I was told by a relative who served in the Afghan special forces before the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021 that the deep state will not relent until one relinquishes an open and independent mind for the ‘Cold War intellectualism’ or ‘NATO intellectualism’ which many intellectuals and scholars have critiqued and deconstructed. But of course, and as we said before, one must make sure that such a discourse is actually logical and valid in order to adopt it. And if the discourse is not logical and valid as a result of the poisoning and perversion of it at the hands of the American liberal and neocon, it then becomes a matter of reversing the poison and perversion of the discourse in order to render the discourse logical and valid enough to adopt it. At this point in time, the discourse is illogical and irrational, and in turn, lobbying and special interests have ensured that not only the discourse but rather the entire state system as a whole is beyond change and reform.
And as we mentioned before, in order to render the discourse logical and valid, the goals and the strategies have to be straightened out. Or in other words, in order to render the discourse as rational, one must straighten out the goals and strategies. The difference between rational and irrational could be as peculiar and specific as the difference between “The Nixon Doctrine” on one hand and the “The Bush Doctrine” on the other hand. Nevertheless, and in essence, the difference between rational and irrational is a matter of goals and strategies. To borrow from John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato: “Rational decision makers simply try to figure out the most effective strategy for dealing with other states, and as should be apparent by now, threatening or initiating violence sometimes makes sense. This message is hardly uplifting, but such is the reality of international politics.”
Dominance and hegemony, the accumulation of wealth, and shifting the balance of power in their favor through nuclear weapons and war are some of the ways in which states deal with other states. In a sense, and as Mearsheimer contended, states all have to act in the same exact way, but at the same time, the competition between states “pushes states to deviate from accepted practice as well as to conform with it.”
The idea is that it pays off for states to be aggressive and to expand, but only when it is done intelligently and wisely. There are certain circumstances and situations which surround a decision on the part of a state to be aggressive and to expand, and those circumstances and situations have to be assessed and analyzed. Only after having taken the circumstances and situations which surround a decision to be aggressive and to expand into account can one truly assess and determine whether the decision to be aggressive and to expand was logical and rational or not. But there is also a catch or a trick to decision-making, in the sense that after having taken all the circumstances and the situation surrounding the decision-making process into account, one must also choose a credible and legitimate theory to back the decision among a multitude of theories, none of which can explain anything on their own, given that each discriminate between the entirety or totality of facts. As Mearsheimer and Rosato wrote:
“What, then, does it mean for policymakers to be rational? Rational policymakers are homo theoreticus: they employ credible theories to make sense of the world and decide how to act in particular circumstances. Nonrational policymakers employ noncredible theories, or no theory at all, to deal with the situations facing them.”
And in the very end, a state is a hierarchy of individuals – all with their own theory of explaining and understanding broader reality – who then debate and deliberate and eventually take their debates and deliberations all the way to the very top of the hierarchy for a final decision on what the basic goal and strategy of the state vis-à-vis other states will be. And of course, it was hard to resist not being part of these debates and discussions, albeit in a very informal manner. But perhaps an informal manner is the most effective way to conduct the debates and deliberations.
Adam A. Azim 