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.
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.