the mid-semester break
● After the mid-semester break we change focus and work on the case
study presentations, where we will apply what we have learned in the first
half of the course

POLS3001 Course
● The rational actor model is a natural starting point for foreign policy
analysis
● Yet it has been strongly criticized on a number of grounds
● Supposedly ignores norms, culture, imperfect reasoning powers and
information processing
● However, I argue that this generally represents a misunderstanding of
what the rational actor model is
● We start off with a single decision maker
● He/she is faced with a limited budget of time and resources, a set of goals
and a set of beliefs about the world
● This decision maker faces a set of alternative options
● He/she estimates the ‘expected utility’ of each option
● Expected utility is simply the product of the utility you would gain from
an outcome weighted by the probability you attach to it, minus the cost
● U(x)p(x) - c(x)
● For instance, the expected utility of buying a lottery ticket where the prize
is $10m, the cost is 50c and the chance of winning is 1 in 1 in 10,000,000
is ($10,000,000/10,000,000)=$1-.5= 50 cents
● What is the expected utility if the chance of winning is 1 in 100,000,000?
● What if the prize is $50m?
● What if the price of a ticket is $1.35?

What is expected utility?

● We are then said to rank each option by its expected utility
● We choose the option with the highest expected utility
● The expected utility of the next best option to the one we chose is called
our ‘opportunity cost’
● The true ‘cost’ of our action is not just the monetary cost but rather the
benefits we would have obtained by pursuing our next best option
● We must also weigh our options at the margin - that is, what is the
expected utility of doing ‘more of X’ given where we are now. Whatever
money, time or resources we have already invested into X should not
matter

Weighing options
● Suppose I told you you can have $50 for sure or we toss a coin - heads
you win $100, tails you win nothing?
● Same deal, but if the coin turns up heads you get
○ $120?
○ $130?
○ $140?
● Same deal, but if the coin turns up heads you get
○ $80?
○ $70?
○ $60?

Risk Attitudes
● Oranges > Apples & Apples > Bananas => Oranges > Bananas
● These are known as transitive preferences
● This assumption must hold or we could be arbitraged out of everything
we have!

Transitivity
We have preferences over all of the
possible outcomes and can rank them

Completeness
● We can say Oranges > Apples > Bananas (for other people)
● But we simply can’t tell how much more you like Oranges than Apples
● Early (or proto) rational choice theorists like Bentham and Mill thought
that you could measure preferences on a cardinal scale (ie I get 10 utils of
pleasure from an orange, 8 from an apple, 5 from a banana)
● Now however we don’t talk about utils any more and instead focus
simply on preferences - He prefers oranges to apples and apples to
bananas

Ordinality vs Cardinality
● So how do we figure out what others’
preferences are?
● The only way to do so by rational choice theory
is to infer them from the choices they made in
the past

Revealed Preferences
● Allison makes the mistake of confusing the rational actor
model with the unitary actor model
● But decisions that are rational for individual are often
perverse for a group considered as a unitary actor
● Groups composed of rational individuals do not have
preferences which are rational in the sense I have just
described

Individual rationality does not imply collective

rationality
 1st Preference 2nd Preference 3rd Preference

Nicola No Brexit Soft Brexit Hard Brexit

Theresa Soft Brexit Hard Brexit No Brexit

Nigel Hard Brexit No Brexit Soft Brexit

Example - Brexit
● No Brexit beats Soft Brexit
● Hard Brexit beats No Brexit
● Soft Brexit beats Hard Brexit
● No Brexit beats Soft Brexit...
For the Group..
● All of the situations here involve one single decision maker
possibly in the context of uncertainty. This is decision
theory
● But in foreign policy, this is rarely the case
● We base our decisions on what we think other decision
makers are going to do, who are in turn deciding based on
what they think we will do
● This is the domain of game theory

Game Theory vs Decision Theory

● Players (at least two, could be more)
● Strategies (decisions they can take - defect, cooperate etc)
● Payoffs (what does each player get in each outcome)
● Information (what do they know about each others’ strategies and
payoffs)

Basics of a game
Key Contributions of game theory to foreign policy
analysis
● Suppose two players are playing a game, how do you predict the
outcome?
○ For player 1, figure out what his ‘best response’ is to every one of
player 2’s strategies. Do the same for player 2
○ Draw the two best response correspondances on a piece of paper
○ Where do they meet? This is each player’s best response to the
other’s best response. It’s a Nash equilibrium. The predicted outcome
of the game

The Nash Equilibrium

● It’s unlikely anyone would deviate from a Nash
Equilibrium since they can only do worse for themselves
by doing so
● It’s a very general tool for predicting social behaviour

Power of the Nash Equilibrium

● In many competitive situations, the Nash Equilibrium is not to pursue one
sole strategy with certainty
● If you do that, your opponent can exploit this knowledge to their
advantage
● In that case, you should randomize your choice of strategy so as to keep
your opponent guessing
● Two examples from sports - tennis serve and football penalty kick

Mixed Strategy Nash Equilibrium

The Goalkeeper’s Fear
● Game theory also teaches us that sometimes we must take costly actions
so as to signal our type both to allies and competitors
● Our ‘type’ is the kind of actor we are - tough, loyal, competent etc.
Qualities anyone would want others to think they have
● Signalling is the process whereby we undertake an action which only
someone who really was tough, loyal, competent etc would actually do
(because they are costly)

Signalling
Collective action problems
Alliances are collective action problems..
● In alliances where one member is much bigger than everyone else, that
member will shoulder a disproportionately large share of the burden
● But this member will continue to do so, though they might complain
about it, because it’s in their interests
● This member might however attempt to use side-payments to induce
other members to contribute more (incentives in other domains)

What game theory says about alliances

Bargaining
● The advantage in a negotiation goes to
the side with
○ The least to lose
○ The most patience
What game theory teaches us about bargaining and
negotiating
● Popular critique is that it ignores non-material motivations
● Another critique is that it endows people with superpowers
of reasoning that they don’t have
● A final critique is that it simply doesn’t have good
predictive power

Critiques of rational choice theory

● No rational choice theorist would deny that human beings
are motivated by things other than money or survival
● Preferences can be composed of just about anything
(eternal salvation, national pride, victory of the
working class etc) and provided they are complete
and transitive they are rational

Non-material motivations
● This only partly gets rational choice off the hook
● If preferences can come from anywhere, then it is hard to
predict much from a rational choice model per se
● It can make them hard to falsify
● The ‘revealed preferences’ approach can go some way
towards solving this problem but you need a lot of
background information on the actors

However...
● Where game theoretic models are joined to in-depth
knowledge of the actors and their preferences, however,
they can be very useful
● They sensitise us to the point that we can’t just assume that
the outcome will be whatever the actors prefer, because
they are conditioning their decisions on what they think
others will do

Synthesis
● The rationality postulates of game theory were essentially what Nash or
von Neumann or Morgenstern thought a rational person would do
● Beginning in the 1970s, a new wave of economists and psychologists
started examining whether real people actually act they way rational
choice theorists say they should by carrying out laboratory experiments
● They found substantial deviations from what game theorists say ought to
happen. We will cover this in the next session

The Behavioural Critique

● Rational behaviour tends to emerge over time as people learn by trial and
error what the best course of action is
● Rational behaviour is also likelier to emerge where the stakes are very
high - incentivizes careful thought
● Rational behaviour is also more likely where agents interact with one
another repeatedly over long periods of time - so that each can learn each
others’ preferences and the best response to them

The Rational Choice Response

● In behavioural experiments, individuals tend to start off
behaving ‘irrationally’ - but end up behaving more
rationally as they learn
● Ken Binmore, a game theorist, put his money where his
mouth was and made the UK Government AU$40bn
designing a 3G Bandwidth Spectrum Auction
Evidence
● Rational choice theory is the first cut for predicting, explaining and
advocating foreign policy decisions
● It’s often caricatured. Some of the caricatures have weight, others less so
● Rational choice theory does not rely on the assumption of Spock-like
rationality and amoral selfishness
● However, rational choice models are most useful for the foreign policy
analyst when combined with solid background knowledge

Summary
● Rational choice models are most likely to be right where
○ The stakes are high, so agents have incentives to think
hard
○ Agents have had a long time to ‘learn the rules of the
game’ and to learn about each other
○ There is clear feedback from the environment on what
works and what doesn’t
Summary
● Key things to remember
○ Mixed strategies: - it can pay to randomize to
keep your opponent guessing
○ Signaling:- show that you are who you say you
are
○ Bargaining:- patience and the ability to walk
away are key
Summary
Behavioural Approaches

POLS3001 – S1
● Foreign policy analysis draws on a number of other
disciplines
● The rational actor model of decision making is
drawn from economics
● Today we look at an alternative approach, which
draws primarily from psychology
● This is known as the ‘behavioural approach’
because it seeks primarily to figure out how humans
make decisions inductively by observing how we
behave, especially through lab experiments

Origins of the behavioural approach

● The behavioural approach takes the rational actor
model as a foil, a point of comparison
● There are two aspects to this approach which I want
to highlight today
○ ‘Predictable irrationality’: how human beings in
general diverge from rational action
○ ‘Individual irrationality’: how particular human
beings diverge from rational action

Two types of ‘irrationality’

Founder of the modern behavioural approach
● Kahneman and Tversky were the first researchers to
subject the rational actor model to experimental testing
● They founded a field known as ‘behavioural economics’
on this basis and were awarded the Nobel Prize for
economics
● They claimed to find a number of systematic divergences
from ‘rational’ behaviour in their experimental subjects
● Many of these are important concepts in the analysis of
foreign policy decision making

Behavioural Economics
● Last session we discussed expected utility and risk
attitudes
● I asked you what you would prefer - $5 for sure or a 50
percent chance of either $10 or $0
● Now what if I ask you the following question - you give
me $5 for sure, or I toss a coin and if it comes up heads,
you give me $10, tails $0. Which do you choose?

