#136 Xi Is Unfriending Big Tech

Matsyanyaaya: The Rational Actor Trap<br/><br/>Big fish eating small fish = Foreign Policy in action<br/><br/>&#8212;&#160;Pranay Kotasthane<br/><br/>Nothing succeeds like success. Once you are perceived as being successful, new narratives emerge that trace a neat path explaining how success was attained through grit, foresight, and determination. The role of chance fades in the background. All stories show how the hero withstood the odds, took the right decisions, and defeated a world that was stacked against it. <br/><br/>Sometimes, nation-states craft stories with such narrative arcs. <br/><br/>The State as the all-knowing decision-maker is imagined as a consistent, value-maximising agent, which chooses each policy as a calculated solution to a strategic problem. This model is what Graham Allison and Philip Zellikow call the rational actor model of decision-making in their classic Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis.<br/><br/>The book goes on to show the inadequacy of the rational actor model in explaining foreign policy decisions. It proposes two other decision-making models that take into account bureaucratic resistance, individual initiative, turf battles, and a struggle for power, to better explain government decisions. <br/><br/>The key takeaway is that when we don&#8217;t understand the internal politics of a nation-state, we instinctively assume it as a black box that churns out decisions based on well-defined goals, well-understood alternatives, and well-projected calculations of costs and benefits of all the available alternatives. <br/><br/>Precisely this is how the thinking about China is today on the streets and WhatsApp groups of New York, Delhi, or Lagos. Every act by China is imagined as a calculated move made with a larger long-term goal in mind; a juggernaut that makes no mistakes; an Arjuna that never misses the fish&#8217;s eye.<br/><br/>A common way in which this narrative commonly plays out is as follows: someone will quote a Chinese leader in the past to show how pru