Nuclear Rationality
Iran and American "rationality"
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
One of the most important developments in recent American politics has been the decline of the neoconservatives, a wing of Republicans known for their hawkish foreign policy views. Twenty years ago, the neocons were powerful enough to direct NATO into a years-long war on entirely false pretenses. Now, we have a completely different Republican President, a changed coalition, different staffing and institutional dynamics…
Yet here we are in 2025 with a possible war in the Middle East. Why? Thinking narrowly about recent events themselves gives a lot of possible answers and no clear ones: the dead hand of neoconservatism lives, Netanyahu schemed around or persuaded Trump, the President’s whim. Inconsistency by Donald Trump never really needs an explanation. Or you could say what has happened is restraint compared to what we might have gotten in the Bush era. If you want helpful answers on this level you should turn to reporters rather than historians.
Instead I want to go back nearly a century to consider the roots of American nuclear thinking, and their relationship to economics. Some of the prevailing assumptions of American right-wing economics, and economic “common sense,” are closely wedded to nuclear hawk sentiment from the early Cold War. The history of this vision of “rational choice” can help explain why Donald Trump’s foreign and domestic policy have often been so far from what we might call rational— and why in both areas, a more destructive version of mainstream Republican policy continues to successfully contend with the (differently bad) “national conservatism” that was supposed to characterize Trump 2.0.
The Ultimate Equation
In 1948, a 27-year-old summer intern working for the RAND Corporation think tank was given a simple assignment: develop a mathematical representation of what the Soviet Union would do. This was meant to be a “utility function” in the sense of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism. With a coldly logical depiction of what was good for the USSR, its rival could plan its own actions to avoid nuclear war… or win it. As S.M. Amadae narrates in the excellent Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: the Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism, there was a powerful current of thought in America during the early Cold War that aimed to resolve the madness of a nuclear world with mathematical reason. (For brevity I have to conflate some terms she precisely defines in the book, so while the relationship between “public choice,” “rational choice” and “systems analysis” is not significant for our purposes, if you are curious about it, you should go there!)
The RAND project of “systems analysis” claimed to “rationally” consider policy matters. And who wouldn’t want to use rational analysis? After all, the alternative was, implicitly, irrational. The first significant use of this RAND method was a project called the Offensive Bomber Study, which ran from 1947-1950. Its scope was ludicrous: in an era in which serious computing power was around one billionth that of a Nintendo Switch, RAND planned to determine the best future strategic bomber (bombers that drop extremely heavy ordnance loads) with calculations including everything from base location to aerial combat dynamics. If they could do it, they would prove to everyone the validity of their “scientific” approach to war.
This did not work. To the horror of the Air Force, RAND analysts determined the best solution by ranking damage to aircraft, not expected crew deaths. It is hard to imagine airmen excitedly climbing into bombers that had been designed to minimize economic damage rather than casualties. Moreover, somehow the study arrived at the solution– laughable in retrospect– that what the Air Force needed was more low-flying propeller aircraft rather than higher altitude and high-speed jets. This is the kind of policy-making that ignoring real people and their experience gets you: the supposed objectivity that made RAND’s method “rational” actually meant it was disconnected from the real world.
So RAND and then later advocates of systems analysis pivoted to fiction. Over the next few years, a circle centered around RAND political scientist Albert Wohlstetter began to drum up fears of nuclear war. They convinced themselves, and often the nation, that the Soviet Union was far more powerful than it actually was. RAND goons terrified the nation with the claim of a “missile gap,” which led accordingly to aggressive nuclear policy.
Opining on aircraft failed because it confronted reality: the people who actually flew them knew RAND’s suggestions were bad. Nuclear war with the Soviet Union was an entirely different kind of problem: because it was hypothetical and would hopefully remain so, there were no engineers, pilots, or generals who could definitively reject the doomsaying proposals of “systems analysis.” Their fearmongering relied on dubious, amoral, and oversimplified mathematical analysis that legitimized itself by being dubious, amoral, and oversimplified mathematical analysis: this is cold and distant and therefore rational, unlike the biased accounts of actual intelligence reports and military experience, or the naive idealism of anyone who might bring up ethical concerns.