Prospect Theory
Risk Attitudes are Frame Dependent
● The implication of prospect theory is that we are risk averse in the domain
of gains and risk acceptant in the domain of losses in general
● However, where probabilities are very low or very high, we behave
differently depending on whether we are in the domain of gains or the
domain of losses
○ High probability + Domain of Gains = Risk Aversion (100% chance of
$9499 > 95% chance of $10,000)
○ Low probability + Domain of Gains = Risk Acceptance (5% chance to
win $10,000> 100% chance of $501)
○ High probability + Domain of Losses =
Risk Acceptance (95% chance to lose $10,000 > 100% chance to lose
$9499)
○ Low probability + Domain of Losses = Risk Aversion (100% chance
of losing $501 > 5% chance to lose $10,000)
● Prospect theory has been proposed as an alternative
‘microfoundation’ for foreign policy analysis and
international relations (to rational choice theory)
● One important implication of prospect theory is the idea
that leaders will be more likely to make risky decisions
(like going to war) when things are going badly (that is,
when they are in the domain of loss)

Implications for Foreign Policy Analysis

● Alternative explanation - “Wag the Dog Effect”,
Gambling for Resurrection
System 1 and System 2
• Two different ‘systems’ in the mind posited by behavioural
economists Kahneman and Tversky
• System 1 is low effort, highly efficient for most purposes, disastrous
for high level cognitive tasks
• System 2 is good for high level cognitive tasks but demands lots of
energy

*
For instance
• A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat
costs $1 more than the ball. How much do the
bat and ball cost individually?
• Count up from 1 in increments of 13
(1,13,26,39 etc). See how far you can go…
• How do you feel?

*
 ● Kahneman and Tversky’s research spawned a whole
school of work into ‘cognitive biases’ - systematic
departures from ‘rational’ decision making
● Some of this research was carried out by K&T
themselves, some by other behavioural economists and
psychologists such as Dan Ariely or Phillip Tetlock

The ‘Cognitive Biases’ Literature

Availability heuristic
• Systematically overestimate the chances of
something happening if you personally can
recall an example of it
• But the ease with which you can recall an
example of something has nothing to do with
how likely it actually is – it’s partly driven by
media attention and partly by randomness

*
Probability neglect
• Ignoring shades of probability (i.e. buying a
lottery ticket because of how great it would be
if you won, ignoring how unlikely that is)
• Treating very unlikely events as impossible,
and very likely events as certain
• The three mental settings – ‘Impossible-50/50-
certain’

*
Small sample bias
• Chances of unusual or unrepresentative events
are higher when you look only at a small
sample of the data (e.g. 8 heads in 10 tosses
are more likely than 80 heads in 100 tosses and
so on)
• In foreign policy analysis, this means
overgeneralizing about trends from a small
number of events (Munich-Vietnam)

*
Sunk costs fallacy
• The Brumbies are playing tonight but it’s cold,
wet and miserable. Do you go to see the game
if
– a) you have already paid to watch the game and
the money is non-refundable
– b) you haven’t bought tickets yet but there are still
enough available?

*
Sunk costs fallacy in FPA
• Induced to explain
– Vietnam
– USSR in Afghanistan
– Iraq
– USA in Afghanistan

*
Fundamental Attribution Error
• When I/my country behave badly, it’s because
circumstances forced us to, when you/my
enemy behave badly, it’s because that’s the
way they are

*
Halo effect
• If someone is good at one thing or did one
thing well, we tend to assume they do
everything else well too
• Churchill made many strategic blunders.
Chamberlain got lots of things right

*
Trade off avoidance
• Choosing one alternative over another only
implies that on balance that alternative is
better
• Trade off avoidance means that we tend to
downplay or ignore the downsides of our
chosen alternative

*
Confirmation bias
• Tendency to look for evidence in favour of our
favourite hypothesis
• Instead we should be looking for evidence
against it
• Various practices have emerged to help combat
confirmation bias – red teaming, devils’
advocates and premortems

*
Sacred values protection
• All communities have certain things which
they hold to be sacred
• Enemies who transgress those sacred values
can elicit an excessive response
• Individuals find it hard to bargain over things
which they hold to be sacred (e.g. the Dome of
the Rock in Jerusalem)

*
Importance of norms

● In the prisoner’s dilemma game, the rational choice is to

defect regardless of the decision of the other player
● However, when experimental subjects have played the
game in a lab, cooperation is actually quite frequent
● Similarly, in ‘public goods’ games, the rational actor
model prediction is little or no contribution
● Experimental subjects, however, have been found to
contribute far more and in many cases even to pay a cost
to punish those who don’t contribute enough
The Dictator and Ultimatum Games
The Trust Game
 Cross Cultural Variation

● Behavioural experiments have been carried out in a

variety of cultural settings, Western and non-Western
societies, developing and developed
● There is significant variation among cultures in terms of
how they play
● Westerners tend to be relatively high on trust, cooperation
and altruistic punishments, East Asians tend to view
behaviour holistically. Eastern Europeans tend to ‘anti-
social punishment’.
● The groups of people who act most like ‘rational actors’
are in fact certain types of Amazonian hunter gatherer
tribes
Really irrational?
• Some rationalists push back against the behaviouralists on the
grounds that many heuristics are in fact quite rational
• It’s not rational to wait for all available information before acting
• Some heuristics such as the sunk costs fallacy or may have some
rational advantages
• Are behavioural laboratory subjects really representative of how
world leaders would behave in real life?
• Many proponents of rational choice argue that behavioural
experiments in decision making are ‘gotcha’ questions, designed to
catch people out

*
Individual Irrationality
Particular ‘irrationality’
• Long-standing cottage industry of people who
psychologically analyse political leaders.
Jerold Post one of the key figures
• Diagnosis at a distance of Donald Trump is the
latest in the genre
• However, political scientists and professional
psychiatrists are skeptical

*
Psychiatrists on Trump
• “His widely reported symptoms of mental instability -
including grandiosity, impulsivity, hypersensitivity to slights
or criticism, and an apparent inability to distinguish between
fantasy and reality - lead us to question his fitness for the
immense responsibilities of the office” – Judith Herman,
Nanette Gatrell and Dee Mosbacher, Harvard Medical School
and University of California, San Francisco

*
Leader psychology
• Scholars in this school believe leaders’
individual personality matters
• Some types of leaders could emerge
systematically in some types of society
(Rosen)
• Political power could of itself cause
individuals to start acting in pathological ways
(Robertson)

*
Counterarguments
• Psychologists are not in a position to make a
diagnosis of political leaders
• Psychologizing one’s opponents can lead one
to underestimate them
• Leader’s public persona may be a carefully
crafted image
• Observational equivalence – appearance of
instability may not imply real instability
*
Example – Saddam Hussein
• Prior to 2003, Saddam was one of the most
distance diagnosed world leaders in history,
including by Post
• An unexpected bonus from the 2003 invasion
is that a vast trove of documents about the
internal workings of the Iraqi state under
Saddam, including tape recordings of his
private conversations

*
What they found..
• Saddam had a very naïve view of world and
US politics
• Believed US was out to get him even when it
was not (e.g. 1980s)
• Believed UN could constrain US in 2003
• Convened a conference to ‘celebrate’ Iraq’s
‘Great Victory’ in the Gulf War of 1990-1991

*
But…
• Saddam understood nuclear deterrence
• Saddam knew the US army would outfight the Iraqi
army, thought US casualty sensitivity would bring
him victory
• Not clear what better options he had in 2003; not
clear in advance that 1991 would be as big a defeat as
it was
• Not clear that he really believed 1991 was a ‘great
victory’

*
Horowitz et al - the LEAD Database

● Horowitz et al sought to examine the question of

whether leaders’ particular psychologies influence
their foreign policy behaviour
● They gathered extensive biographical data on world
leaders going back to the early 19th Century
● This included a number of individual level variables
such as
○ Birth order
○ Family Background
○ Prior occupation
○ Military experience
Findings

● Illness also matters - sick leaders behave more erratically

● Military experience has a complex effect - leaders with
combat experience in democracies tend to be less willing
to use force (Eisenhower), leaders with military but no
combat experience (Bush) are more willing
● Experience coming to power as a rebel leader (Mao,
Castro) makes one more risk acceptant
● Political system has a mediating effect - combat
experience in an autocratic system makes one more likely
to want to use force. Old democratic leaders are more
likely to start wars, as are young autocrats
Gender
Genetics
● It’s highly likely that our psychology and decision making
are influenced by our genes
● However as yet ‘behavioural genetics’ is in its infancy -
we still don’t know with much confidence which genes
influence which behaviour
● Moreover, even if we did know, it’s unlikely we’d get
DNA from present or past world leaders for analysis
● That said, we can speculate that leaders predisposed to
particular types of behaviour are more likely in some
states than in others
● Countries with frequent instability and violence are likely
to ‘select for’ leaders with high propensity for violence
and risk taking
Conclusion
• Behavioural approaches represent a major alternative to the rational
actor model as a ‘microfoundation’ for FPA
• Behavioural experiments appear to show numerous departures from
rational decision making
• These systematic departures have been advanced to explain
numerous foreign policy decisions
• Similarly, leadership psychology has seen a resurgence of interest,
with interesting and useful predictions about leader behaviour
• Next session, we will examine another alternative approach to
thinking about decision making, different both from the rational
actor and the behavioural approach - the evolutionary approach

