Grand Strategy after Great Men
(Prospectus in Progress)
Richard Jordan
October 7, 2012
Abstract
Much that statesmen achieve dies with them. A state’s preferences depend
upon its leadership, and as its leaders change so too do its policies—sometimes
catastrophically. Yet IR theory largely ignores first image explanations. I argue
that we cannot understand many of the most important phenomena in international
relations without theorizing individuals: first, how the variety of their preferences
and capabilities a↵ect state action; second, how the uncertainty over future leaders’
preferences drives current policy. After posing the motivating puzzles and cases, I
review the relevant literature, sketch a preliminary theoretical argument, and o↵er
a series of testable hypotheses.
1
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interrèd with their bones.
– Antony, Julius Caesar
Introduction
Why do some states pursue the same strategy across generations, while others change with
every new leader? Why are some leaders successful at binding their states to their vision for
foreign policy, while others fail, sometimes disastrously? If realists are right, and institutions
cannot bind a state, then why do leaders think they can; and if institutions can bind a state,
why do some leaders not use them to enshrine their policies? And why should we care?
Pericles devised for Athens an unbeatable strategy. Invulnerable behind her walls, Athens’
navy could strike any in Greece with impunity; supplied by sea she could outlast her enemies,
eventually forcing them through weariness and depredation to sue for peace. And Athens
lost. She lost, for after Pericles’ death the Athenians abandoned his plan. Pericles’ very
success consigned Athens to failure: without him Athens could not keep his strategy, and a
city whose victory seemed once inevitable ended in ignoble desolation.1
Like Pericles, Bismarck also famously condemned his state through the very genius of his
own success.2 Alexander, Caesar, Aurelius... these are not unintelligent men; indeed, many
are counted among the greatest statesmen who ever lived. So here is the first puzzle: how
could these statesmen, the titans of their worlds, fail so thoroughly, often with such disastrous
results? When will the loss of a great leader wreck a state?
Fortunately, where these failed, many succeed. Richelieu, uncomfortably aware throughout his stewardship how tenuously the future of France hung upon his own and the king’s
poor health—indeed, before the birth of the future Sun King uncertainty over the succession
dictated much of his domestic policy3 —took pains to ensure his achievements would outlive
him, restructuring domestic politics, planting the roots of nationalism, and on his deathbed
insisting Mazarin succeed him. Hadrian, after consolidating the empire, carefully engineered
the next two generations of emperors, so that, unlike in 69, what he had carefully built would
not crumble.4 Thus the second question: anticipating their own absence, how do statesmen
perpetuate their foreign policies after the leave office?
(Also fortunately, grand strategies do not always die spectacularly. Kissinger, who spent
his academic life studying how statesmen had crafted systems which endured for generations,
could not extend his foreign policy beyond his own decade. But this incapacity has no tragedy,
1 For Thucydides’ account of this strategy, see I.142-4, when Pericles first articulates it and Athens adopts it. Perhaps he
intended to live longer, but when the plague took Pericles it took Athens with him. Later, Thucydides o↵ers this assessment
of his hero: ”he was the best man of all for the needs of the state...the correctness of his foresight concerning the war became
better known after his death...[but] What they did was the very contrary...whose failure entailed certain disaster on the country
in the war,” II.65
2 Kissinger remarks, “It was beyond the comprehension of Bismarck that statesmen might di↵er in understanding the requirements of the national interest. Because of his magnificent grasp of the nuances of power relationships, Bismarck saw
in his philosophy a doctrine of self-limitation. Because these nuances were not apparent to his successors and imitators, the
application of Bismarck’s lessons led to an armament race and a world war.” Kissinger, “The White Revolutionary: Reflections
on Bismarck,” (919). Similarly, Of Bismarck Kagan remarks that with Pericles and Augustus he ”belongs in their company as
one of those rare leaders of mighty states who choose to limit his ambitions” (101). At least two of these leaders share another
trait: their restraint did not long outlast their rule.
