The Dilemma of Rationality in Foreign Policy
The Case of Putin’s Russia
Victory Day on Red Square, Moscow, May 9, 2018 Parade, The parade march of the Special Purpose Operational Division, Source: www.kremlin.ru
With the threat of a new, potentially massive Russian attack on Ukraine, an old debate has resurfaced: that of rationality in foreign policy and, in particular, that of the Russian regime. Many have long wondered whether Vladimir Putin is a rational actor and have generally concluded that he is not. Some believe, refusing to banish the term “rationality” with regard to him, that his rationality is different from that of the political leaders of the free world and imagine a kind of relative rationality. Others, finally, consider that the “rationality” of the head of the Kremlin has evolved during his 22 years of reign and that if his faculty of rationality is affected, it is also because, in his isolation and in the regime of fear that he has installed, it is his very reason that is compromised. None of these assertions is in itself obvious, for none of them is absolutely true or false. The very term rationality refers to an often uncontrolled polysemy.
The central point of the debate here is the non-linear relationship between rationality and reason. Without doubt, being rational consists in using one's reason. But there is a distance between “reasoning reason” and what we could call reason as such. The former obeys what is called “instrumental rationality”, in other words, a form of rationality that aims to achieve certain goals. We can grant that Vladimir Putin has made better use of this rationality than the Western leaders, since he has, until now, achieved his goals while the latter have not been able—or rather, have not wanted—to achieve theirs. For 22 years he has won the war while the West has lost it.
But were Putin’s goals rational in a second sense, that is, guided by reason? If we believe that reason for a leader consists in particular, if not primarily, in making his people happy and alleviating their misfortunes, it is clear that the head of the Kremlin is not the possessor of such reason. If we understand that the goal of a head of state is to strengthen the prosperity of his country, its economic and research potential, and to give it an attractive image abroad, then we can hardly consider that Putin has motivations that obey this reason and, in a way, acts against the “nature of things”. The nihilistic and destructive ideology that is his is opposed to reason as it is generally understood. But we are obliged, in order to criticize it, to make a normative judgment on reason and to pass from instrumental rationality to rationality in terms of values—which opens a whole field of philosophical reflection.
As such, the questioning of the rationality of a foreign policy is actually a banal debate: was the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan rational? Was it rational for Barack Obama not to respect his red lines in Syria? Was the Vietnam War rational? Was the sending of French troops to Mali—and their withdrawal—rational? Was launching a referendum on the Brexit rational? Was the refusal of nuclear power in Germany—with the consequences we know about in terms of dependence on Russian gas—rational? Was the second Iraq war rational? The examples are certainly infinite. In all these cases, rationality or irrationality is assessed both in relation to a goal and to a result, which is by definition known ex post, and involves questions about the probability of victory, the feedback effects induced by the perception of a decision by public opinion, especially in terms of perception, the indirect consequences and possible perverse effects, the opportunity cost, the hierarchy of objectives that leaders have set themselves, etc.
The myth of rationality in foreign policy
In 1967, Raymond Aron denounced certain proponents of the realist school of international relations who tended “to hypostasize states and their so-called national interests, to lend these interests a kind of rationality or constancy, and to reduce the interpretation of events to calculations of force and compromises of equilibrium.” In fact, as I had also insisted, to imagine that what the leaders declare as their “interests” correspond to real interests, or that this discourse is sincere, is at best naive. The very definition of a “national interest” of states does not obey a rationality, even though this can be constructed politically with the help of formally rational arguments.
Attempts have sometimes been made to formalize foreign policy choices through models based on the behavior of rational actors in decision-making processes. These rationalist models have been strongly criticized by a part of the academic literature. It is certainly possible, in an empirical way, to list the points to be considered, in the short, medium and long term, and to establish scenarios that allow us to determine the scope of a given decision. This is what all serious foreign policy analysts do when they analyze the impact and possible chain effects of a given decision. This is also the role of advisory and decision-making bodies placed under the authority of heads of state and government, such as the National Security Council (NSC) in the United States and, to a lesser extent, the Defense Councils in France. Depending on the period, the NSC has thus been functional or dysfunctional, the political factor often being the determining factor.
One could conclude that foreign policy is more or less rational, which does not explain much. It is most often the ability of the political leader and his or her entourage to appreciate the consequences of his or her decisions or non-decisions over the long term that constitutes a reasonable indicator of his or her rationality. But this assumes that he or she has in mind the long-term goals he or she intends for the country, that he or she adequately considers a multiplicity of factors—including a range of potentially induced consequences and how these might be used in the propaganda narratives of enemies—and takes into account the positions and reactions of the country’s allies, who will also help shape the future. He or she will have to balance all of this against the constraints of resources and the reactions of public opinion, which can be either encouraging or limiting.
