The role of leaders in foreign policy decision making

The course of history is determined by the decisions of political elites. Leaders and the kind of leadership they exert shape the way in which foreign policies are made and the consequent behavior of states in world politics. "There is properly no history, only biography" is the way Ralph Waldo Emerson encapsulated the view that individual leaders move history.

Leaders as Makers and Movers of World History.

This history-making individuals model of policy decision making equates states' actions with the preferences and initiatives of the highest government officials. We expect leaders to lead, and we assume new leaders will make a difference. We reinforce this image when we routinely attach the names of leaders to policies, as though the leaders were synonymous with the state itself, as well as when we ascribe most successes and failures in foreign affairs to the leaders in charge at the time they occur. The equation of U.S. foreign policy with the Nixon Doctrine in the 1970s, the Reagan Doctrine in the 1980s, and the Clinton Doctrine in the 1990s, are recent examples.

Citizens are not alone in thinking that leaders are the decisive determinants of states' foreign policies and, by extension, world history. Leaders themselves seek to create impressions of their own self-importance while attributing extraordinary powers to other leaders. The assumptions they make about the personalities of their counterparts, consciously or unconsciously, in turn influence their own behavior toward them, as political psychologists who study the impact of leaders' perceptions and personalities on their foreign policy preferences demonstrate.

One of the dilemmas that leader-driven explanations of foreign policy behavior pose is that the movers and shakers of history often pursue decidedly irrational policies. The classic example is Adolf Hitler, whose ruthless determination to seek military conquest of the entire European continent proved disastrous for Germany. How do we square this kind of behavior with the logic of realism, which says that survival is the paramount goal of all states and that all leaders engage in rational decision making? If the realists are correct, even defects in states' foreign policy processes cannot easily explain such wide divergences between the decisions leaders sometimes make and what cold cost-benefit calculations would predict.

We can explain this divergence in part by distinguishing between procedural rationality and instrumental rationality. Procedural rationality is the foundation of the realists' billiard-ball image of world politics. It views all states as acting similarly because all decision makers engage in the same "cool and clearheaded ends-means calculation" based on perfect information and a careful weighing of all possible alternative courses of action. Instrumental rationality is a more limited view that says simply that individuals have preferences and, when faced with two or more alternatives, they will choose the one they believe will yield the preferred outcome.

The implications of these seemingly semantic differences are important. They demonstrate that rationality does not "connote superhuman calculating ability, omniscience, or an Olympian view of the world," as is often assumed when the rational-actor model we have described is applied to real-world situations. They also suggest that an individual's actions may be rational even though the process of decision making and its product may appear decidedly irrational. Why did Libya's leader, the mercurial Muammar Qaddafi, repeatedly challenge the United States, almost goading President Ronald Reagan into a military strike in 1986? Because, we can postulate, Qaddafi's actions were consistent with his preferences, regardless of how "irrational" it was for a fourth-rate military power to take on the world's preeminent superpower. This and many other examples serve as a reminder of the importance of the human factor in understanding how decisions are made. Temptation, lack of seif control, anger, fear of getting hurt, religious conviction, bad habits, overconfidence—all play a part in determining why people make the kinds of decisions they do.