3 Tapie 386
4 So far as I can tell, the success of Hadrian’s strategy during his lifetime rested on the intelligent use of the Roman military;
moreover, he does not seem to have instituted any alliances or domestic reforms which would institutionalize this strategy. See
Luttwak
2
for the next decade called for another strategy.5 )
The easiest way to perpetuate a policy, the one political scientists most immediately
cite, is institutionalization. But this answer is insufficient: neither Richelieu nor Hadrian secured their policies through international institutions, and though Richelieu’s France survived
through a combination of domestic reforms and succession, Hadrian’s imperial strategy did
not. Moreover, Metternich’s much-vaunted system had almost no formal institutions. Thus a
third puzzle: when and how do statesmen institutionalize their strategies? Especially, when
do they rely upon international institutions? And if they do not work through institutions,
how then do they manipulate future leaders?
And now the puzzles mount: how does an obscure bureaucrat envision and transform
the European Coal and Steel Community into a Continental confederation? If international
institutions serve as credible commitments, why do democratic parties oust politicians with
heretical foreign policy views during the Cold War? If leaders don’t matter, why do many feel
it necessary to constrain their successors?6 Especially, why do they try to bind their successors
against actions they themselves would never take?7 On these questions and others, our
leading theories say little. Though no right-thinking IR scholar would explain the nineteenth
century without Napoleon, Metternich, or Bismarck, or the Cold War without Stalin or
Gorbachev, no major paradigm focuses on individuals. Indeed, first level variables figure in
less than one-sixth of IR scholarship. This silence demands remedy.
Yet, observing this lacuna is not enough: we all agree that ‘individuals matter’; the
question is not whether they matter, but how. And this problem has proven notoriously
difficult to theorize. This prospectus therefore has three purposes: first, to demonstrate
the need for individuals in our theories; second, to demonstrate the possibility of theorizing
individuals; third, to begin to theorize them.
Goal
I want to help save the first image from oblivion. I do not intend to o↵er a theory of
personality and foreign policy; I cannot account for many particulars, and the systematic
study of leaders, their psychology, and their decisions far exceeds my capacities. My aim
is more modest but also, I hope, more tractable. I propose to study how the uncertainty
of leadership change a↵ects current foreign policy. This topic, I believe, lends itself well
to a rational choice model, though to my knowledge no one has built one. It can stand,
I think, on two premises: first, that as leader preferences vary, so too do states’; second,
that leaders change. Their conjunction supports several general, novel hypotheses. This
prospectus’ grandiose title is thus somewhat deceptive: I propose to o↵er not a ‘great man’
theory which relies upon the unique genius of particular individuals to explain history, but
rather a straightforward rationalist theory that introduces only two novel assumptions to the
standard IR approaches.
Finally, though I take preferences for granted, tacitly the prospectus cautions all statesmen—
take care for the future. Many brilliant policies collapse into disaster because a leader cannot
5 Gaddis remarks Nixon and Kissinger’s policy “proved impossible to sustain...Kissinger made a valiant e↵ort to convince
Congress, the bureaucracy, and the public of the rationale behind his policy, but he never entirely succeeded. In the end, the
system he created, like those of Metternich, Castlereagh, and Bismarck...depended upon the unlikely coincidence of strategic
vision with decisive authority” (341)
6 Ikenberry o↵ers the example of Salinas, the Mexican president who embraced NAFTA not only for its immediate benefits
but because ”it would tie his successors to a policy of economic liberalization” (240)
7 Actually, Moravcsik (2000) on human rights regimes argues particular governments use these regimes to lock in democratic
reforms against future ones. This question is thus not entirely novel nor entirely without examination.
3
see beyond his moment’s troubles, and I know of far more strategies that die with their
progenitors than long survive them. I thus also intend the project to draw attention to the
broad kinds of ways a statesman can entrench his successes. I do not pretend to know and
describe all the strange instruments of policy those in the real world have at their disposal,
but I do hope to help supply the theoretical categories with which they can make sense of
their world. My goal is thus not merely to bring the statesman back to IR, but to bring
rational choice back to the statesman.
The remainder of this prospectus has three parts: first, I review the relevant literature.
Second, I outline a preliminary theoretical argument. Finally, I present an early research
design in which I outline the independent and dependent variables, draw preliminary hypotheses, and suggest how I will test these claims.