It is easy to show that the policy of the West, both the United States and the European Union, towards the Russian regime has lacked a rational perception of its threat. This rationality is linked to our security interests as well as to our values. Our abstention or near abstention in the second Chechen war (1999-2000), Georgia (2008), the war against Ukraine (since 2014) and Syria (2013, 2016, 2018 and today), which led to both the strengthening of Russian positions and the intensification of its crimes can be explained by a lack of rationality on four main points: the lack of research into understanding the nature of the Russian regime, the missing anticipation of the consequences that each gain had on the part of the Kremlin, the understanding of the changes to be made to the classic diplomatic game, and the total disregard for the Russian propaganda game.
One can easily conclude that Moscow has rationally taken advantage of our irrationality. However, without a rigorous and sincere evaluation of its mistakes, the West risks continuing, at least partially, to repeat its errors. Even the fortunately firmer and more united position of the West today does not mean that a full assessment of the reasons for our blindness has been made.
Crime and rationality
The crime against humanity, the war crime and the crime of genocide as such can be considered, in logical terms, as the extreme mark of irrationality in foreign policy. They translate not only an abandonment of reason as a value, but also a loss of all rationality, even instrumental, in the conduct of war. Some historians thus consider that the destructive madness of the Holocaust largely compromised the conduct of the war by the Nazis. Trains carrying European Jews to their deaths were prioritized, in Hitler’s demented mind, over those bringing troops close to the battlefield—other historians, however, dispute the significance of this point and offer varying assessments of the consequences of prioritizing mass murder on Nazi defeat.
Conversely, in examining the “rationality” of some criminals, one can make allowances for a form of instrumental rationality: barbaric regimes such as Assad's and Putin's may find that spreading terror on civilian populations is part of their war tactics to bring their adversary to its knees. The deliberate targeting of hospitals, schools, markets and homes—even those labeled as “terrorist hotbeds” by their propaganda—are part of their tools. Their war of extermination is part of their war. It indicates a project of overall destruction, including in ideological terms. The genocide committed by the Hutus against the Tutsis in Rwanda obeys the same monstrous logic, as does the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Serbs in Bosnia. The crime appears to be more than just a means: it is the substance of their project.
The Geneva Conventions prohibited these crimes as not being part of the “normal” and “legitimate” conduct of war. It is not, however, their irrationality that compels us to condemn them and to take the necessary steps to prosecute their perpetrators before international criminal courts. It is their very purpose and their attack on the universal idea of irrationality. This simple fact renders vain all exhortations heard in international forums for moderation or restraint: these crimes are part of the nature of these regimes and are their very foundation; it is, in a way, “rationality” that guides them. No doubt there is no rational war, any more than there is a “clean war”, but this judgment itself is made on the basis of a consideration of values. From the point of view of its author, war is rational when it is won and irrational when it is lost. A criminal does not have the same notion as we do of what are gains and losses.
The characteristic of war, a fortiori war accompanied by war crimes, is that it distorts the notion of rationality as we usually conceive it by making a link, sometimes involuntary, between rationality and values. Putin’s wars are irrational in relation to what we had described as “reasonable” objectives: Russia’s prosperity, economic strengthening and social progress. In the same “reasonable” way, Russia would have every interest in establishing peaceful and cooperative relations with Ukraine and, more broadly, with Europe and the United States. But if ideology becomes the primary consideration, aggression and crime become part of the logic of destruction. This becomes rationality in the sense of the explanatory reason for an enterprise of total annihilation of one’s own country, as is the case with Assad’s Syria.
Formal rationality is therefore inoperative to understand the war crimes that accompany contemporary wars, wars that have become the focus of the foreign policy of certain states. Their rationality does not derive from the consideration of foreign policy as a separate element of the regime, an object that could be dissected from the outside as having its own grammar. It is the regime itself that explains the war in its entirety. It is the regime that is the war; it is the regime that is the crime.
But it would be just as dangerous to conclude that rationality has a kind of relativity, because that would be to give it a credit that we cannot give it, except to fall into the trap that is set for the West.
From rationality to values
Rationality is also the object of a narrative. Now, every narrative not only carries values and appreciative or devaluing representations, but it also aims at using words which are as such value-bearing, that is to say received as such by public opinion. The heroes in the stories are courageous, generous, honest, altruistic, intelligent, but also rational. They know what they are fighting for—instrumental rationality—, but their fight is also just—value rationality. Up to now, not enough attention has been paid to this double image of rationality that the Kremlin’s propaganda wants to project—while trying to give the exact opposite image of the enemy.