Continuing to run with this, 50s and 60s systems analysis advocates downplayed actual quantitative work and turned “systems analysis” into a vibe– a brand, even. In a series of 1960s lectures at American war colleges, RAND economist Alain Enthoven described “Systems Analysis” as simply “a reasoned approach,” “quantitative common sense” and “an application of the scientific method.” Advocates of “systems analysis” etc. tend to present their ideas as intellectual tofu: flavorless, objective, and broad. Useful, in short, because they are empty of moral content. But this lack of moral content was itself a moral system and ideological construct. Gaither and Wohlstetter were not just dishonest scientists using cooked numbers to justify conclusions they already believed in– though they were that too. They were also ideologues carrying the logical implications of their fundamental beliefs forward. Because they were using the methods of game theory– and the world of game theory is a world of fear.
Tired of Winning
John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s 1944 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior was foundational for both game theory and “rationality” in general and RAND’s vision of them specifically. It aimed to advance economics by approaching market interactions as a series of mathematically-described games. Right off the bat, the book encounters and addresses a key problem for any mathematical attempt to describe human behavior, especially in economics: measuring “utility”-- the way human beings value particular outcomes. For those of us who don’t want to reduce human beings to math, this isn’t an issue. But for those who do, it has been a thorny problem ever since the language of utility was coined in the late eighteenth century.
In an early chapter, Von Neumann and Morgenstern do an excellent job of outlining the problems of utility as a framework. It is difficult or impossible to compare utility between individuals. As more and more individuals arise in a system, they have to consider the “utility functions" of others in order to pursue their own, making utility increasingly more complicated to define or work with. And utility can be borderline tautological: fine, people only act toward outcomes they want, but why do they want them? Going beyond tautology is the whole point of trying to do math with utility: aptly, Von Neumann and Morgenstern point out that a theory is valuable only insofar as it explains things and thus goes beyond circular reasoning.
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, economists had already begun to abandon the fruitless quest to empirically observe or calculate utility the way Jeremy Bentham seemed to suggest was possible. Italian theorist Vilfredo Pareto, among others, proposed replacing cardinal utility– a pineapple makes me 3 units happier, a mango 2– with ordinal utility– I prefer a pineapple to a mango and a mango to a pear. The Austrian School took this and ran with it. Like Herbert Spencer before them, the Austrian School economists wanted to abandon empiricism– observing reality in order to deduce general truths from experience and experiment– altogether. Ordinal utility let them avoid pesky questions of what value was by simply pointing to individual choices. Alice and Bob purchase X rather than Y when they can’t afford both– that’s all we need to know. The Austrians believed that “the market” itself collated ordinal preferences, and thus, did all the calculating we needed for us.
Von Neumann and Morgenstern insist their work does not rely on ordinal utility– they are fine allowing for a numerical representation of utility. But the distinction is only relevant as math, not as social or political theory. Being mathematically comfortable with a numerical utility existing does not mean believing you can measure it– indeed, that’s the whole point of their work here. They drew on Austrian School work and it shows: this is a book that tries to evade reality.
Theory of Games resolves and avoids problems with utility with a series of assumptions and maneuvers. The most important is the assumption that “the aim of all participants in the economic system, consumers as well as entrepreneurs, is money” which is “assumed to be freely transferable and identical” with whatever “utility” the participant wants. Everyone wants money, and money can be turned reliably into whatever subjective things you value. This saves Von Neumann and Morgenstern the trouble of actually determining what people value, let alone trying to compare it.
Another assumption is, they admit, necessary for their method: they assume every actor has complete information. Each economic actor knows everything about their situation and has all of the mathematical literacy and practical awareness to analyze and use this knowledge. Obviously this is not and has never been true of any economic actor in the history of the world. The point of these assumptions is not to be precise, of course, but to produce a reality that can be modelled. Physics uses all kinds of nonsense assumptions to remove unnecessary variables and produce a clear description of reality– why not economics? It’s easy to get lost in questions of how “realistic” assumptions like these are, and while that’s a worthy line of inquiry, I want to take a different one here.
