Book Review - Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis

What I will be trying to do in this review is to examine how decisions were made by policy actors during the Cuban Missile Crisis and to “explore the influence of unrecognized assumptions upon our thinking”. 

Allison presents three models as lenses to see the Cuban Missile Crisis: The Rational Actor Model, Organizational Behavior Model, and Government Politics Model. The author presents these models as lenses between which an analyst may switch. The author concludes, though, that a synthesis between the models is probably best as the models compete and overlap. 

The Rational Actor Model - This model assumes that actors in the international relations system are unitary states, which are goal-oriented and utility-maximizing. This model grows out classical realism, which is a philosophical paradigm that views rational states as the primary actors in the international system, which is a cluster of each against all. This model helps the analyst identify the circumstances states perceive as threats and opportunities, the states’ goals, options for addressing threats and opportunities and their costs and benefits, and the best choice for each opportunity or threat. 

For further explanatory power, the authors turn to the Organizational Behavior model. The Organizational Behavior model builds analyses based on understanding how organizational outputs such as organizational missions, routines, capabilities, coordination, and decisions influence specific occurrences, organizational capacities, and organizational structure. The core thesis of this model is that government behavior can be best explained as the outputs of large organizations. We can use this model to understand which organizations part of the government are; the capabilities and constraints of these organizations’ standard operating procedures in creating information about international conditions, threats, and opportunities; the capabilities and constraints of these organizations’ standard operating procedures create in generating options; and the capabilities and options of these organizations’ in implementation options. This model is very useful for explaining how bureaucracy in both the civilian and military organizations of government influence occurrences.

The Governmental Politics Model - explains government action as the result of political processes. This model looks at how “players in positions”—more commonly we may refer to them as policymakers—make decisions. This model examines players’ perceptions, preferences, and stakes. The model draws from game theory and holds that there are “action-channels” that structure the game by identifying major players, their points of entrance into the game, and any inherent advantages or disadvantages. Here, we can use this model to understand who is involved with shaping the choice and action, what factors shape each player’s perceptions, preferred course of action, and the player’s stand on the issue, the factors that account for a player’s impact on the choice and action, and the established process for aggregating competing perceptions, preferences, and stakes in making decisions and acting. 

The dependent variable is the political decisions whereas the independent variables are the goal-oriented and utility-maximizing states; the organizations with deep bureaucratic hustles and the influence of few key politicians. But we also know that hatefully motivated people organized in social movements or causes can drive the direction of states as the events of September 11, 2001 have shown. This shows that the Rational Actor model has extreme limits as it depends on unitary states. This model underestimates understanding information flows and information dissemination. The author, however writes throughout the text multiple times that information flows influence both organizational and individual player level decision-making including the Soviets’ process of getting information to Washington, DC and the US Navy’s command and control procedures during the blockade but does not seem to give it a lot of importance.