Nitpick on the framing: I feel that thinking about “misaligned decision-makers” as an “irrational” reason for war could contribute to (mildly) misunderstanding or underestimating the issue.
To elaborate: The “rational vs irrational reasons” distinction talks about the reasons using the framing where states are viewed as monolithic agents who act in “rational” or “irrational” ways. I agree that for the purpose of classifying the risks, this is an ok way to go about things.
I wanted to offer an alternative framing of this, though: For any state, we can consider the abstraction where all people in that state act in harmony to pursue the interests of the state. And then there is the more accurate abstraction where the state is made of individual people with imperfectly aligned interests, who each act optimally to pursue those interests, given their situation. And then there is the model where the individual humans are misaligned and make mistakes.
And then you can classify the reasons based on which abstraction you need to explain them.
Nitpick on the framing: I feel that thinking about “misaligned decision-makers” as an “irrational” reason for war could contribute to (mildly) misunderstanding or underestimating the issue.
To elaborate: The “rational vs irrational reasons” distinction talks about the reasons using the framing where states are viewed as monolithic agents who act in “rational” or “irrational” ways. I agree that for the purpose of classifying the risks, this is an ok way to go about things.
I wanted to offer an alternative framing of this, though: For any state, we can consider the abstraction where all people in that state act in harmony to pursue the interests of the state. And then there is the more accurate abstraction where the state is made of individual people with imperfectly aligned interests, who each act optimally to pursue those interests, given their situation. And then there is the model where the individual humans are misaligned and make mistakes. And then you can classify the reasons based on which abstraction you need to explain them.