*
Evolutionary Approaches

POLS3001 – S1
So far...
• We’ve examined the rational actor model
• We’ve also looked at the competitor - the
behavioural model
• Today we will be examining the evolutionary
approach, in some sense a synthesis of the other two
How Evolution works
• Replicators - entities with the means to make copies of
themselves
• Random variation (copying errors) in the transmission of
the replicators from one generation to the next
• Variants which are better suited to their environment
survive and reproduce at a greater rate
Types of replicators
• Genes (Dominic Johnson, Hugo
Mercier)
• Strategies, decision making
heuristics, ideas, norms (Gerd
Gigerenzer, Vernon Smith)
Genetic Replicators
• According to evolutionary psychologists, many of our ways
of thinking are hard wired into our genes
• This is because they gave our ancestors some kind of
reproductive advantage in the prehistoric past
• Whether they are still adaptive or not depends on the extent
of the match between the modern and pleistocene world
Mercier
• Our thinking is guided by a number of genetically
encoded modules
• Most of our decisions are made instinctively by
these modules without our conscious brain’s
awareness
• Reasoning is, however, one of these modules
Example: the Waiting Room
Experiment
The purpose of reason
• We think of the aim of reason as being to find out the truth
• But for Mercier this isn’t it
• For Mercier reason exists to justify to others the decisions we
make instinctively in our own (or our genes’) interests
• Reason is more like a defence lawyer or a PR consultant than a
disinterested truth seeker
Kahneman in a new light
• ‘Faulty’ heuristics and ‘biases’ can therefore be seen
in a new light
• They are not ‘faulty’ at all. They are doing exactly
what they are designed to do
• But what they are designed to do is not what we
thought
Example: confirmation bias
• Confirmation bias is seen as irrational
• But confirmation bias generally doesn’t apply to any old
theory
• Specifically it applies to theories which serve our
interests
• We do not suffer from confirmation bias with respect to
theories it’s not in our interest to believe
What can we do about it?
• Mercier believes that we have also evolved the ability to
spot flaws in others’ reasoning
• Hence working in teams and groups is crucial to good
decision making, as other group members will shoot down
faulty reasoning
• One way to institutionalize this process is through ‘red
teaming’ which we will examine in a later session
Johnson
• Similar to Mercier in that he sees
‘heuristics’ as hard wired genetic
adaptations
• They only appear to be irrational
because we do not understand
their true evolutionary function
Overconfidence
• Overconfidence is a common feature in human
psychology
• It’s also often been seen as a key cause of war
• Sometimes overconfidence is quite remarkable - e.g.
Saddam Hussein’s apparent belief he won the 1991
Gulf War
Nothing ventured...
• For Johnson, however, this is only part of the story
• Overconfidence encourages us to take risks which, if
they come off, will pay off big
• Thus in the long run, although most of these ‘bets’
might fail, they will still be adaptive
Churchill
• In retrospect Churchill is considered a hero for his
refusal to surrender to Hitler
• But in reality the idea that Britain could defeat Germany
in 1940 was wildly unrealistic
• Churchill was lucky - had the US and USSR not entered
the war we would see him as being a delusional
blunderer
 Sunk Costs ‘Fallacy’
• Is it really a ‘fallacy’?
• Consider
– Reputation for sticking with projects
– ‘Option value’
– ‘Breakthrough problems’
Heuristics as replicators
• An alternative view comes to similar conclusions for
similar but different reasons
• This is a view which sees heuristics themselves as
replicators
• Rather than being ‘hard coded’ into our DNA as in Mercier
or Johnson, heuristics are socially constructed but then
subjected to a process of natural selection
Smith - Ecological Rationality
• We spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the best decision is
in a given situation (constructivist rationality)
• But crucially we subject these heuristics to the test of experience
• If the heuristics work well for us in a given situation, we keep
them, otherwise we jettison them
• If we stay in a similar environment for long enough, these
heuristics can end up being very highly adaptive
• But they are only adaptive for the environment in which they arose
Example
• Which three out of these six cities
are the largest (by population) in
Brazil?
– Sao Paolo; - Fortaleza; -Rio de
Janeiro
– Belo Horizonte; - Brasilia; - Belem
Continued
Which three of these six cities are
the biggest in Australia?
- Sydney; - Melbourne; - Canberra
- Brisbane; - Adelaide; - Darwin
Continued
Which of these six cities are the
biggest in Kyrgyzstan?
• Osh, Usgen, Bishkek, Jalal-Abad,
Naryn?
The “Have I heard of it?”
heuristic
• Works well with countries that you know somewhat
well (e.g. Brazil)
• Unnecessary and maybe misleading with countries
you know well
• Doesn’t work with countries you don’t know at all
(e.g. Kyrgyzstan)
Gigerenzer
• Gigerenzer believes that human decision making
capabilities have evolved to be highly adaptive in most
situations
• Contra Kahneman, he believes there’s nothing
‘irrational’ about them, when you understand rationality
to mean ‘getting the best result’
Example - the constant angle
heuristic
Gigerenzer’s critique of
Kahneman
• Behavioural approaches are simply a ‘patched up’
version of rational choice
• In developing a theory of decision making we should
start by observing how human beings actually behave,
not postulating a theory and then measuring deviations
from it
Commonalities between rational
choice and behavioural
economics
• Decisions are made in order to
maximize a ‘weighted sum’ of
utilities (e.g. p(x)U(X))
• The difference is simply over how
the weights are constructed
Gigerenzer - the checklist
Checklist method
• In reality, Gigerenzer states, decision making is more
like a checklist - is the case that X? If yes, do Y, If no, is
it the case that Z? If yes, do A, If no…
• This is in fact a way of making decisions that has
evolved over human history because it works better than
the alternatives
Application to foreign policy
• Clearly there is something to this way of thinking
• Many strategies - balance against power, maintain a
reputation for strength - can be seen as heuristics which
have evolved over time
• Heuristics must come from somewhere
• They can be adaptive in many situations
• However...
W
What are the limits to snap
judgments?
• Should we just always go with our instincts then?
• Under what conditions will our instinctive judgments lead
us astray?
• How much is the modern international environment like the
one in which our decision making capabilities/heuristics
evolved?
Differences
• Scale of modern societies
• Technology, including nuclear
weapons
• Extent of international trade
• Complexity of government
machinery
Commonalities
• Oscillation between conflict and cooperation
• Groups competing over resources
• Need to gain popular support
• Need to predict others’ motives and actions
Conclusion
• Evolutionary approach shows us how ‘rational’
decision making may come about through anything
but rational means
• It cautions us against simply dismissing behavioural
heuristics as ‘mistakes’ or ‘biases’
Conclusion
• However, in the realm of foreign policy, it doesn’t give
us clear guidance on when and how we should rely on
instinct
• Are our instincts adaptive in this particular domain? It’s
not clear
• Also, what are the conditions under which instinctual
decision making might lead to better FP outcomes?
Forecasting

POLS3001 – S1
Why forecasting is important
• Allocation of resources
• Ability to make timely decisions (e.g.
Rwanda)
• Serves as a check on our understanding of the
world – Fred and Jane’s lottery
• Governments devote significant resources to
forecasting (e.g. Australia’s ONA)

116
Forecasting has a long pedigree
• Laplace believed that one could, in principle,
forecast the rest of human history
• Karl Marx most famously forecast that history
would culminate in the victory of the
proletariat
• Isaac Asimov’s books created the idea of the
‘psychohistorian’ who could foretell the future

117
But the record of forecasting is terrible
• Marx got it wrong
• Intelligence agencies got fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, Arab
Spring, Iranian revolution, all wrong
• Economic forecasters missed the GFC
• Political forecasters missed Trump and Brexit

118
‘Dart throwing chimps’
• Psychologist Phillip Tetlock studied the record
of hundreds of experts in making predictions
• He found most do no better than chance, many
do worse than chance
• If you want a prediction about Chinese
politics, better to ask a specialist in Russian
politics and vice versa

119
Why is forecasting hard?
• Our psychology
• Strategic interaction
• Preference falsification
• Complexity/non-linear dynamics
• Lack of incentives for getting it right

120
Our psychology
• Availability heuristic
• Affect heuristic – ‘wishful thinking’
• Probability neglect – ‘three mental settings’
• Underrating randomness

121
Lack of incentive to get it right
• Few forecasters are assessed on the accuracy
of their forecasts
• Media prefer sensational statements which are
more likely to be wrong
• Even forecasters who work for financial
institutions can often defray the costs of poor
forecasts onto others

122
Strategic interaction
• ‘Holmes-Moriarty’ problem. Your enemy can
gain an advantage from predicting your actions
so you need to be deliberately unpredictable
(sometimes)
• We see this in, for example, Allied deception
operations in World War Two
• And of course what’s true of you is also true of
your enemy

123
Preference falsification
• In dictatorial regimes, few feel free to express
their real political views
• Even in democratic countries, some political
views are more politically acceptable than
others
• As a result, the ‘true’ level of popular support
for a leader is often unknown, hence the
stability of a regime is unclear

124
Complexity/non-linear dynamics
• Small events can have large unforeseen consequences
• Assassination of Franz Ferdinand, 9/11, Able Archer
• These dynamics make it hard to forecast very far into
the future

125
Advances in forecasting
• Econometric models/ Artificial intelligence
• Prediction markets
• Crowdsourcing (e.g. the Good Judgment
Project)

126
How does one assess a forecast?
• Forecasts should be given as probabilities.
Probabilities lie on the range (0,1)
• 1 means – ‘this event will certainly happen’; 0
– ‘this event will certainly not happen’
• Brier score – (Outcome – Prediction)^2 (e.g. I
predict Biden wins with p=.7 and he wins,
so my Brier score is (1-.7)^2 =(.09). Best
Brier score is 0, worst is 1
127
What makes a real forecast?
• Forecasts must be specific
– Numeric (75% not ‘highly likely’)
– Clear what they refer to (military clash involving
100 or more fatalities not ‘instability’)
• Forecasts must be time limited
– A recession by 31st October 2019, not a recession
‘soon’

128
Why quantify?

129
Gives you less wiggle room…
• Suppose you say it’s likely Erdogan will
still be President of Turkey in
2022. What does likely mean? 55%? 75%?
• If he is, you’re likely to say you meant
‘75%’, vice versa if he is not
• ‘Vague verbiage’ forecasts give you the ability
to make your record out to be better than it
really is 130
Why’s this bad?
• It gives outsiders too much confidence in your
abilities
• It gives YOU too much confidence in your
own abilities – prevents you from learning
how you could have done better

131
Ambiguity
• Chiefs of Staff told Kennedy that the Bay of
Pigs operation had a ‘fair chance’ of
succeeding
• They thought they were telling him the
chances of success were weak
• He thought they meant the chances were
strong

132
Types of forecasts - Econometrics/Artificial
intelligence
• Ben Goldsmith –
Atrocity Forecasting Project
• Jay Ulfelder - Political Instability Task Force
• Lockheed Martin –
Worldwide Integrated Crisis Early Warning
Project
• Reasonable performance with short lead times

133
Prediction Markets
• Intrade
• Iowa Electronic Markets
• iPredict
• Defunct internal prediction market in US
Defense Department
• Based on the insight of giving people
incentives to get it right

134
Crowdsourcing
• Good Judgment Project – open invitation
project to submit questions you’re interested in
and have people answer them
• Questions come from Government agencies,
businesses, media etc
• Small number of participants have consistently
very good predictive record. They are known
as ‘superforecasters’

135
What makes a superforecaster?
• Cognitive style
• Do not try to fit the world into a pre-conceived theory
• Understand probability and make fine-grained judgments
• Foxes – ‘know a little about a lot of things’
• No particularly strong correlates in terms of training,
education, job – many superforecasters are ‘regular Joes’

136
Superforecasting tips
• Fermi-ize: break questions down into component
parts (what must happen in order for this to come
about?)
• Be on guard against wishful thinking
• Look for clashing causal forces
• Balance the inside and the outside views
• Constantly learn and update
• Look for ‘equivalence classes’ – similar past cases

137
2020 Question – will China have a military dispute with
the US, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam or the Philippines?
• How would we go about answering this question?