Literature Review
I review the relevant literature in three stages. First, I address the field’s inattention to first
level analysis, arguing that this neglect results not from epistemological or methodological
limitations but rather from the discipline’s paradigmatic division. Second, I discuss the work
scholars have done on individuals and state strategies and why this work has failed to lead to
a more progressive research program. In the final section, this critique leads me to highlight
the possibility and need for a rationalist, first image theory of strategic continuity.
IR Theory and the 1st Image
IR theory disdains the first image: less than one-sixth of IR scholarship published in the
leading journals uses first level variables. This dearth at first frightens a researcher: if generations of scholars have shunned the individual as an explanation, then likely their aversion
reflects some tacit wisdom; I would be a fool to walk “where angels fear to tread.” Therefore,
before taking up my motivating questions, I argue that the first image is, in fact, amenable
to theory.
The division of independent variables into three levels of analysis, or images, dates to
Waltz’ Man, the State, and War. The work also laid the foundation for the field’s longstanding neglect of the primary image—man. Yet, though Waltz no longer dominates the field,
his dismissal of first level variables endures. If scholars have rejected much of Waltz’ theory,
if they have opened the state and sought the sources of state preferences, why do they still
cling to his bias against the first image?
The obvious answer appeals to methodological bias: theorizing at the level of the individual
does not lend itself to positivist, especially quantitative, social science; since such theorizing
dominates American political science, American political science ignores individuals. But
the obvious answer is wrong: positivist, even quantitative articles just as often employ first
image variables as their nonpositivist, nonquantitative kin.8
The neglect does not stem from the field’s epistemological or methodological biases.
Rather, the neglect results from the field’s paradigmatic divisions. One-fifth of articles without paradigmatic commitments use first image variables. By contrast, first image variables
8 All claims concerning journal articles use the TRIP data set. Similarly, Byman and Pollack refute the three objections to
first image analysis they consider most pervasive among political scientists: first, that individuals do not matter; second, that
if they matter, they do not lend themselves to generalization; third, that whether or not they matter, they are theoretically
intractable
4
appear in less than one-fifteenth of realist and liberal articles. That realists ignore individuals makes sense: a theory which treats states as unitary and rational has no room for their
rulers. But that liberals ignore leaders does not: the paradigm prides itself as the only one
which “takes preferences seriously,” yet it has almost never engaged the personal sources of
state goals. Rather, like its realist brother, it largely takes these preferences as structurally
determined, albeit at a lower level. Given that the regnant three paradigms account for
roughly half of all theoretical work in IR (and strongly influence the other half), their neglect
is sufficient to account for the larger trend within the discipline.9
The barriers to incorporating individuals in our theories are neither methodological nor
epistemological; rather, they are the product of our paradigmatic divides: rational statesmanship has no place in the major IR theories.
First Image Analysis in IR
In 2001, International Security published ”Let Us Now Praise Great Men: Bringing the
Statesman Back In.” Despite its grand exhortation, the trickle of first image research has
remained moribund. The article well illustrates the recurrent shortcomings of many first
image works: the authors convincingly discuss five cases from international relations—cases
that none could dismiss as inconsequential—that cannot be explained without examining
individual leaders; yet after this criticism they o↵er only a series of untested (and largely
untestable) hypotheses. The flaw results because many of the attributes they theorize cannot
be examined ex ante, if at all. They introduce a problem in need of redress, but o↵er no real
answers.10
Like Byman and Pollack, many scholars rightly recognize that international relations
remain inexplicable without individuals, but in their rush to theorize the first image they
often pass from science to description. Those that avoid this error tend to simplify individuals
until they lose their individuality, becoming mere survival-maximizers or products of domestic
politics.
I divide existing first image studies into three categories: psychological, constructivist,
and game theoretic. While I believe descriptive and historical studies have great merit (and
are certainly entertaining to read), they are not properly part of political science, and so I
omit them from this discussion.
9 Incidentally, Marxism, that fourth paradigm which has blessedly fallen forever by the wayside, has never used first image
variables in a major journal. Not once. This total disregard fits with their theoretical assumptions, but is nonetheless quite
striking in its absoluteness. At least realists have taken them up a few dozen times.
