"No" - Matthew Yglesias

Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon make a valuable contribution to our understanding of questions of war and peace with “Why Hawks Win” (January/February 2007). What’s most novel is their explanation of the psychological foundations of policy errors, rather than their more general conclusion that hawkish advice is usually mistaken and accepted for reasons other than its merits.

Put so bluntly, many would probably regard that conclusion as intensely controversial. Yet it should be obvious, as its truth is easy to establish. Some wars are disastrous for both sides, causing widespread damage and devastation without achieving much of anything. World War I is the classic example, where not only the Central Powers (who “lost”) but also the Allies (who “won”) found themselves far worse off than before the war began. Other wars arguably end in a beneficial manner—for one side. The reverse situation—a war where both parties end up better off than they had been before the fighting—is so rare as to be unheard of. That is because war is a negative-sum enterprise, involving the destruction of resources (most notably, human beings) that could otherwise be employed in productive ways. As a result, when two parties go to war, at least one of them, and possibly both, is making a mistake.

Consequently, Kahneman and Renshon actually end up being unduly generous to the hawkish point of view. Sometimes, of course, war is necessary. But since there are two sides to every conflict, hawks won’t always be right. Even in a case where an American president is rightly listening to his hawkish advisors (George H.W. Bush in the first Gulf War, say, or Bill Clinton over Kosovo), a foreign leader (Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic) is making a serious miscalculation in listening to his hawkish advisors.

In short, most decisions to go to war have been mistakes. Sometimes, as in World War I, both sides are making a mistake, and other times, as in World War II, only one side is, but the upshot is that the impulse to launch wars is more widespread than it ought to be. Indeed, hawks themselves recognize this fact. Pro-war arguments almost always contend that the enemy is irrationally aggressive, while overestimating one’s own military capabilities. Where the hawks go wrong is in their belief that irrational exuberance about violence is the exclusive province of real or potential adversaries, rather than a problem from which they themselves may suffer.

Unfortunately, Kahneman and Renshon shy away from pushing their psychological analysis into the policy domain, writing that “the clear evidence of a psychological bias in favor of aggressive outcomes … won’t point the international community in a clear direction on Iran or North Korea.” In fact, the implications are rather clear. As members of the Bush administration admit, the decision to rebuff repeated diplomatic initiatives from Tehran was probably influenced in part by irrational “reactive devaluation,” defined by the authors as “the very fact that a concession is offered by somebody perceived as untrustworthy undermines the content of the proposal.”

Many analysts, meanwhile, have raised serious questions about the American military’s capacity to seriously degrade the Iranian nuclear program. Hawks are predictably more optimistic. Strong evidence of a human bias toward overestimation of one’s own capabilities is obviously relevant to evaluating this dispute. Hawks seem unwilling to consider the possibility that Iran’s efforts on the nuclear front are motivated by fear of America’s threatening behavior rather than by Teheran’s desire to behave in an equally threatening way. This would appear to be a textbook manifestation of the authors’ observation that “even when people are aware of the context and possible constraints on someone’s behavior, they often do not factor it in when assessing the other side’s motives.” If hawkish psychological biases are widespread, and if all of those biases are in play in Iran’s case, then hawks’ arguments are significantly undermined. In particular, it strongly suggests that it would be a mistake to resort to military action without first making a good faith effort at engagement and the peaceful resolution of differences—precisely what the Bush administration has failed to do.

Matthew Yglesias is a staff writer at the American Prospect and writes an eponymous blog.