138
Outside view / Inside view
• What is the baseline probability of any two countries
having a military dispute? (Equivalence class - pairs
of countries in modern history)
• What is different about Chinese relations with any of
these countries? Does this cause us to revise our
estimate up or down?
• Shortcut in this case - which of these countries is
most likely to have a dispute with China?
My answer
• .01 (very low). Baseline probability of any two countries
having a military dispute in one year is very low
• Risk for China and any of these countries is higher than
average.
• Nonetheless I believed that the distraction caused by
Covid would leave any of the countries named in no
shape to launch a military adventure in 2020
• I was right, but on a technicality. Because I didn’t
include India in the list of countries...
What can I learn from this?
• China recovered from Covid much
faster than I had anticipated
• It also perhaps saw the crisis
engulfing other countries such as
the United States as an
opportunity to engage in saber
rattling
2020 Question - will Trump win
re-election?
• How would you deal with this?

142
At the time the assignment was
due..
• Covid was beginning to run wild
in the US (over 2,000 deaths on
the due date of the exercise,
33,700 new cases) but the worst
was yet to come
• Biden had not formally been
nominated but it appeared almost
My reasoning
• US Presidents in modern times are
usually re-elected. Especially if
the economy is strong
• The economy had been strong
until Covid hit the US hard
• The strength of partisanship in US
means any party nominee is
However..
• Diseases usually follow an exponential growth rate.
This implied that the worst of Covid was likely to
come
• Research shows that natural disasters have a strongly
negative effect on incumbent reelection prospects,
especially if handled badly
• Moreover, Biden had the highest approval ratings of
any Democratic candidate, especially in swing states
• Trump was historically unpopular. Loathed by
Democrats, administratively incompetent
Here’s the bottom line...
• I gave Diamond Joe a 60% chance
of winning
• I though however that his victory
would be more decisive due to
Covid
• I also thought he would win Ohio
and Florida but not Georgia
2020 Question - will the UK strike a post-Brexit trade
deal with the EU by the end of the year?

147
My reasoning - Fermi-ization
• What would have to happen in
order for this to happen?
• The EU and UK would have to
solve a number of seemingly
intractable problems, including
fisheries and finance
• Even smaller trade deals, such as
Covid
• At this point the UK and the EU
were both being hit hard by
Covid.
• Substantial amounts of public
service time were having to be
devoted to this issue
• I therefore judged the probability
Lesson
• Never underestimate the cynicism
of Boris Johnson!
• He had promised a deal but knew
most voters wouldn’t care much
about the details
• He had the credibility with the
Tory right to make concessions to
Continued issues
• Forecasting far into the future (even 5 years) is
still hard
• Best we can do is straightforward
extrapolation
• Was thought that the area of politics best
suited to forecasting was the domestic politics
of advanced industrial democracies (ahem!)

151
Scenario Planning

POLS3001 – S1
Why scenario planning..
• Forecasting is hard over a greater timescale
than one year
• Yet so many important decisions will take
effect much further into the future
• For instance, the first SSN-
AUKUS are scheduled for delivery
in the early 2040s (most optimistic
scenario) 153
The ‘minimax’ principle
• An alternative to forecasting suggested by
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• `What is the worst case scenario? What can
we do to minimize our losses in this case?’
• Hence mini-max – minimize the maximum
loss
• Ignore the probability part of the expected
Scenario planning
• First adopted by the US Government to plan weapons acquisition in
the early Cold War
• Adopted by Shell for corporate planning in the 1960s
• Shell’s success spurred a number of corporations to adopt scenario
planning from the 1970s onward
• Scenario planning is now a staple in many businesses and
consultancies (e.g. KPMG)
• Primarily a technique for businesses today but some have advocated
wider use in government
Pierre Wack
• In the 1960s, the assumption was the oil prices would remain stable
• But Pierre Wack of Shell’s strategic planning department saw some trends which
made him doubt it would continue – exhaustion of US reserves and the rise of
OPEC
• Wack presented two scenarios to Shell Executives, one in which prices remain
stable and another in which they rise dramatically
• When, in 1974, the OPEC crisis did lead to a sharp rise in oil prices, Shell was the
best prepared major oil company
Purpose of scenario planning
• Sensitises decision makers to a wide range of possibilities
• Allows us to examine the robustness of our current policies to a
variety of different scenarios
• Allows us to spot advance indicators of scenarios of interest. ‘Warning
signals’
• Allows us to prepare for scenarios we might not have anticipated
(good or bad)
Two key maxims in scenario planning…
• “We know they have to come from the east, General, but we don’t know if they’re
traveling up the mountain or through the forest. Here’s what we’ll do in either
case.”

- Peter Schwartz. The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain
World (p. 115).

• “If you fail to prepare you are preparing to fail”

- Benjamin Franklin
How do you do scenario planning?
• Scenario planning is a very popular concept
and a lot has been written on it
• Multiple ways to do it. Here we’re using
Wright and Cairns (modified)
• Wright and Cairns’ method designed for
businesses not foreign policy but the method
can be transported into a new domain
Wright and Cairns Method
1. Setting the agenda
2. Determining the driving forces
3. Clustering the driving forces
4. Defining the cluster outcomes
5. Impact/Uncertainty Matrix
6. Framing the scenarios
7. Scoping the scenarios
8. Developing the scenarios
Setting the agenda
• What is the policy we are interested in
examining?
– e.g. weapons procurement, alliance treaty etc
• The scenarios must be relevant to a specific
policy decision to be made
Determining the driving forces
• What are the key determinants of the
scenarios we are examining? (e.g.
demographics, economics, strategy,
technology)
 Critical uncertainties and predetermined
elements
• In addition to driving forces some scenario planners recommend
examining critical uncertainties and predetermined elements
• Predetermined elements are things which we can be relatively sure of
in the long run (e.g. demography)
• Critical uncertainties arise by questioning predetermined elements
(e.g. Schwartz’s example of AT&T’s “guaranteed” income from long
distance landline telephony – in 1991)
Clustering the driving forces
• Are the driving forces really different to each
other? Are they interrelated? Do they cause
one another?
Defining the possible cluster outcomes
• For each of the clusters, what could the
outcome be in the specified timeframe?
• For instance, will the United States grow
rapidly demographically and economically?
Will China experience a political transition?
What are the possibilities?
Impact/Uncertainty Matrix
• Place the scenarios in terms of impact and
uncertainty (high and low)
Impact / Uncertainty High Low
High A,B
Low
Framing the scenarios…
• Which cluster outcomes are both highly
uncertain and highly impactful?
• These are the ones you should focus on
• No more than 2 or 3 scenarios. Why?
Scoping the scenarios
• Outline four scenarios based on combinations
of the two outcomes – ‘worst/best’,
‘worst/worst’,’best/worst’,’best/best’
• Do this in general terms
Developing the scenarios
• Produce a story or ‘narrative’ which leads
from the present to each outcome via the
driving forces you’ve identified
Tips for developing scenarios….
• Avoid straight line extrapolation. If things are
going badly, don’t assume they will keep on
getting worse (and vice versa)
• Look for ‘self-denying prophecies’
• Try ‘retrospective’ scenario plans. What
would a scenario plan written ten or twenty
years ago have looked like?
Example - AUKUS
• Let me specify the agenda. We wish to
examine the robustness of the AUKUS
agreement to a variety of different scenarios
• What are the key drivers of whether AUKUS
will be seen as a good or a bad decision?
• Let’s apply the scenario planning approach
ourselves
Critiques of scenario planning
• May lead to devoting excessive resources to
events that are unlikely to eventuate.
• Reprises many of the issues with prediction
• Is it worthwhile to ensure that you are ready
for very unlikely scenarios at the expense of
likelier ones?
 Intelligence Analysis

POLS3001 – S1
Markus Wolf, head of the HVA (East German foreign intelligence
service)
• “The courage and suffering involved in
obtaining information really has nothing to do
with its significance. In my experience, the
efficiency of a service depends much more on
the willingness of those who receive its
information to pay attention to it when it
contradicts their own opinions”
175
Richards Heuer Jr, CIA
• “Major intelligence failures are usually
caused by failures of analysis, not failures of
collection. Relevant information is
discounted, misinterpreted, ignored, rejected
or overlooked because it fails to fit a
prevailing mental model or mind-set”
Example – Stalin and Operation Barbarossa
• Stalin had advance warning of the 1941
German invasion from multiple sources
– Richard Sorge (‘most formidable spy in history’ –
Ian Fleming)
– British Government
– Cambridge Five Spy Ring
– Soviet sigint and imint
What this lecture is not about…
• All the stuff you see on TV shows and the
movies
– ‘Wet work’
– Dead drops
– Agent recruitment
– Double agents

178
Sources of raw intelligence
• ‘Imint’ – image intelligence
• ‘Sigint’ – signals intelligence
• ‘Humint’ – information from human sources
• ‘Osint’ – open source intelligence
Sigint
• Interception of enemy communication,
followed by decryption if secret
• Very old in intelligence – started with
interception of diplomatic correspondence,
then radio traffic, now cyber hacking
• Very useful if you can break enemy codes
• But you must be careful to protect the source
Osint
• For all intelligence services this is by far the
most common source of intelligence about
foreign countries – stuff we can all access
• This was true even for highly effective humint
agencies such as Wolf’s HVA
• The value added comes from the analysis plus
how osint fits into what is known from covert
Humint
• Sexiest and most impactful intelligence
source but also the rarest
• Fraught with problems – inserting one of your
own nationals into a foreign country’s
decision making apparatus is actually near
impossible for most countries
• Most humint comes from defectors, but
Example – Oleg Penkovsky
• Penkovsky was a senior KGB officer who
turned and worked for the British and
Americans due to his disgust at Khrushchev’s
autocratic and reckless behaviour
• He was most crucial in the Cuban missile
crisis – he passed on to the CIA the details of
what Soviet missile sites look like - made it
Example – Oleg Gordievsky
• Like Penkovsky, Gordievsky was a senior KGB officer who turned to
the British
• During Able Archer, Gordievsky alerted the British and Americans to
the Soviet fear of a nuclear attack
• He briefed both Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher
(unbeknown to Gorbachev) prior to their first meeting. Helped
persuade Thatcher and Reagan that they could ‘work with’ Gorbachev
• Exfiltrated from Moscow by MI6 when his cover was blown
Example – Rafid Ahmed Alwan
(Curveball)
• Iraqi Chemical Engineer
• Claimed asylum in Germany, passed on information to the BND
(German intelligence) about Saddam’s WMD program. BND passed it
on to the CIA
• Alwan’s information about mobile chemical weapons labs formed part
of the US case for war
• But Alwan had made it up. He was fervently anti-Saddam and wanted
to provoke a US invasion
Example – the Cambridge Five
• Five British agents who had turned to the
USSR
• They provided information which helped the
Soviets in WW2, dismantled many Western
operations behind the Soviet bloc in the early
Cold War
• However, initially Stalin strongly suspected
Problems of dealing with ‘Humint’
• You can be too trusting when dealing with sources (as the US was with Curveball)
• Or you can be too distrustful (as Stalin was at first with the Cambridge Five)
• What you ideally want is a Penkovsky or a Gordievsky, a genuine agent with
access to the highest levels of enemy decision making
• The Cambridge Spy Ring experience drove many Western intelligence officers
(e.g. James Angleton, Peter Wright) to suspect almost everyone was a Soviet spy
• How can we sort the wheat from the chaff (or worse?)
• Some suggestions to follow…
Intelligence analysis and Forecasting
• Part of intelligence analysis is forecasting
• Unconditional forecasting – what is likely to
happen? E.G. Will the Iranian Govt fall?
• Conditional forecasting – how is North Korea
likely to react if we do X?

