Much of the scholarship on misperception in international politics begins by identifying disastrous military conflicts and then scours the historical record to exhume the misperceptions that led inevitably to this dire outcome. The often unstated premise of this kind of work is that the world would be a safer and more cooperative place if decision makers perceived their environment more accurately.
Eric Grynaviski’s Constructive Illusions directly confronts this premise. To be sure, Grynaviski is not the first to question the truism that misperception causes war. Robert Jervis (“War and misperception,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 [no. 4, 1988]: 675–700) is perhaps most well known for drawing this presumption to our attention. However, Jervis’s discussion is largely theoretical rather than empirical, and Grynaviski’s book brings us a step closer to answering Jervis’s question with a detailed historical interrogation of the détente period of the Cold War.
The book begins with a theory chapter that articulates the causal pathways linking misperceptions (or more specifically, false intersubjective beliefs, or FIBs) to cooperation. The book’s core is a series of three historical case studies focusing on the origins of détente, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the decline of détente. The central empirical claim of these chapters is that détente was centrally founded on misunderstandings (or FIBs) by the leaders of both superpowers regarding the principles and norms undergirding the relationship. Without these misunderstandings, the author concludes, the cooperation and peace building realized through détente would have been impossible. Moreover, he argues that the end of détente was brought about by shifts in American domestic politics, not by a clarification of the foundational misperceptions. Consequently, he concludes that 1) misperceptions had a strongly positive impact on U.S.–Soviet cooperation during the 1970s, and 2) these misperceptions had few—if any—negative consequences for subsequent superpower relations.
The first of these two claims seems well supported by Grynaviski’s historical evidence. At its core, détente was founded on the Basic Principles Agreement (BPA) of 1972. The BPA was dissonant in its very structure, which comprised two articles—the first written largely by the USSR and the second largely by the United States—that were inconsistent with each other in important respects. The placement of these articles side by side in a single accord allowed Soviet leaders to believe that the United States had agreed to political parity between the superpowers, while simultaneously allowing American leaders to believe that the USSR had agreed to the political linkage of arms-control cooperation to Soviet restraint in support of Third World clients. Nonetheless, this short, incoherent accord set the stage for a series of superpower arms-control agreements that would otherwise have been impossible. Grynaviski’s evidence draws heavily on Raymond Garthoff’s scholarship in this area (e.g., Détente and Confrontation: American—Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, 1985), but Constructive Illusions places these findings in a broader theoretical context than the historian’s earlier work, particularly regarding the positive role of misperceptions.
The second empirical claim, however, is somewhat more speculative and left me less than entirely persuaded. While he largely agrees with Garthoff’s explanation of the origins of détente, Grynaviski seeks to rebut the historian’s claim that the misunderstandings rooted in the BPA ultimately undermined the cooperative relationship. He does so by arguing that the change in American policy toward the Soviet Union was a function of the changing domestic power and influence of different U.S. policy- makers, rather than a result of any individual policymaker’s changing his or her beliefs. Specifically, he writes that “if a group did not change its beliefs about cooperation after these misperceptions arose, then the misperceptions themselves do not explain the decline of cooperation” (p. 141).
One cannot so easily infer the causes of state behavior from evidence at the individual level, however. The policies of any government are inevitably the result of a bureaucratic competition among actors with different preferences, each trying to persuade the chief executive to follow their preferred course. The relative influence of those actors, however, is likely to depend on the chief executive’s perceptions of the efficacy of their advice. Thus, at least one plausible account is that the failure of the USSR to comport with American expectations of restraint in the Third world lent credence to the arguments of hawks within the United States who wielded increasing influence over American policy and brought an end to détente.
Viewed in this way, Grynaviski’s evidence seems to suggest both that the FIBs embodied in the BPA caused détente and that the clarification of those FIBs caused the renewed Cold War of the late 1970s and early 1980s. This is not necessarily a problem for his argument, but it does point out that false beliefs often erode over time as they repeatedly come into contact with reality. If that is so, then it is important to assess the impact of FIBs on the level of cooperation or conflict that ensues after they are unmasked. On the one hand, actors who discover that they have been holding false beliefs about their partner may feel betrayed and may escalate a conflict more sharply in response. Alternatively, if actors learn to trust one another through the practice of cooperation, then perhaps their behavior will persist even after the false beliefs have been corrected.
In order to address the total impact of the false intersubjective beliefs embodied in détente on the U.S.–Soviet relationship, one would need to evaluate the history of the Cold War in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Specifically, one would need to assess whether the level of superpower conflict in this period was higher or lower than would have occurred without the FIBs that created détente. Such counterfactual analyses are always tricky, but in Chapter 3 Grynaviski does an admirable job of constructing a counterfactual narrative to support his claim that détente would not have been possible without false intersubjective beliefs. Unfortunately, he does not extend this analysis by assessing the impact of the collapse of those beliefs on the U.S.–Soviet relationship after détente.
Finally, while the author persuasively demonstrates that misperceptions can create cooperation as well as conflict, the reader is given somewhat less guidance regarding the conditions under which each effect is likely to occur. The most specific statement that he makes in this regard is that “a false intersubjective belief can cause cooperation if it masks ideational conflict” (p. 40). This statement seems plausible as far as it goes, but what is the meaning of “can”? Is the relationship conditional on some other variable? Is it simply stochastic? Why only ideational conflict? Can FIBs regarding power or capability create cooperation? What about the FIBs regarding the preferences, power, or behavior of third parties? The scope conditions for Grynaviski’s argument are less than fully articulated.
Nonetheless, Constructive Illusions does an excellent job of providing theoretical depth and empirical weight to Jervis’s speculation that misperceptions can cause cooperation as well as conflict. Moreover, it does so with a relationship that is undeniably important: the superpower relations during the Cold War. While the manuscript raises some questions that it cannot answer, those questions are only important because of the argument and the evidence that Grynaviski has constructed. This book is an important read for anyone interested in the impact of misperceptions on cooperation and conflict, and I hope that it will become the foundation for future works that will continue to expand our understanding of perception and misperception in international politics.
