Narrativized Strategic Choice

(Hardback)

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In February 2019, Donald Trump announced the United States withdrew from the landmark Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia sparking worldwide concerns over the specter of a new nuclear arms race. The rational actor and game theoretic models dominating international relations literature failed to predict or explain this strategic choice.

Rationalist, normative, and materialist models of strategic choice saturate the study of international relations. Scholars continue to expose the shortfalls in these approaches in explaining or predicting outcomes of strategic interactions. This book advances a new model of strategic choice through a narrative lens. This narrative turn reframes the logic to emphasize the propositions of motives, perceptions, preferences, and the reflexive interaction of strategic choices. Case studies of American and Russian nuclear arms control treaties from the negotiations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987 to the crisis of the American withdrawal from the INF Treaty in 2019 support building a theory of narrativized strategic choice.

Reviews

Narrativized Strategic Choice provides an intense examination of strategic choice in warfare. DeRosa broadens the understanding of strategic choice by carefully analyzing seven cases within the nuclear arms control realm to demonstrate that narratives better explain strategic choice compared to traditional models. Well structured, researched, and documented, this book is highly recommended for the strategist community. -- Kevin D. Stringer, Lecturer in Strategy and Leadership, University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Northwestern Switzerland

Author Bio

John P. DeRosa is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Government and Politics Department of the University of Maryland Global Campus and a fellow with the Center on Global Interests. He has served more than twenty years as a soldier, officer, and civilian in the US Department of Defense.