10 Byman and Pollack, [citation]. Their cases are Hitler, Bismarck, Napoleon, Saddam Hussein, and Khomeini. Their hypotheses are 1) “individuals set the ultimate and secondary intentions of a state,” which is actually an assumption; 2) “individuals
can be an important component of a state’s diplomatic influence and military power,” which is either an assumption or an
empty thesis; 3) “individual leaders shape their state’s strategies,” which is sufficiently vague to mean anything; 4) “individual
leaders a↵ect the behavior of opposing states that must react to leaders’ idiosyncratic intentions and capabilities”; 5) “states
led by risk-tolerant leaders are more likely to cause wars,” a viable hypothesis assuming someone can measure such tolerance;
6) “states led by delusional leaders start wars and prolong them unnecessarily,” a hypothesis whose falsifiability turns on the
careful definition (omitted in the paper) of the terms; 7) “states led by leaders with grandiose vision are more likely to destabilize
the system,” which su↵ers the same potential flaw; 8) states led by predictable leaders will have stronger and more enduring
alliances”, a real hypothesis which I take up later in this prospectus; 9) “the more power is concentrated in the hands of an
individual leader, the greater the influence of that leaders’ personality and preferences;” 10) individuals are more important when
systemic, domestic, and bureaucratic forces conflict or are ambiguous; 11) individuals are more important when circumstances
are fluid; 12-13) individuals can shape the other images. Of course, Byman and Pollack do not test any of these hypotheses.
5
Game theoretic
The game theoretic literature examines the first image roughly as often as the wider discipline—
that is, more than realism or liberalism but still infrequently. Yet, these works often grossly
oversimplify leaders’ preferences. Like many modelers, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita tends to
treat leaders’ preferences as pure functions of their probability of survival in office, not permitting them a regard for their state’s wellbeing.11 Some theorists grant leaders preferences
over outcomes after the leave office, but to my knowledge these preferences extend only over
the likely consequences of retirement—i.e. democrats enjoy safety, autocrats a short rope
and a long fall.12 Others ponder how leaders’ di↵erent experiences and personalities might
a↵ect their behavior, especially in crises.13 Others, the traits in a leader domestic processes
tend to select.14 None provide for the possibility, however naive and remote, that leaders
might actually care about their states after they’re gone.
Proposed: a Rationalist, First Image Theory
After he takes up his subject, Clausewitz warns that much in war must remain forever beyond
theory: war is the province of chance, and its complexities will never reduce to mathematical
laws; in these realms no learning substitutes for experience. Yet he theorizes war. Indeed,
he produces the theory of war. For not all aspects of war must frustrate generalization.15
We must strive to discover those facets of grand strategy which are amenable to theory.
The particular predilections of leaders, their idiosyncrasies, their character flaws, and the
peculiarities of their diplomacies will ever elude systematic study; we ponder such attributes
in vain, for if we cannot decipher the role of these oddities even in our personal lives, how much
less shall we discover their role in the lives of statesmen far removed from our ivory towers.
Indeed, theories which rely upon these minutiae to explain international phenomena are like
“the realistic Irishman who said he preferred to prophesy after the event”16 , and I fear such
work shall never grow beyond ex post explanations. The psychology of leaders will not bear
fruit; we must ”restrict discussion to general principles and large unit actions.”17 Therefore,
I do not propose to theorize greatness, leadership style, or personality and strategy; neither
do I think such a theory possible. Rather, I set aside how a leader’s peculiarities a↵ect his
statecraft, and instead treat how uncertainty over other, future leaders’ peculiarities a↵ects
his present policy.
11 At best, these articles allow leaders to consume state resources for private gain in addition to caring about survival. See for
instance“An Institutional Explanation for the Democratic Peace,” or “Political Institutions, Policy Choice, and the Survival of
Leaders.” Also Debs and Goemans, ”Regime Type, the Fate of Leaders, and War” APSR 104.3 (2010).
12 Comparativists have done significant work on the importance of allowing a despot an escape route: a dictator will more
likely yield power if he knows asylum and a few million dollars wait for him after he steps down. [others more impt, but from
IR] Sutter, ”Settling Old Scores: Potholes along the Transition from Authoritarian Rule,” JCR 39.1
13 Haas, ”Prospect Theory and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” ISQ 45.2 (2001):241-270
14 van Belle, ”Leadership and Collective Action: the Case of Revolution” ISQ 40.1 van Belle theorizes who becomes a leader,
but now how those preferences matter once he holds power.