188
Well known intelligence failures…
• Fall of Shah’s regime in Iran
• Fall of the Soviet Union
• Indian nuclear program
• 9/11
• Saddam Hussein’s WMD program

189
Politicization
• Can be obvious – political pressure on
intelligence agencies to reach conclusions
• Can also be more subtle
– Promotions and hiring decisions
– Inconvenient conclusions more likely to be
questioned
• But politicization is by no means the only
190
Reasons behind intelligence failure
• Complexity effects
• Preference falsification
• Other side’s deception
• Other side’s self deception
• Compartmentalization
• Cognitive heuristics
– Groupthink
– Confirmation bias
– Failure to put oneself in opponent’s shoes
– Overrating one’s state’s own importance

191
Reasons behind intelligence failures (2)
• Small sample bias (“I know a man who”)
• Bias in favour of causes rather than
randomness
• Fallacy of identity (Fischer):- big events must
have big causes. Failure of the Spanish
Armada can’t just have been caused by a
storm
What can be done about it?

193
Social science thinking tools (1)
• Don’t select on the dependent variable
– That is, look at cases where an outcome occurred
and where it did not occur
– Look at intelligence failures and intelligence
successes. How are the former different from the
latter?
– Many ‘post mortems’ look only at failure (e.g.
9/11 Report, Iran Post Mortem) 194
Social science thinking tools (2)
• Look at relevant comparisons (equivalence
classes)
– What happened in other similar cases?
– Relevant comparison cases may not be the same
country at a different time
– Problem is though – what is a relevant
comparison? Here theory must be your guide
195
Social scientific thinking tools (3)
• Do not overlook negative evidence
– What evidence is there that suggests my chosen
interpretation is wrong?
– For instance, what evidence was there that
suggested Saddam Hussein did not have WMDs?
– What were alternative interpretations of the
supposedly supportive evidence?
196
Heuers Table (from Omand, How Spies
Think) Source Type
Credibility
Hypothesis 1:
Iran plans to conduct nuclear
Hypothesis 2:
Iran intends to conduct nuclear
Relevance weapons related experiments research for civilian purposes

Evidence 1: known capability Assumption Consistent Consistent

to enrich uranium Medium
High
Evidence 2: procurement via Inference Consistent Less Consistent
an import/export company High
Medium
Evidence 3: military security Imagery Consistent Less Consistent
around warehouse High
Medium

Evidence 4: high speed fuses Humint Consistent Much less consistent

acquired by covert channels New source on trial
High
Evidence 5: encrypted high Sigint Consistent Much less consistent
grade military comms to and High
from warehouse Hight
Red Teams – a digression
• Three different types of red team
– Plays the adversary in war games
– Plays the adversary to check security
– Team designed to probe weaknesses in the dominant argument
• When we talk about ‘red teams’ we mean the third sense
• Red teams in this sense are designed to mitigate confirmation bias
• This is what you should be doing as the ‘red team’ in the presentation exercises

198
Social scientific thinking tools (4) – the
hypothetico-deductive model
• Hypothetico-deduction:-
– Derive ‘observable implications’ of your theory
• What would we expect to see if this theory were true?
– Make your theory falsifiable
• What evidence could prove your theory wrong?
– Identify alternative theories
– Construct discriminating tests
• What evidence would we see if our theory was correct
199
Social scientific thinking tools – Bayes’
Rule
• Probability a hypothesis (A) is true, given
some evidence (B). (e.g. probability Trump is
a Russian asset= A; his appointment of Flynn
as National Security Advisor = B)
• ) = ) * ) / () * ) + ) * ) )
• “The probability Trump is a Russian asset given that he appointed Flynn as his advisor ()) is equal
to the probability he appoint Flynn as his advisor if he were a Russian asset ( ) ) times our prior
belief that he is a Russian asset) ), divided by the probability he would appoint Flynn as his advisor
whether he was a Russian asset or not ) * ) + ) * ) )”
Social scientific thinking tools – sensitivity
analysis
• There’s a saying ‘assumptions make an ass
out of ‘u’ and ‘me’
• But in reality all conclusions rest on some
assumptions. The key question is – are these
assumptions reasonable? If not, are our
conclusions sensitive to these assumptions?
• Sensitivity analysis involves examining what
Application: Overlord

202
Where will the Allies invade?
• Two theories
– Normandy
– Pas de Calais
• Calais is close to UK,
but heavily defended
• Normandy further,
but less protected
What are your priors?
For each piece of evidence –
• How likely would this be to occur if the Pas
de Calais were the main target?
• What are some alternative explanations of the
same evidence?
• How likely would this evidence be if
Normandy were the main target?
 First Data Point – Agent Alaric
• Alaric is an agent of the Abwehr (German
intelligence). A hardline Spanish fascist, he
lives in England and runs a network of
informers out of the Spanish Embassy in
London. He has a high reputation with the
Abwehr and has provided useful information
in the past about the Allied invasion of French
 Second Data Point - FUSAG
• Alaric reports that the main invasion will be undertaken by the First
US Army Group (FUSAG) stationed in Kent, directly opposite the Pas
de Calais, under the command of General George S Patton, widely
considered the best Western Allied General
• Limited aerial reconnaissance confirms presence of large amounts of
US armour in Kent
• US and British newspapers obtained by Abwehr contain photographs
of visits by Patton to FUSAG units in Kent
 Data Point 3 – Landings in Normandy
• Large numbers of US, British and Canadian troops land in Normandy
• Alaric warns the Germans in a radio message to the Abwehr station in Madrid at
3am (shortly before the first Allied troops land). The message is not received and
passed on to Berlin until 8am (after the landing) because the signaller is on leave
• The details Alaric passed on were later confirmed to be true. Alaric sent a furious
message to the Abwehr about the laxness in not passing on his report in time
• Alaric’s message also adds that the Normandy landings are a diversion designed
to draw German forces away from the Pas de Calais in preparation for Patten’s
landing
Data Point 4 – Churchill Speech – 6th June
1944
“I have also to announce to the House that during the
night and the early hours of this morning the first of
the series of landings in force upon the European
Continent has taken place”
Given the evidence, what is our final
conclusion?
• What do you estimate to be the probability
that the main Allied invasion will be in the
Pas de Calais?
Sensitivity Analysis
• How sensitive is this conclusion to our choice
of priors?
• How sensitive is it to certain pieces of
information?
• Which pieces of information are the most
discriminatory?
Aim of the exercise
• Helps to show the power of ‘priors’ – our
initial belief in whether a theory is true or
false
• Shows how important some pieces of
evidence are relative to others – by how much
they shift our priors
• Forces us to be explicit about what alternative
Takeaways from today’s lecture
• Intelligence failures result from many of the
same faulty heuristics that we find in decision
making more generally
• Intelligence is about discerning our
adversaries’ intentions and capabilities,
allowing us to predict their actions and their
responses to ours
Remember
• Formulate your initial hypothesis – what is the case?
• Look for alternatives – what might be true instead?
• Form your priors – how likely is this theory? How likely are the alternatives?
• Update your priors based on incoming evidence. How likely would it be that we
would observe this evidence if our theory were true? How likely if the alternative
were true?
• Strong evidence is that which causes us to update our priors considerably
• Ask ourselves why we find this evidence so strong
 OSINT

POLS3001 – S1
The next big thing in intelligence…
• Today we are flooded by enormous amounts of data
• No intelligence service has the capacity to comb through it all
• But a substantial proportion of this is open source
• This has led to the rise of the ‘OSINT Community’
• A large community of hobbyists and professionals from outside the
intelligence agencies using OSINT to answer important questions
How OSINT works
• Solving a question of interest
• Often involves a mixture of social media,
other online sources and satellite imagery
• Open source investigation – collaborators
may not know one another
• Puzzle is pieced together by a loose network
of investigators
Example: Who downed MH17?
• MH17 was a Malaysian Airlines flight from
Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. It was shot
down over Eastern Ukraine on 17 th July 2014
killing all 298 passengers and crew.
• Suspicion immediately fell on pro-Russian
Donbas separatists, but various narratives
were advanced online.
Alternative ‘Theories’
1. Ukrainians deliberately diverted the flight path
so that the Donbas Separatists would shoot it
down
2. Ukrainian jet shot down MH17
3. Ukrainian missile shot down MH17
The OSINT investigation
1. Post on Vkontakte Donbas separatist page
claims they downed a Ukrainian Air Force
plane on 17th July. No UAF jets downed on
that day. Post deleted
2. 35 second video uploaded to YouTube
showing a Buk missile launcher
3. Using Google Earth, Bellingcat researcher
4. Russian-speaking US OSINT hobbyist
geolocates another picture of the Buk in a small
city in the Donbas using only the name of a
hardware store that appeared in the corner of the
photograph. Posted on Twitter
5. Analysis of the shadows in the picture dated
the picture to 12.30pm on the 17 th. The Buk had
6. Another YouTube video locates the Buk at the town of Zuhres at 11.40am, while a
photograph published in a French magazine locates it at 9am in Donetsk
7. Finnish ex-military office worker confirms
from the blast site, radius and shape of the
holes in the fuselage that MH17 was indeed
taken down by a Buk missile
Where did they get the Buk?
• Russian émigré in the Netherlands discovers a video on Vkontakte of a
number of Buks passing through Southern Russia in convoy in June
2014. One Buk had a serial number 3’2.
• This resembled the partially painted out serial number of the Buk
spotted in Donetsk
• He found the same vehicle’s registration number in a separate video,
which he traced back to the Russian 53 rd Brigade based in the Moscow
Military District
53rd Brigade
Launch site
Verifying Geolocation
Verifying smoke
What to believe?
• Who are OSINT investigators?
• Who might they be working for?
• Where did they get their information?
OSINT Methodology
• Don’t go ad hominem. Who the source is is
not important provided..
• The data sources can be verified
• You can follow the reasoning which connects
the data source and the conclusion
• This reasoning itself is sound (ie correct
methods have been followed)
Gaza
Gaza Damage Map
OSINT Tools and Resources
• https://images.google.com/ or Lens app
• Google Earth
• Landsat
• Google advanced search options
• Social media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Vkontakte,
YouTube, WeChat
• Translation options – Google Translate, DeepL
• Training offered via Bellingcat and Udemy
OSINT links
• Bellingcat https://www.bellingcat.com/
• Osint Defender
https://ko-fi.com/osintdefender
• Project Owl – Discord and Threads
• Osint Technical https://linktr.ee/osinttechnical
• Osint Techniques
https://www.osinttechniques.com/
Dangers of OSINT?
• Raw data does require significant skill to
process and analyze properly
• Karber’s ‘Chinese tunnels’ study
• OSINT sleuths may inadvertently tip off
malign actors about security vulnerabilities
 Deciding in groups

