The fundamental problem with this model is that states are not well-modelled as EU-maximizers, precisely because they are not subject to strong enough coherence pressures (on the relevant timescales), and western/democratic intuitions about what constitutes the interests of a state are often misleading.
For example, it’s more natural to explain the Russian invasion of Ukraine as the result of Putin’s personal domestic-political interests, and to a lesser extent of the great-Russia ideology he draws on, than as being actually or in expectation good for the Russian state and citizenry.
I think this is complicated. It’s completely fine for the preference relation to be determined mostly or entirely by one person and for the most or all of the considerations to be ideological, and empirically I think the rational-agent IR theory has done quite well (e.g explaining the decline of inter-state wars). For instance Russia-Ukraine war can be pretty easily explained in a bargaining frictions model of inter-state conflict.
The problem comes if the procedure used by all the different power blocs to come up with policy gennerates a non-transitive preference relation in which case a utility function can’t be used to model their behaviour. I think it’s completely possible that this is the case, but I think a rational choice model does explain Soviet behaviour quite well in the Berlin example I gave.
This ignores concerns about reaching equilbiria and computational constraints, although I don’t think the latter should be a signfignt problem in these sorts of contexts.
The fundamental problem with this model is that states are not well-modelled as EU-maximizers, precisely because they are not subject to strong enough coherence pressures (on the relevant timescales), and western/democratic intuitions about what constitutes the interests of a state are often misleading.
For example, it’s more natural to explain the Russian invasion of Ukraine as the result of Putin’s personal domestic-political interests, and to a lesser extent of the great-Russia ideology he draws on, than as being actually or in expectation good for the Russian state and citizenry.
I think this is complicated. It’s completely fine for the preference relation to be determined mostly or entirely by one person and for the most or all of the considerations to be ideological, and empirically I think the rational-agent IR theory has done quite well (e.g explaining the decline of inter-state wars). For instance Russia-Ukraine war can be pretty easily explained in a bargaining frictions model of inter-state conflict.
The problem comes if the procedure used by all the different power blocs to come up with policy gennerates a non-transitive preference relation in which case a utility function can’t be used to model their behaviour. I think it’s completely possible that this is the case, but I think a rational choice model does explain Soviet behaviour quite well in the Berlin example I gave.
This ignores concerns about reaching equilbiria and computational constraints, although I don’t think the latter should be a signfignt problem in these sorts of contexts.