We can approach game theory’s assumptions like philosophers instead of mathematicians: instead of looking at these as assumptions necessary to solve a problem, let’s consider them as tenets that constitute a worldview. This is what they became, given their influence on economic thought. As a set of tenets rather than assumptions, game theory paints a dark picture of humanity. We all want money. We are black boxes of “preferences” which cannot be measured or compared except by competition with each other. We are wise, rational beings who know everything we need to in order to make good decisions– which means we can be blamed for the consequences. Our many divergent worldviews and preferences can ultimately be reduced to a single standard of “rational behavior” better than all others. And we can describe this single standard by examining the world as a series of competitive games.
These assumptions are closer to fascism’s nihilistic war of all against all than liberal democracy’s freedom and tolerance. Game theory, like libertarian economics, claims to be morally empty in order to be objective. But in fact that moral vacuum is a philosophy itself. The amorality of game theory and rational choice is not the promising emptiness of the blank slate but the hungry void of the black hole. Applying game theory to democracy, political theorists came to doubt that voting itself could ever produce rational outcomes.
Game Theory Against Democracy
In 1951, Kenneth Arrow published the highly influential Social Choice and Individual Values. Arrow was the aforementioned RAND intern, and his book applied game-theoretic and rational choice ideas to politics. Social Choice opens immediately with a problem. Consider three voters, Alice, Bob, and Charlie, who have to choose between three policy alternatives, cold war, disarmament, and hot war. Their preferences are as follows:
Alice: 1.) Cold war 2.) Disarmament 3.) Hot war
Bob: 1.) Disarmament 2.) Hot war 3.) Cold war
Charlie: 1.) Hot war 2.) Cold war 3.) Disarmament
Note that I haven’t told you why they – Arrow finds such considerations irrelevant. Now, 2 out of 3 voters (Alice and Charlie) prefer cold war over disarmament, and 2 out of 3 (Alice and Bob) prefer disarmament over hot war. Rationality, for economists, is simply the mathematical property of transitivity: if A > B and B > C then A > C. This means that our community of three, given those first two majority preferences, should also rationally prefer cold war over cold war. It doesn’t though: the majority (Bob and Charlie) prefer hot war over cold war.
Developed exhaustively through the mathematics of set theory, Arrow builds from this problem into what has become known as “Arrow’s impossibility theorem.” Under a series of mostly reasonable assumptions, Arrow proves that a voting system which produces a rational collective outcome by aggregating individual preferences is logically impossible. This result is… odd. One way around Arrow’s theorem, by his own admission, is cardinal systems in which voters score their preferences rather than just ordering them. This is interesting– it would follow that libertarians’ beloved markets are not rational, and arguably that their embrace of ordinality over cardinality is an attempt to enforce irrational outcomes!-- but seems dubious on face. No one who has looked at American politics can credibly imagine that a score system would be automatically better than a ranked choice system– just look at how we use Yelp reviews!-- and the significance this distinction takes on in Arrow’s world, for mathematical reasons, should demonstrate how narrow and unhelpful his conception of rationality is.
But that’s not a very convincing objection, I concede. Instead let’s turn to a more traditional idealistic interpretation of democracy for answers. Consider three voters again, this time in a thought experiment I’ll call the Hateful Voter Problem. Alice prefers the Orange Party because of their support for public housing. Bob prefers the Yellow Party because of their foreign policy. Charlie has a preference too, but his motive is worse: Alice is trans, and Charlie is a bigot. Alice happens to be Charlie’s neighbor in an apartment building, and has repeatedly and politely told Charlie that greeting her with slurs is hateful. Charlie dislikes being told he’s hateful, and has decided to vote for the Yellow Party out of spite. Most of us would agree that– whether or not the Yellow Party itself is actually more compatible with anti-trans policy– the optimal solution to this problem is not one where the Yellow Party wins simply because Charlie is a bigot and hates Alice. Indeed, colloquially we would probably call Charlie’s preference irrational.
Believing this does not mean believing we need a system that keeps Charlie from voting. It can also simply entail creating a society that reduces the number of Charlies through education programs, civil rights legislation, and more. Or it could involve constitutional structures that preclude the Yellow Party from supporting homophobia in the first place, or from institutionalizing it if they win. Other solutions are possible too– my point here is simply that saying Charlie’s preference can be compared to that of other voters does not mean supporting a dictatorship in which a fourth person, we’ll say Donovan, is allowed to make that comparison.