POLS3001 – S1
Previously on POLS3001…
• We talked about the unitary rational actor
model of FPA
• Few believe in the unitary rational actor
model in its entirety, but many believe it’s a
useful simplification
• There are challenges to many of its tenents.
Today we will look at a challenge to the
237
The pros and cons of deciding in groups
• As Mercier points out, groups can provide a
vital check against faulty individual thinking
• That’s why process is so important in foreign
policy
• *But* group dynamics can introduce new
complexities
The Bureaucratic Politics Model
• Associated with Graham Allison and his
analysis of the Cuban missile crisis
• Key postulate – bureaucratic actors within
states are the main actors we should focus on.
State policy emerges from haggling amongst
different agencies with their own interests and
worldviews. A state is more like an unruly
239
Examples
• Army vs Navy/Air Force over ‘Defence of
Australia’ Doctrine
• Foreign ministries often accused of ‘going
native’ – sympathizing with foreigners more
than their own country (e.g. FCO & Brexit)
• US military more cautious about use of force
than civilians, hews to Powell Doctrine
240
Why different interests?
• Government agencies want to increase budgets and power because
this means more prestige and money for people in them
• Those working in some agencies may have few alternatives should
their agency be downsized
• Also, individuals may come to believe that their agency’s mission is
more vital than others (ie the Air Force really is the future of warfare,
intelligence agencies are the only thing stopping terrorist attacks)

241
Why different worldviews?
• Selection – do you join DFAT if you have no
empathy for foreigners?
• Socialization – other diplomats have a way of
thinking which you emulate
• Experience – if you’re posted overseas as a
diplomat, you may come to appreciate
foreigners’ points of view more than you
242
Standard Operating Procedures
• Standard operating procedures are essential
for complex organizations to work, especially
under conditions of high stress
• SOPs encapsulate years of hard won learning
• But they can lead to disaster…

243
The Railroad Theory of WW1
• Russia wished to mobilize against Austria to protect Serbia, but not
Germany
• But the Russian railroads’ SOP meant that Russia had to mobilize
against both or neither – the Tsar chose both
• German General Staff’s SOP (the Schlieffen Plan) required they then
invade Russia’s ally France to knock it out of the war

244
Even worse
• 1983 Able Archer crisis – Soviet leadership
fears President Reagan will launch a nuclear
first strike
• Soviet Colonel Stanislav Petrov receives radar
reports of five incoming US ICBMs.
• Soviet SOPs are that if he concludes they are
real, Soviets must launch counterstrike
245
How can bureaucratic actors shape foreign
policy?
• Sheer complexity allows bureaucrats to
pursue their own agendas
• Bureaucrats have informational advantages
over the political leadership
• Bureaucrats can shape the agenda by drawing
up only plans they support
• Bureaucrats can leak to the press, political
246
How can political leaders respond?
• Be aware of key departments’ SOPs and language (e.g. Kennedy and
the US Navy)
• Play different agencies off against each other (especially common in
autocracies)
• Employ people from outside the chain of command (special advisors)
to police the bureaucracy
• ‘Blue dye’ tests for leaks

247
Limits of the bureaucratic politics model
• Like all models, it only explains part of what’s going on
• Even the most powerful bureaucratic agency can’t ignore strong
structural constraints or public opinion on issues the public really
cares about (e.g. Brexit)
• Theory is quite US-centric. Explains less when applied to other types
of states. Public service generalists have less incentive to defend
bureaucratic turf

248
Groupthink vs Polythink
• When small groups make decisions, there are
two opposing dangers
• Groupthink: a tendency to suppress dissenting
views and express insincere agreement with
the prevailing consensus
• Polythink: tendency to express so many
dissenting views that a consensus is never
Groupthink
The Asch Experiment
• In 1951, the social psychologist Solomon
Asch carried out an experiment on
conformism
• The error rate in determining which right
hand line was the same length as the left hand
line shot up when a number of ‘confederates’
were instructed to intentionally give the
Why conformism?
• Fear?
• Desire to be agreeable?
• Recognition of one’s own fallibility?
For example…
And now…
Groupthink and foreign policy
• Bay of Pigs
• Korean War
• Pearl Harbour from the US side
Danger of group think
• Key assumptions unexamined
• Possible dangers ignored
• Consensus phony
• Bad decisions made
How do we combat group think?
• Red teaming
– Deliberately assign some people to challenge
conventional wisdom
– Must be genuine
• ‘Pre mortems’
– Imagine the chosen policy has failed. Write from
the point of view of the future as to why it has
failed
Too far the other way - polythink
• Inability of a group to come to and accept
responsibility for a decision
• Group may make a decision but then find it
undermined by dissenters
• This is also damaging for good policy making
Symptoms of polythink
• Leaks
• Confusion and poor communication
• Lowest common denominator policies
• Decision paralysis
Example – pre-9/11US
• US government characterized by splits
amongst key agencies with respect to the key
threats
– State Department vs Defense Department
– FBI vs CIA
– Presidential advisors vs Career public servants
– Bush appointees vs Clinton appointees
Bush Cabinet’s threat perception
• Cheney – Iraq
• Rumsfeld – military transformation
• Rice – rogue states and WMDs (e.g. Iran and
North Korea)
• Clarke – al Qaeda
Results
• Lack of communication between key agencies
(e.g. CIA did not pass information to FBI)
• Lowest common denominator policies (e.g.
ruling out direct military assault on al Qaeda)
• Poor flow of intelligence to Bush about al
Qaeda (intelligence about al Qaeda rarely
featured in the President’s daily brief)
How do we deal with polythink?
• ‘Decision unit architecture’ – ensure there are
clear procedures for making decisions (e.g.
majority vote)
• Break the problem into smaller sub problems
• Group brainstorming
Hitting the sweet spot
• Since groupthink and polythink are opposite
sides of a spectrum, decreasing the risk of one
may increase the risk of the other
• However, combining many of the
recommendations of the ‘groupthink’ and
‘polythink’ theorists can produce better policy
Running groups well
• Red Team
• Use premortems
• Break problems down
• Build teams with similar overall values but differing views on getting there
• Have clear decision rules
• Allow everyone to speak
• Strong signals from leaders that diverging views can be expressed
• However, once decisions have been made other group members must abide by them (‘cabinet
collective responsibility’)
Society and Foreign Policy

POLS3001 – S1
Societal factors shaping FP
• Political structure
– Democracy/Autocracy
– Types of Autocracy and Democracy
• Economic structure
– Type of market economy
– Politically influential sectors

267
Democracy/Autocracy
• Key distinction in comparative politics
• Democracies are characterized by competitive elections with universal
suffrage and individual rights
• Autocracies are states which do not meet one or any of these
conditions
• Some also posit the existence of ‘mixed regimes’ which combine
elements of both democracy and autocracy

268
Consequences for foreign policy
• Democracies fight less with other
democracies (democratic peace theory)
• Democracies tend to be easier to deal with
than autocracies in other ways
– Free press, political debate makes it easier to
know what democracies want
– Democracies tend to renege less on commitments
269
Distinctions amongst democracies
• Parliamentariansim/Presidentialism
– Powers of head of state relative to legislature
– UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland vs US,
France
• Single member vs multimember districts
– Former encourages two strong parties and single
party government
270
Consequences for foreign policy
• In presidential systems, foreign policy is usually reserved to the
President although the legislature has a certain amount of say.
Presidents often negotiate a deal, then must ‘sell’ it to the legislature
• In multimember district systems, coalition government is the norm.
Small coalition parties can have an outsize effect on foreign policy
(e.g. Kosovo War, Israel)

271
Distinctions amongst autocracies
• Personalist – based on one individual and his family. No real ideology,
basis in national tradition or ruling party (e.g. Syria, North Korea)
• Single party – based on a single governing party with a somewhat
clear ideology (e.g. China)
• Traditionalist – monarchical or religious. Grounded in a real or
imagined national tradition (e.g. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan)

272
Consequences for foreign policy
• Traditionalist/single party regimes more
predictable than personalist regimes
• Single party regimes resemble democracies in
some respects, though they are less
transparent
• Unsurprisingly, the personality of the leader is
most important in personalist regimes
273
Economic structure
• Almost all states these days have some kind
of market economy
• But there are vast differences in how these
market economies are organized
• Moreover, economic structure overlaps with
political structure in ways which are
important for FPA
274
Market economies
• Companies compete for business, state is at least in theory neutral
between them
• Private companies not supposed to influence or be influenced by state
foreign policy
• Market economies are usually also open to foreign trade and
investment
• Many scholars credit economic interdependence and globalization
with reducing the prospects for war

275
‘State capitalism’
• Many Middle Income Countries practice
‘state capitalism’ – market economies but
with large state owned enterprises or
sovereign wealth funds
• The interests of these organizations often
shape state foreign policy – these
organizations can also often be tools of state
276
Politically crucial sectors
• Some businesses/sectors can be politically
crucial for two reasons
– They generate significant employment/wealth in
politically crucial parts of the country
– They generate a significant part of the country’s
wealth
• Politicians cannot afford to ignore
277
Examples (1)
• US automobile industry (Ohio, Michigan etc)
• US armaments industry (substantial portions
of the country)
• French/Japanese agriculture
• Industries like these are politically
untouchable. Foreign partners cannot expect
deals that go against their interests 278
Examples (2)
• Mining industry in Australia
• City of London in the UK
• Oil industry in many countries
• Generate so much revenue and employment
for the government that their concerns cannot
be ignored
279
Consequences for foreign policy
• Influential sectors lobby for better relations with important markets (e.g. City of
London against ‘hard Brexit’)
• They can also lobby for more aggressive foreign policy (US defence industry) or
campaign for tariff or other types of barriers against foreign competition (US auto
industry)
• But economically influential sectors don’t always get what they want, especially
when ranged against other economically important sectors who want something
else (e.g. US retailers & financial services vs manufacturing and defence industry
over China policy)

