What I'm Reading: Essence of Decision

In my foreign policy course this semester, we spent a great deal of time discussing the Cuban Missile Crisis. One of our assigned books was Graham Allison's classic Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was eager to learn more about the crisis, but the book proved to be about much more than that. Allison asks, "How should citizens understand the way their government behaves?" He presents three alternative lenses, based on very different theoretical underpinnings. He then uses all three lenses to analyze the Cuban Missile Crisis. Each lens, of course, yields in a different understanding of the conflict.

The three lenses are:

THE RATIONAL ACTOR MODEL: The government examines a set of goals, evaluates them according to their utility, then picks the one that has the highest "payoff."

THE ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESS MODEL: Policy is not a rational choice by a government, but the output of a complex organization programmed to behave a certain way. When faced with a crisis, government leaders don't look at it as a whole, but break it down and assign it according to pre-established organizational lines. They generally rely on existing plans, limit uncertainty, and focus on the short-term because of organizational constraints.

THE GOVERNMENT POLITICS MODEL: A nation's actions are best understood as the result of politicking and negotiation by its top leaders.

I love frameworks like this, because they clarify thinking. They give me a structure for organizing and understanding complex debates.

Here's an example: why did the United States recently decide to escalate in Afghanistan? Is it (1) because President Obama and his expert advisers all agree that a fully-resourced, long-term counterinsurgency strategy is the best strategy to pursue American national interests? Or is it (2) that the US military is now "programmed" for counteinsurgency because of the rise of COIN leaders like General Petraeus, influential think tanks like CNAS, and the success of the Surge/COIN strategy in Iraq? Or (3) did President Obama escalate despite his better judgment, because he didn't want to suffer the political consequences of rejecting the advice of his generals, and then preside over a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan? I've read articles alleging all three, but Allison's lenses give me a structure to hang these different ideas on. These three interpretations of the Afghanistan escalation, of course, coincide with Allison's three models of decision.

Which lens is right? That's the wrong question to ask. All three are right. All three are simplifying models that each focus on certain aspects of the policymaking process. The lenses should be used together, because multiple lenses lead to a more complex, nuanced understanding of how policy actually gets made.