I’m struck by how status you keep or lose in different domains depending on your answer to: “Is Iran a Rational Actor?”
I assume everybody acts rationally in their own interest because that is an assumption I learned early on in my study of economics and I find it useful.
My father the Christian theologian thought the contention was ludicrous. We’re fallen creatures, sunk in sin.
I find the assumption provides useful results. For example, if the assumption is true enough, it quickly illuminates another party’s hero system.
It seems we are evolved to sort the world into friend and enemy. No matter how morally relativistic our claims, we all act as though good and evil are objectively true, and that our enemies are evil. If you don’t speak that way, you show you are not a reliable member of the team.
I love the Iran conflict because I am unaware of any prominent player who has a position on the war that contradicts his position. Everybody says what their coalition expects them to say, and nobody famous has changed sides.
There will eventually be a cascade to a conclusion where famous people change sides.
In international relations theory, a rational actor has ordered preferences and calculates means against ends. The term carries no verdict on the content of the preferences. A regime can want terrible things and pursue them by careful accounting. Kenneth Waltz (1924-2013) held that Iran was rational and drew a conclusion almost nobody wanted: let it have the bomb, since deterrence would then operate as it operated between Washington and Moscow. Bernard Lewis (1916-2018) argued that a leadership holding certain apocalyptic beliefs might read destruction as fulfillment and treat it as a benefit.
In ordinary speech “rational” means sane, reasonable, someone you can do business with. That meaning carries a moral halo the technical one lacks. So the hawk hears “Iran is rational” as “Iran is fine,” and the dove hears “Iran is irrational” as a war brief. Both are mishearing, and both mishearings are useful to the man doing them.
The first thing the position tells you is how tightly it predicts policy conclusions. Claims about a foreign government’s decision procedures ought to sort people the way empirical claims usually do, which is messily, with awkward cases in every camp. You should find deterrence hawks who think Iran calculates carefully and therefore respond to threats, and engagement doves who think Iran is erratic and therefore needs to be brought inside institutions that constrain it. Those positions exist but are thin on the ground. When a factual premise maps almost one to one onto a policy preference, the premise is usually downstream of the preference. Waltz irritated nearly everyone because he ran the inference forward instead of backward.
The second thing is which error a man fears more. Assume rationality wrongly and you may get a nuclear detonation. Assume irrationality wrongly and you may get a war you did not need. Neither error is recoverable. The evidence underdetermines the choice, so temperament and coalition fill the gap. The Iranian record supports both readings and always has. The calibrated April 2024 strike on Israel, telegraphed in advance and designed to be intercepted, reads as cost-benefit reasoning. The restraint after Qasem Soleimani (1957-2020) was killed reads the same way. Then there is the funding of proxies at enormous expense with modest returns, the hostage-taking, the human wave attacks of the 1980s. A man can build either case from real material.
Third, look at whether the reading travels. Ask the same man about Russia, China, North Korea, the Taliban. Some people hold a consistent view that regimes behave like states, pursuing survival and interest, and that ideology is decoration. Others hold that regimes can behave like movements, where the mission sets the preferences and survival is instrumental. Both are defensible dispositions. Someone who says Iran calculates coldly while Putin is a mad revanchist, or the reverse, is doing coalition work, and the Iran position is a symptom.
Fourth, there is a methodological commitment hiding inside. To call Iran irrational you generally credit regime rhetoric as evidence of intention. To call it rational you discount rhetoric as domestic performance and read behavior instead. That is a real question about how speech relates to action in authoritarian systems, and almost nobody applies his answer evenly. The same analyst who dismisses Iranian speeches as theater will quote an American politician’s speech as proof of intent.
Last, the framing hides a unit problem. Iran is not one actor. The Supreme Leader, the IRGC, the elected government, and the clerical establishment in Qom have distinct interests and unequal power. A system built of rational parts can produce incoherent output when the parts want different things and none can override the others. Public argument skips this because the argument is not about Iran’s decision structure.
The question I would put to anyone holding either position: name the event that would move you. Rationality is falsifiable in principle. A leadership that accepts regime-ending costs for ideological ends falsifies it. Few people name their disconfirming case, which suggests the claim is doing work other than describing Tehran.