280
Public Opinion and Foreign Policy
• 1) Does public opinion matter for foreign
policy?
• 2) What issues are most salient? What does
the literature say about them?
• 3) What does the literature have to say about
Australia specifically?
281
Key considerations
• Public has little incentive to inform themselves about politics in
general
• Public has even less incentive to inform themselves about foreign
policy, consequences are remote
• Political leaders generally don’t respond much to public pressure over
foreign policy (Dowding, Martin et al 2015)
• Yet if and when foreign policy crises do arise, public opinion is very
important

282
Issues in public opinion and foreign policy
• Support for military conflict, especially as a
function of casualties (‘casualty cringe’)
• Support for free trade/globalization
• (In the Australian context especially)
favorability towards other countries,
especially the US and China
283
Public impact on FP
• Bush 2004 victory largely due to war on terror
• Conversely Obama’s nomination and victory
in 2008 largely result of mismanagement of
Iraq by Bush Administration
• Australian PMs frequently consult pollsters
over war decisions (e.g. McMahon and
Whitlam over Vietnam)
284
Main schools of thought
• The ignorant public (Almond-Lippman
consensus)
• Casualty sensitivity (Mueller)
• Pretty prudent/roughly rational public
(Jentleson, Feaver & Gelpi)
• Partisanship above all else (Berinsky)
285
The Almond-Lippman Consensus

286
Almond-Lippman
• Public don’t care about foreign policy so they
are badly informed about it
• They have no real ‘opinion’ about it
• Public have no input into foreign policy
decisions and this is a good thing!

287
Casualty sensitivity
• Public opinion turned against wars like Iraq
and Afghanistan after (in a historical
perspective) very few casualties
• Phenomenon first noted with respect to
Korean and Vietnam War
• Became axiomatic – public will turn against
wars as casualties mount
288
The pretty prudent public
• Voters make a rough calculation of the costs and benefits of foreign
conflicts
• Casualties are important as they factor into the costs, but prospective
benefits matter too
• Chances of success and the goals of the war can counteract casualties
• Through Feaver’s influence, this animated part of the Bush
administration’s ‘surge’ strategy in Iraq

289
Partisanship
• Partisan identity is the ‘DNA’ of US politics
• Berinsky claims US public motivated by partisan cues not by facts on
the ground
• Casualties/prospects for success move elite opinion, which then
moves public opinion
• Iraq is a good example
• Not clear how much this travels outside the USA

290
The ‘Bottom-Up’ Theory (Kertzer and Zeitzoff)

• How can elite cues explain?

– Why US Democrat voters take a consistently pro-
Palestinian stance?
– Why publics in most NATO countries opposed
the war in Afghanistan long before any
mainstream parties did?
– Why publics in many EU countries oppose the
euro/EU but no mainstream parties do? 291
Social Networks
• Individuals form their views about world
politics based on general principles
• They get information from like-minded
individuals about particular events
• This is increasingly true as the media
landscape fragments – the ‘information
environment’ has changed
292
Views of globalization/free trade
• According to economic models, views of free
trade should follow personal economic
interest
• High skilled people in rich countries should
be in favour
• People dependent on exporting industries
should be in favour
293
Reality
• Opinion on globalization/trade has little to do
with personal economic interest
• Instead, main drivers are ideology/identity
• Two types of people overwhelmingly oppose
free trade/globalization
– Conservative nationalists
– Left wing socialists
294
The Australian context
• Variety of sources for Australian public
opinion on foreign policy – AES, ANU Polls,
Lowy Institute Australia and the World Polls
• Lots of work has been done to understand
what drives Australian opinion on foreign
policy
295
Australia and casualties
• Brown – Australia uniquely casualty averse
because of Gallipoli legacy
• Friedman – Australia rather insensitive to
casualties
• My research – Australia quite similar to US.
More casualty sensitive than in the past, but
still prospects for success matter
296
Australia Survey Experiment

CDF Very Confident CDF Somewhat CDF Not Very

of Success Confident of Success Confident of Success

High Casualties .39 .35 .3

Medium Casualties .45 .42 .35

Low Casualties .46 .43 .37

297
Australia and Afghanistan
Australian Casualties Cumulative Australian Casualties
40
(Cumulative)

30
20
10
0
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

Australian Public Opinion

on Afghanistan (Essential
Media)
Support for
Withdrawal

100
50
0
9 9 9 0 0 1 1 2 2
b-0 l-0 c-0 y-1 t-1 r-1 g-1 n-1 n-1
u c a
Fe J De Ma O M Au Ja Ju

298
ANZUS
• Alliance enjoys consistent majority support
• Main predictors of support – education,
ethnicity, political ideology and age
• External shocks in the form of wars or
terrorist attacks increase support for the
alliance
• However, alliance is less popular when 299
Australia and China
• China is Australia’s major trading partner by far
• Yet also has a very different political system and culture to Australia
• Australian opinion towards China fluctuates from year to year
• Gut favourability of the US usually much higher
• Opinion towards China largely shaped by education and attitudes
towards outsiders

300
Conclusions
• In general, public does not care or have much influence on foreign
policy
• But in crises and wars, the public can be crucial
• Public in most countries more casualty averse than before, but
casualties are not everything
• Australian public still more favourable to the US than China, but
unclear if this will last

301
 Economic Leverage

POLS3001 – S1
The new frontier?
• Some scholars believe direct war between
great powers is unlikely
• The main reason is the danger of nuclear
escalation
• But the great powers still disagree over a
number of issues, so how can this be
resolved?
303
Forms of economic coercion
• Sanctions – uni, bi or multilateral
• Foreign investment
• Aid
• Cyber attacks
• Monetary and Fiscal policy
• Market access
304
A few examples to think over
• In the following situations, there are two
actors
• They are dependent on one another
economically to some degree or other
• They want something from each other
• Who is more likely to get what they want?
305
(1) - Brexit
• UK voted to leave the EU in 2016
• In the subsequent negotiations, the UK
Government wanted access to European
markets without allowing free movement of
EU nationals to the UK
• EU unwilling to grant full access to European
markets without freedom of movement
306
(2) Scotland

• Had Scotland voted for independence in 2014, an independent

Scotland wanted to maintain the British pound as its currency
• This would mean the Bank of England would have to act as lender of
last resort to major Scottish commercial banks
• Different currencies in Scotland and England however would hurt
both countries’ economies

307
(3) Chinese holdings of US debts
• China is the major holder of US sovereign
debt
• Chinese purchases of US debt allow US to
consistently run budget deficits
• But the purchases also provide a safe haven
for Chinese savings
308
Conventional wisdom about economic
pressure
• Advantage lies with the lender and the seller,
not the debtor and the buyer
• Hence concern over Chinese purchase of US
debt (in US), dependence on Middle Eastern
and/or Russian oil and natural gas

309
JM Keynes
• “If you owe someone £1,000, they own you.
If you owe someone £1,000,000, you own
them”
– JM Keynes

310
The Arab Oil Embargo

311
Background
• Israel defeated Arab states in the Yom Kippur
War largely due to US assistance
• Arab states decided to wield the ‘oil weapon’
to punish US for its support of Israel
• Main Arab oil producers embargoed oil sales
to the US (and Holland)
312
How’d that work out?
• European and Japanese companies bought oil
which they sold to the US
• But supply shock led to a global economic
downturn
• Global economic downturn led to reduced
demand (and hence price) for oil
• Also sparked conservation measures in oil313
The real lesson
• The party with the advantage is the one whose opportunity costs of
disruption are lower
• Disruption of an economic relationship hurts both parties, the key
question is who it hurts more
• If there are more willing lenders out there than borrowers, this is the
borrower
• If there are more willing sellers out there than buyers, this is the buyer

314
David and Goliath

• Generally, the advantage lies with the bigger actor

• Canada loses more from a disruption to trade with the US than the US
would
• Both American and Canadian policymakers know this, and know that
each other knows it
• Hence the US will tend to get more of what it wants than Canada will
• This explains why smaller countries often group together in trade
federations (e.g. EU, Mercosur)

315
Exception
• If you have something the other state needs,
others may also need and no one can get
anywhere else, you’re in luck
• But cases like this are quite rare

316
Likely winners…
• 1) the EU
• 2) the rest of the UK
• 3) the USA

317
Sanctions
• Empirical record of sanctions very mixed
• Very little evidence that sanctions work in the
sense of producing policy concessions or
leadership change
• But sanctions are popular as a bloodless
alternative to military action
318
Why sanctions are an imperfect tool
• Need to coordinate amongst multiple states
(e.g. South Africa example)
• ‘Sanctions rents’ may enrich and entrench the
political elite (e.g. Iraq)
• May generate public support for targeted
regime
319
Model of sanctions

320
The Sanctions Paradox (Drezner)
• States with high prospective future conflict
are unlikely to be vulnerable to sanctions
• Similarly, sanctions unlikely to work where
opportunity costs gap small
• Sanctions only likely to work where there are
low expectations of future conflict AND high
disparity in opportunity costs
321
Aid
• Aid is often used as a tool of influence
• Very few countries give development aid
solely for humanitarian reasons
• Biggest recipients of US aid – Egypt and
Israel
• Cut off of aid can be a major tool of leverage
322
Monetary and fiscal options
• Soft loans can also be a form of economic
coercion
• Loans can be withdrawn, or collateral might
be demanded
• Some policymakers have raised such concerns
over the Chinese ‘One Belt, One Road’
initiative (‘debt trap diplomacy’)
323
Example – the Euro
• Germany is a major exporting economy. It is
geared to running a large trade surplus
• The individual European currencies were
merged into the euro at a rate which was good
for German exporters (ie DM was too low)
• The Eurozone thus provides Germany with a
well priced market for its export goods
324
The Eurozone Crisis
• As a result, goods from Southern Europe especially are uncompetitive
with the Germans
• This is a major cause of the Eurozone crisis of the early 2010s
• But it was in Germany’s interests to maintain the Eurozone by bailing
out Southern European economies. Those economies recognized the
euro was better than the alternative