15 ”no prescriptive formulation universal enough to deserve the name of law can be applied to the constant change and diversity
of the phenomena of war. Principles, rules, regulations, and methods are, however, indispensable concepts to or for that part of
the theory of war that leads to positive doctrines” Clausewitz, 152.
16 Chesterton, find source
17 vFL 181. Of course, as this very reference attests, Clausewitz did theorize personality, albeit modestly. But he also meant
to inculcate a certain character in his readers, and he therefore drew attention to the merits of particular traits; here he o↵ered
not science but art. [is this clear?]
6
Preliminary Theorizing
Structure imposes certain preferences on states. Internationally, the imperative to survive
drives states to raise armies and build arsenals. Pace Waltz, though, this imperative is
not nearly strong enough to determine all a state’s preferences. Rather, many reflect a
state’s internal politics: peculiar constellations of interests and institutions drive states to
certain policies instead of others. Yet even these forces are insufficient to determine a state’s
preferences. The final piece, the one most lacking in IR theory, is leadership: particular
leaders have particular visions for their state and its place in the world, and they pursue
these di↵erent visions within the broad confines of their domestic and international environs.
In short, states are not unitary rational actors; rather, rational leaders control states.
These leaders desire not only their own material well-being but the longterm health of their
country and (perhaps) the world. That is, they have preferences over outcomes not only
during their tenures but also after they leave office.
The problem of leadership change
Leaders matter. But leaders are not constant. A statesman tries to preserve what he has
wrought after he has gone, but a status quo may not prove stable as leaders change. Within
a rationalist framework, changes in leadership can upset an equilibrium in two ways18 : first,
the change in leaders can change the preferences of states, so that a once-satisfied state
becomes dissatisfied; second, the change in leaders can change the capabilities of states, so
that a once-stable distribution of goods no longer reflects a new distribution of power.
A leaders’ successors will di↵er from him. They may conceive the national interest differently (or they may simply be petty and corrupt). If he can, this new leader will try to
alter the status quo to suit his own tastes. But a statesman desires that later leaders, though
they have di↵erent preferences, will pursue the same strategy. He must therefore find an
equilibrium that resists meddling by his successors.
Second, a statesman’s absence might alter the very capabilities of a state and the balance
of power. A talented general or diplomat strengthens his state, altering its bargaining power.
With this greater power a state can increase its share of the world’s goods. But his leadership
will not last forever, and so a statesman’s very presence is a form of overextension: an
equilibrium division of the pie while he lives may not remain stable after his death.
Conjecture: Leaders, Power Transition, and War
If a leader enhances the capabilities of a state, and if his successors will (or even may) be
less capable, then his death or departure will result in a power transition. This transition
is sudden and discontinuous, creating a commitment problem.19 A statesman will seek to
resolve this commitment problem during his lifetime: either he will wage war in the present to
secure gains his country could not hold after his death, or he well accept gains (or gradually
cede gains) only commensurate with his country’s capabilities after his death. Moreover, if
a leader’s termination in office is foreseeable, it should not result in war after his departure.
18 maybe three, by changing beliefs, but a statesman wd want policy to be responsive to updating beliefs. Not sure how this
works
19 That is, they fit the Powell (2006) criteria.
7
How a statesman insulates his strategy against changing preferences
A statesman has two principle means whereby he can insulate his policies against the vagaries
of leadership change: grooming his successors and altering his successors’ incentives.
First, he might a↵ect or even determine the character (i.e. the preferences) of his successors. In our modern Republic we often ignore this possibility, but historically statesman
strongly influenced those who followed them. In fact, the most successful foreign policies
often arise when a series of leaders handpick their successors. Even in democracies, premiers
and foreign ministers often train their successors: the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth American
presidents all served predecessors as Secretaries of State; so too less populist governments:
during the principate Roman emperors frequently adopted their successors to advance their
ends; not shared blood but shared goals bound the Antonines together; and of course, for a
thousand years the pope has chosen his Cardinals.