But all apparent democratic solutions to the Hateful Voter Problem, or any other hypothetical situation in which we might want to protect values like human rights or public health, require something important– something Arrow denies. My analysis required two assumptions: we should protect trans rights, and we can compare human “preferences” rather than taking all as equally valid. Any solution to the Hateful Voter Problem requires a third assumption: that human beings can come together and intentionally build a community with certain values. Arrow deals with this possibility as part of an argument with “idealist” thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Under the idealist paradigm of democracy, “Voting is not a device whereby each individual expresses his personal interests–” Arrow’s view– “but rather where each individual gives his opinion of the general will.” Democracy allows us to build a consensus on values together, not just compete over wants.
Arrow wrote as if this was impossible. One of the assumptions in his theorem is that individual preferences cannot be compared. The language of “preference” effectively encodes this: non-economists might describe Alice’s belief in public housing as a conviction, Bob’s thoughts on foreign policy as an opinion or as wisdom, and Charlie’s lib-owning prejudice as bigotry. Preference locks motives and values in a black box, never to be examined. And this game-theoretic analysis of voting undermines democracy itself.
The ideas, authors, and events I’ve just outlined were pivotal in the development of right-wing and mainstream American economics. Arrow’s social choice became economist James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s “public choice”-- a powerful right-wing paradigm for dismantling government programs (and I’ll explore this more in June’s premium article, which will arrive in a couple of days to give this one time to percolate– if you take out a premium subscription today with the link at the bottom, you’ll get it soon!). Buchanan was one of the many scholars who worked with Charles Koch, of the infamous “Koch brothers.”
On the more mainstream side of economics, the most famous example of game theory is the “prisoner’s dilemma”-- a RAND creation from 1950. You’ve probably heard it, but to recap: prisoner A and prisoner B are being interrogated separately for a crime. If A stays quiet and B stays quiet, they both get short prison sentences. If both talk, they get long prison sentences. And if one talks (“defects” from the other, to use the usual language), the other prisoner gets a very long prison sentence while the one who informed on his accomplice goes free. The nuclear analogy is obvious– that’s why it was originally developed– but economic thinkers began to use this for all kinds of problems. It is a common fixture in colloquial and introductory economic thinking, including in America’s most popular economics textbook, Principles of Economics by one-time Bush Jr. advisor N. Gregory Mankiw (a malign tome you can read more about in my book Control Science, which also has a lot more to say about the themes I’m talking about here, when it comes out next May).
In matters economic and international, the American right has used the “dog-eat-dog” world of the Prisoner’s Dilemma to justify stunning aggression and profound cynicism. Buchanan’s critique of welfare became part of the language the right still uses to attack our social safety nets. Mankiw’s Principles insidiously pushes the “free market” on thousands of undergrads every year. At risk of combining everything I don’t like into the same thing, all right-wing politics and especially the more fascist and less “conservative” politics of MAGA is based on a competitive nihilism. Game theory has been a powerful contributor to that nihilism in both foreign policy and economics.
Competitive Rationality Today
After several decades of growth and dominance, “rational choice” provides a language Republicans can use to justify all kinds of adventures and evils. When neocons wanted to invade Iraq, they convinced the world and themselves that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. This useful lie summoned all the Cold War rhetoric and terror up at once, with the racist insistence, often explicit, that “irrational” Muslims could never be deterred. By summoning the specter of existential war, the GOP succeeded in calling the world to war.
Note what neocons could not say, not alone. It’s common to hear people on the left talk about Iraq as a money-making enterprise. Trump said we should “take the oil?” A lot of progressives seem to think, in effect, that we did. To quote a favorite joke from beloved and now departed Twitter account kirbybot, “‘George Bush made money off the Iraq war.’” This is not really why Iraq happened. Neocons had their own strange and complicated reasons for wanting to invade Iraq– I particularly recommend Richard Beck’s piece on American viceroy Paul Bremer. The invasion was a nation-building project meant to bring Iraq into shining capitalist modernity at the barrel of a gun. But to pursue these ideals, they had to cloak them in rational choice competition.