325
Upshot
• The EU and Eurozone are thus a good
example of the use of economic instruments
as an alternative to force
• By the use of monetary and fiscal instruments
Germany has a strong market for its exports
without any suggestion of a resort to force
326
Foreign investment
• Foreign investment is overtaking trade in
goods and services as the main form of
globalization
• Instead of exporting goods to a foreign
country, you buy a stake in a foreign business
• Such investment can either be ‘portfolio’ or
‘FDI’
327
FDI as a tool of statecraft
• Many institutional investors have close
relations with their home government
• Sovereign wealth funds are one example.
These are quasi-statal organizations
• Often represent commodities exporters, rarely
democratic (Norway one exception)
• Debate over whether they pursue fully 328
Example – China-Taiwan

329
State banks
• State banks are another quasi-statal financial institution
• Again these can be more easily used as an instrument of state power
• Russia and China, for instance, have powerful state banks.
Governments happy for them to trade at a loss
• Western countries usually divested from state banks in the 1980s

330
Cyber attacks
• Cyber actors can attack foreign companies as
a way to weaken competition, steal secrets or
even gain a stronger negotiating hand
• One example is the persistent spate of cyber
attacks on Rio Tinto when a Chinese company
attempted to take it over
331
Market Access
• Returning to the EU
• The prospect of accession to the EU was a
major impetus to structural reforms in Eastern
Europe (e.g. Poland)
• The prospect of a closer relationship with the
EU and possible future accession is a major
tool for spreading West European influence
332
Farrell and Newman – ‘Weaponised
Interdependence’
• Optimistic 1990s and 2000s globalization
proponents believed that it reduced the scope
of great power competition
• Because the world was becoming more
interconnected, the thinking went, no one
would be overly dependent on anyone else
• Moreover, no state would be able to use
333
Economic Networks

334
Centrality
• It’s a major finding in network science that a small number of ‘nodes’
have lots of connections and a large number have few
• Some ‘nodes’ therefore have an outsized influence on the network as a
whole. This is a ‘high centrality’ network
• Many aspects of the global economy – especially finance and
communications – are like this

335
Global Financial Network

336
Argument
• Since the US, UK and EU are unusually well connected in terms of
finance and communciations, Farrell and Newman argue they have an
economic power beyond even that of their GDP
• They can use their network power both to observe what other states
and actors are doing (the ‘panopticon’) and coerce them (the
‘chokepoint’)

337
Example - SWIFT
• SWIFT is a payment system designed to facilitate transactions
between international financial institutions, established by US and
European banks
• It is almost indispensable for any bank looking to do business globally
• Because of the US/European basis of SWIFT, Western Governments
can use it to monitor transactions and cut off access

338
Example - PRISM
• Because most web traffic is hosted by US
based cloud servers, the US Government has
used it to monitor the communications of non-
US citizens
• By seeing who is talking to whom, even if
they don’t know who is saying what, the US
Government can get an idea of who is
339
Counteracting
• Powers such as China and Russia are aware of the network power of
the US, UK and EU
• Consequently they are working to counteract it
• A major goal of the Belt and Road initiative is to establish Chinese
standards overseas and give China more network power
• Russia aims to establish the Eurasian Union as an alternative to the
EU, with a blockchain payment system to bypass SWIFT

340
Conclusions
• The party which loses less in the event of a
disruption is generally the one with the
advantage
• This is not always the seller or the lender
• Sanctions are a generally ineffective tool of
statecraft
• Sanctions usually work best when threatened 341
Conclusion
• Yet sanctions are by no means the only tool of
economic statecraft
• Other tools include aid, monetary and
financial policy, FDI and leveraging network
power via ‘panopticon’ and ‘chokepoint’
strategies
• A major part of modern great power
342
 Identity and Culture

POLS3001- S1
Mossadeq
• “It may be easier to articulate the peculiar
difficulty of constraining a Mossadeq by the
use of threats when one is fresh from a vain
attempt at using threats to keep a small child
from hurting a dog or a small dog from
hurting a child” – Thomas Schelling
344
The Coup against Mossadeq
• “What the coup did was to take out the moderate, secular, element of Iranian
politics and enabled radical Islamists and radical leftists to emerge as key
opposition factions in place of it [in the 1960s and '70s]. The coup had this big
impact of essentially eliminating this pro-democracy faction and that had a very
important impact on Iranian politics in the intervening years.”
• - Mark Gaziorowski

345
Strategic Culture
• ‘Culture’ is a popular explanatory variable in strategic studies.
– ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’ – Peter Drucker.
– ‘American Way of War’, ‘Western Way of War’, ‘Eastern Way of War’, ‘Chinese Strategic
Culture’, ‘Iranian Strategic Culture’
• But it’s a problematic concept
– Hard to define
– Often superfluous
– Often carries dangerous ethno-centric connotations (‘military orientalism’)
(just ask Mohammad Mossadeq)

346
What is ‘culture’?
• “collectively held ideas, beliefs and norms” – Carole Pateman
• “Ideas intervene to define what (national interests, war aims or
victory) mean, and even what the end of a war looks like”- Patrick
Porter

347
Tautology
• Russia intervenes in the Eastern Ukraine
because Russian strategic culture hold the
Eastern Ukraine to be of particular value
• How do we know that Russian strategic
culture prizes the Eastern Ukraine?
• Well, the Russians just intervened there,
didn’t they?
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‘Essentialism’
• Holds a state’s decisions in international
politics to be a function of unchanging
national culture
• Russia, or Germany, or Iran, do this because
there’s some ineffable Russian, German or
Iranian strategic culture that propels them to
do it
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Example
• “Hundreds of years ago there seemed nothing
surprising in German barbarism, since the
world was full of savages in these early
days…Other people grew up and settled
down. The Germans never did. The Brazen
Horde remained savages at heart” – Sir
Robert Vansittart, the Black Record
350
Now?
• BBC Poll: Germany most popular country in
the world (2013)
• Germany at peace, democratic since 1945
• Massive donor of foreign aid
• Accepts more Syrian refugees than other EU
states
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Occam’s Razor

352
Does invoking culture add anything?
• The American way of war (Weigley)
– Dependence on technology, logistics
– Use of annihilation, attrition
– Minimization of casualties
– Preference for fighting conventional enemies
• The British way in warfare (Liddell-Hart)
– Preference for using continental allies
– Preference for maritime, indirect approaches

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• United States is a large, wealthy, technologically advanced country.
• United Kingdom is a small, wealthy island off the coast of Europe
• Aren’t the American or British ways of warfare nothing more than a rational
adaptation to economic and geographic circumstances?
• To say it’s ‘culture’ doesn’t add anything. But it can cause confusion

354
Dangerous ethno-centric implications
• For propaganda purposes, states always have
incentives to paint opponents as irrational,
driven by ancient, incomprehensible hatreds
• That doesn’t mean strategists should buy into
this
• It leads to underestimation
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The Maori Pa

356
Female suicide bombers

357
The `Western Way of War’

358
Oh really…
• “He who overcomes the enemy by fraud is as much to be praised as he
who does so by force” – Niccolo Machiavelli
• “He should regulate his march so as to fall upon them (the enemy)
while taking their refreshments or sleeping, or at a time when they
suspect no dangers and are dispersed, unarmed and their horses
unsaddled” – Flavius Vegetius Renatus

359
Oh really (pt 2)…

360
What’s left of culture?
• It has to provide some explanatory leverage
over and above a standard rational choice
account
• What might this look like?

361
 Intercultural differences – trust and
hierarchy
• There is evidence that cultures differ
systematically in how much they value certain
things
• These differences can have important
consequences for decision making
• Two of these differences concern trust and
hierarchy
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Hierarchy
• The extent to which it is considered legitimate
to question those who are higher up in a given
hierarchy than oneself
• Hofstede – power distance index
• East Asians = high power distance index;
Australians and Americans = very low
363
Cross-national differences
• Systematically, Greeks and Saudis, for
instance, have been found to make lower
initial offers than Britons, Swiss or
Australians
• That is, people coming from the former
cultures are systematically less trusting than
the latter
364
Frames of reference
• Policymakers use analogies from their own country’s strategic history and thinkers
first
• This may shape how they interpret other states’ moves and the best responses to
them
• e.g. Americans think by analogy to the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WW2,
Vietnam. Other ways of thinking about things less easy
• Same is true for other cultures. For instance, many Iraqis analogized the US
invasion of 2003 to the medieval Mongol invasion of the Baghdad-based
Caliphate

365
Goals
• ‘Culture’ may provide the goals which states’ strategies pursue
• e.g. ‘sacred’ or quasi-sacred territory such as Jerusalem, Kosovo, the Ukraine,
Northern Ireland
• But remember
– Many ‘ancient’ disputes are modern inventions
– States have incentives to exaggerate how much they care about these issues
– Sacred values such as these can be traded off against other things (e.g. post
GFC, most Northern Irish Catholics opposed to unification with Eire)

366
Even here…
• Strategic cannons so vast that one can use
them to justify pretty much any course of
action
• ‘Western way of war’ supposedly about
direct, face to face combat
• But you can find support for evasive, guerrilla
type strategies in Machiavelli, Vegetius and in
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Moreover
• Thinkers and decision makers borrow from
‘other’ strategic cultures
• Sun-Tzu and Mao popular in US staff
colleges
• Al Qaeda borrow liberally from thought of
non-Muslim urban, guerrilla and insurgency
theorists
368
China
• Push for an IR theory with ‘Chinese
characteristics’
• IR theories usually developed with reference
to Western history and culture
• Are we missing out thereby?

369
The Sinic World System

370
Approx (206BCE)-Approx (1840CE)
• Chinese system not based on formal equality
or sovereignty
• Other states in the system were vassals of the
Chinese emperor (e.g. Korea, Vietnam)
• Could run their own internal affairs, but
deeply influenced by Chinese culture
371
Peaceful
• Two ‘interstate’ wars in East Asia between
1368 and 1840 CE (Chinese invasion of
Vietnam in 1407 and Japanese invasion of
Korea in 1592)
• In the same period, in the West, 46 wars
between England and France alone
372
Kang’s argument
• Other states internalized Chinese value
system (e.g. Korea, Vietnam, Japan to some
extent)
• Chinese did not believe conquest of these
states to be necessary or legitimate
• Historical memory of the peacefulness of
Chinese hegemony permeates Asian reactions
373
Counters?
• Geography? No need for territorial
aggrandizement/ less opportunity
• “If we envision IR as a scientific inquiry, then
IR theory should be universally applied. If we
do not need a Chinese school of physics or
chemistry, why should we need a Chinese
school of IR theory?” – Yan Xuetong
374
Conclusion
• Strategic culture is a popular concept
• But it’s a flawed one
• At worst, it is tautological, adds little to
existing explanations and encourages
underestimation of the enemy
• At best, it can illuminate how one’s adversary
conceives of issues, but even here the 375