This selling point can be found in both the hard and soft propaganda of the Kremlin, with of course the underlying idea of proceeding with rationality as with facts and with truth: relativizing it.
In its hard propaganda, the Kremlin has made constant use of terminology like “the Nazis of Kyiv” or “the rebels, Islamist terrorists” in order to discredit the entire opposition against Assad and to dehumanize its victims. Putin spoke, receiving Olaf Scholz on February 15, 2022, of a “genocide committed in the Donbass” by Ukraine—while the murders are his own. His regime has labeled his opponents, including Alexei Navalny and his organization, as “terrorists”. One also remembers his filthy propaganda campaigns against the Syrian White Helmets. The falsehood of his words, a sign of their intrinsic irrationality, has been shaped into a rational-looking discourse, aimed at identifying himself as a hero and others as bastards. This discourse, abundantly taken up by its relays in the West, aims to cast doubt and sow suspicion.
His soft propaganda proceeds in an apparently more subtle way: it is a matter of presenting his cause as just in the face of alleged NATO aggression, of talking about a betrayed pledge—there never was one—about the extension of NATO towards Eastern Europe, of propagating the idea of a socio-ethnocultural unity between Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, of mentioning an alleged perception of insecurity, etc. In short, it is a matter of presenting his cause as just in the face of alleged NATO aggression. In essence, it is a question of asking the West to enter into what is presented as rationality, even if it is based on sand, in order to undermine the rationality based on proven facts—the aggression of the Russian regime—of its enemy. Yet, by entering into such a scheme, some Western leaders—including the German president when he presented Nord Stream 2 as “compensation” after the Nazi atrocities, a way of saying that the current regime would have rights or excuses—move from accepting the logical staging of the Kremlin’s narrative to recognizing its rationality in value.
Now, there are two dangers: the first, let’s not insist on it anymore, would be that the West accredits this rationality as equally “valid”; the second would be to enter into this battle between two rationalities.
On our side, therefore, there is a dangerous terrain on which it is better not to venture: presenting our own rationality as an argument. We can be intimately convinced by concepts such as the “nature of things” or “natural law” as Leo Strauss understood it. But I am not sure that such concepts can prevail today—whatever the good or bad reasons that made this once theoretically stable universe a lost one.
Putin was able to succeed also because he found a Western universe that no longer had a secure foundation and that had separated reason and values. He instituted a perverse relativism on a philosophical relativism. The latter was founded on the intelligence of things as it resulted from methodical doubt; it was not founded, precisely, on a relativistic morality, carefully distanced from the philosophy of knowledge and language. When the French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis affirmed that “our basement is founded on the night”, he did nothing else than to express a banal observation: science does not produce any morals. But this was not intended to destroy either science or morality. Putin only turned this conclusion around in a perverse sense: if science does not produce any morals, we can make the most immoral morals into a science. And of course, we can also free ourselves from science and the search for truth—in particular, historical truth. That’s why we considered that the liquidation of Memorial ultimately told the truth about the nature of this regime.
In doing so, Putin returned to the very sources of ideology: “It is in the name of our ‘morality’ that we will define what rationality is. We will give it both value and an appearance of logic. By becoming the masters of the words, sometimes to seduce, sometimes to mislead, we will become the masters of the world.” No doubt this is why to the question I asked at the beginning about the rationality of Putin’s regime, there is only one answer whose complexity must be grasped in four steps.
1 One cannot claim that Putin obeys another rationality because his actions are based on a common understanding of rationality—otherwise he would not be manufacturing sophisticated weapons!
2 His behaviors can have an instrumental rationality.
3 We must understand that the ideological offensive that his regime is waging is also a war against our rationality in value, whose foundations and logic he aims to destroy.
4 To give up the slightest bit of ground to his rationality—even in the perverse unfolding of his so-called arguments—is already to enter into the game of his rationality that intends to confront ours. By attacking our rationality, he contributes to play the doubt in the West on our own values.
Faced with such a procedure, it would be totally vain to invoke our rationality, and all the more so since, in the free and democratic world, rationality is agnostic in terms of values. We cannot open the door to a debate on this conflict of rationality, because this would be tantamount to accepting to enter into the perverse logic of a reasoning as ultimately destructive as in Joseph Mankiewicz’s Sleuth. Rationality is neither an excuse for misdeeds nor a sign of recognition of benefits. In foreign policy, at least when it comes to fighting criminal regimes, the question of rationality has no place except in the means we choose to use. It is not the subject of a conversation with the enemy.
We must have the courage to defend our values—those of freedom, law, decency and dignity—not, even if we can demonstrate it, because they are more rational, but because they are ours.