Competitive rationality puts hard limits on any political project. The world is not a game. You cannot change a game you are only focused on “winning,” either. Fearmongering could send armies to Iraq, but a war America was talked into on false pretenses, named in almost too-perfect psychoanalytic terms a “war on terror” itself, could never be a war for anything. This is not to say the Iraq war could have been good– but that any constructive vision, even if the thing it aims to construct is bad, cannot support itself with a destructive political framework alone.
I mean that in structural and not just theoretical terms too. The War on Terror relied on a massive expansion of executive power, and a corresponding abdication of the more constructive power of the legislature, building on a decades-old pattern with Cold War roots. In Bomb Power, Garry Wills warned us that the nuclear button had changed American politics forever. “If the President has the sole authority to launch nation-destroying weapons”-- and the logic of game theory required streamlining this decision in this way, to make for a faster and thus better deterrent– “he has license to use every other power at his disposal that might safeguard that supreme necessity.” The imperial executive Trump relies on for virtually everything his administration does, and that the courts increasingly endorse (and will surely roll back as soon as a Democrat is in power again), is predicated in part upon competitive nuclear rationality.
This dynamic helps explain why Trump’s supposedly doveish foreign policy is less of a break than it should be. A competitive and cynical vision– take the oil, everyone is ripping us off– produces competitive and cynical policy. Neocons pursued their ideals through violence and legitimized them through competitive rhetoric. Trump does not need to legitimize anything– competition is not a way to support his worldview because it is his worldview. There are people in his camp who, like the neocons before them, have a positive (in the descriptive sense, i.e., building something, not something good) vision of politics. The “national conservative,” or natcon, wing has wild visions of a hegemonic white masculinity. But bomb power can’t construct much of anything, especially not a Norman Rockwell painting fantasy that never existed.
This also explains why his domestic policy, while outlandish and a break from previous Republican policies, is nonetheless not the major break many of his NatCon supporters wanted. Why do tariffs keep turning into trade deals that mostly amount to a return to the status quo? Where’s the industrial policy and infrastructure? How come Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is just another round of cuts and tax giveaways? They’re resurrecting the Laffer curve, for God’s sake (the 1970s idea that lowering taxes will stimulate the economy so much that it will increase tax revenue). Again, there are lots of answers here.
But part of the complete story lies in nuclear rationality, from early RAND to James Buchanan’s “public choice” vision. Both are on display in the bean-counting austerity Republicans have embraced for decades– except for the military– and which Trump is now taking even further to kill foreign aid recipients, weaken hurricane forecasting, and destroy scientific research. Ersatz game theory is the language in which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and others justify, and try to maneuver around, Trump’s whim-driven tariff policy. China will blink, we’re told. Art of the deal. Europe will give us… something, and somehow this will lead to more manufacturing. In a prisoner’s dilemma sense: defect defect defect, those soft Europeans will pick cooperate eventually and then they’ll be in prison and we’ll be free.
This is a catastrophic way to conduct international affairs. The last five years have given every sovereign nation in the world an example of what not having nukes means when your neighbor has them. Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons following the dissolution of the USSR, in exchange for security guarantees from the US and the Russian Federation. The latter has now invaded, while the former increasingly abandons Ukraine. Iran, meanwhile, made a deal with the United States, largely adhered to it after the US broke that deal, and then began to negotiate a new one. In response, its nuclear neighbor Israel tried to assassinate a leading Iranian negotiator. The American President then endorsed this attack and followed it up with additional bombs.
What is the rational reaction in a prisoner’s dilemma when the other side has signalled they will always defect? Would Trump really defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion? Japan, even? Does an alliance with the US really keep Israel’s neighbors to the south safe from nuclear brinksmanship? If Ukraine falls, should Poland really expect to rely on American nukes as a threat against Russian incursion? What would a world of far greater nuclear proliferation look like? As Von Neumann and Morgenstern could tell you, the nature of games changes as the number of participants in them grows. It’s possible that none of these countries will pursue nuclear arms, now or ever. But if they do it will be for reasons other than “rational choice”-- ethics, problems within political coalitions, or simple practical difficulty. Trump has shown us that human beings can be worse than “rational.” We can be better, too. If we want to avoid nuclear war, we will have to be.