Ideally, a statesman would prefer a figure who totally shared his preferences, capabilities,
and information. But such people do not exist. Instead, a statesman must balance the competing qualities of actual candidates, among these choosing the one most likely to preserve
his vision. This choice of successor is often strange, even puzzling: Trajan, the quintessential
Roman soldier, named Hadrian, a bearded bureaucrat, to rule the empire; Richelieu, who
loved his country more than himself, his king, or his church, and who had frequently allied
with Protestants against the counter-Reformation, named Mazarin, an Italian and former
papal nuncio, to govern France and complete his legacy. The problem resembles one of delegation, save that the principal must delegate and then cannot monitor his agent (since he’ll
be dead). Which qualities a statesman must balance in his successor remains understudied,
despite the surfeit of curious cases.
Second, a statesman might a↵ect the incentives of his successors. To this end he has
two complementary methods: among possible arrangements he can choose ones more costly
to alter, and he can choose a status quo more likely to remain satisfactory among later
governments. The former corresponds roughly to what political scientists mean by institutionalization.
Conjecture: Leaders, Successors, and Institutionalization
Leaders who can groom successors will be less likely to institutionalize their goals. If a statesman must usually weigh a tradeo↵ between the difficulty of altering a status quo with its
distance from his ideal policy, then as the benefits to the former decline he should pursue it
less. Because choice successors ensure a certain policy continuity (thus obviating one of the
needs for institutions), the more discretion a statesman has over his successors the less often
he should bother institutionalizing his strategy. This conjecture also upends the ideational
arguments for democracies’ reliance on international institutions: their preference for such
instruments reflects, not some normative attachment to the rule of law, but to the uncertainty of their domestic politics.
But institutionalization does not nearly begin to answer the question. Though its unmistakable aim was the preservation of a particular European vision, the Concert of Europe,
arguably the longest period of Great Power peace in history, had almost no formal institutions. Rather, its success rested on an extraordinarily careful division of goods at its
inception; this balance kept states satisfied for much of the century.
8
To achieve the latter a statesman must predict the likely preferences of future leaders, both
of his own state and of others. Given these expectations, he must balance the present benefits
of an agreement with the likelihood it will endure. Here arises an opportunity: if a certain
kind of state tends to produce leaders of particular inclinations, and if those inclinations
accord well with his own, a statesman will ally with that state.
Conjecture: Leaders, Ideology, and Alliances
Walt argues that ideology plays but a minor role to power in the formation of alliances;20
against him many theorists, especially constructivists, have shown the special relevance of
ideological kinship in some of history’s most important alliances. Only the most dedicated
realist would deny that ideology underpinned the Holy Alliance, yet only the most determined
constructivist could find an ideological link between Stalin’s Russia and Churchill’s Britain
(or Hitler’s Germany). What accounts for the di↵erence?
If ideology tends to correlate with complementarity of interests, leaders will tend to seek
long-term allies among ideologically similar states, but in the short run they will remain
indi↵erent to ideological kinship. In other words, during wars and crises states will seek what
allies best suit their present needs, for they have little to fear from a leadership transition;
but in the long run they will seek an ally whose interests will most likely remain aligned
with their own, even at the cost of present gains. Thus at Aix-la-Chapelle and afterward
Metternich tied Austria more tightly to the Czars than to Britain, though his European
goals more closely coincided with those of Castlereagh than of Alexander. Thus also why
19th century Britain largely ignored ideology in its commitments: “Britain has no permanent
allies, only permanent interests.” In shunning long-term alliances, it did not need to search
for ideological partners.
This conjecture clearly contrasts with the constructivist literature. If actors’ identities
incline them to ally with similar states, then this inclination should manifest in both shortrun and long-run behavior. Likewise, it departs from the realist literature, as well: if actors
do not care about identities and other immaterial considerations, their long-term alliances
should be independent of such variables.
Conjecture: Leaders, Regime Type, and Alliances
Finally, I conjecture that democracies tend to select leaders with a narrower range of preferences than nondemocracies. Only certain kinds of people win elections, but anyone can
be born a Romanov. If leaders are risk-averse, then, given the choice between an alliance
with a democracy and an alliance with a nondemocracy, and both are equal in their expected
benefits, then the leader should choose to ally with the democracy.21
Variables, Hypotheses, and Methods
Clarification of Core Variables and Concepts
Properly speaking, the dependent variable I seek to theorize is whether and how a leader
ensures his successors pursue his strategy. I use the term strategy here in its most basic
20 Walt
(1987), 181
pretty sure this has been shown somewhere before. Need to find the article. Also, I recognize there’s a tension here
between this and the first conjecture, but I’m unsure how to resolve it]
21 [I’m
9
sense–a function mapping a set of actions to the set of all possible situations.22 Ideally, a
statesman prefers that his successors act as he would in any situation, though no one can
so perfectly choose a successor or design future incentives to achieve this goal. That is, a
statesman strives for strategic continuity.
The basic independent variables are the costs/benefits of the instruments whereby statesmen perpetuate their policies. As outlined above, within a rationalist framework these instruments are: a↵ecting the succession, institutionalizing policies, and choosing equilibria
with broad appeal. (In English, picking leaders who agree with you, making it more costly to
change the status quo for leaders who disagree with you, and picking equilibria more likely
to satisfy leaders who disagree with you; in trite metaphors, picking the donkey, increasing
the sticks, and increasing the carrots.)
Like the larger rational choice literature, I take the assumption of leaders’ rationality
over a set of preferences not as a testable hypothesis but as part of the research program’s
‘hard core.’ Because strategies (and thus strategic continuity) cannot be directly observed,
the hypotheses below, conjectured during the preliminary theorizing, strive to capture the
importance of variations in leaders’ preferences in ways more amenable to empirical tests.
Hypotheses
Hypothesis 1 The greater a leader’s control over succession, the less likely he is to institutionalize his policies.
I believe the logic behind this hypothesis is straightforward and obvious; the difficult arises
in testing it. I know of no way to quantitatively capture the degree to which a leader
institutionalizes his policies, nor do I know of anyone who has managed it. But I suspect a
qualitative study is possible.
Because potential candidates for succession change, the degree of institutionalization could
be examined within cases. That is, a study could take particular leaders whose tenure in office
spanned several decades, then examine how their reliance upon institutions changed as their
ability to shape the succession or the acceptability of possible successors varied. Such a study
would largely control for variation in leaders’ preferences, the costs and benefits of institutionalization, and political environments (both international and domestic). Corroborating
evidence would find that, as a leader gained the ability to name/train his successor, or as
possible successors became more appealing, the leader would create or reform institutions less
often. Disconfirming evidence would show that leaders’ preferences for institutionalization
remained constant across such variation.
Hypothesis 2 When forming alliances, actors consider ideology primarily in their long-run
calculations. That is, ideology should correlate with long-term alliances, not short-term ones.
Of the hypotheses I o↵er, this one appears the most immediately testable. A basic research
design would have two steps: first, a quantitative one to determine whether ideology correlates
with alliance duration; second, a qualitative one to examine whether leaders consider ideology
when allying, especially for the reasons I suggest.
22 The term ‘grand strategy,’ while essential to our understanding of international relations, is notoriously difficult to pin down.
Liddell-Hart o↵ers the classic definition, that “the role of grand strategy–higher strategy–is to co-ordinate and direct all the
resources of a nation, or band of nations...grand strategy looks beyond the war to the subsequent peace.” Liddell-Hart 335-6.
In essence, his definition accords with that of game theory (and of Clausewitz).
10
Hypothesis 3 When forming alliances, actors prefer (all else equal) to ally with a democracy
rather than a nondemocracy.
This hypothesis would enjoy a similar research design to the previous. Most important would
be the qualitative step in order to assess whether ideological alliances reflect shared identities
or a rational calculation.
[need hypothesis about leaders and power transition]
A note on Case Selection
I argue that leaders matter to policy even within structural constraints. To show this claim,
I must control for such constraints. Many who examine leaders mistakenly attribute to
them a causal significance which more reflects their unique opportunities than their actual
importance. Thus, by their very nature such unique events as postwar moments could not
test the claims I want to examine.23
23 Ikenberry
and Kupchan
11