There has been growing interest in recent years in the relationship between academia and policy: why these communities often talk past one another and how scholars in particular can make their research more relevant and accessible to the people tasked with making critical decisions. Inside the Situation Room: The Theory and Practice of Crisis Decision-Making is a major contribution to this ongoing conversation. The editors—Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state, and Keren Yarhi-Milo, the dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs—have assembled an impressive roster of authors to help make sense of how heads of state and their closest advisors think and behave in times of crisis and war. What makes this volume especially unique and valuable is the purposeful intermingling of scholarly and practitioner perspectives that, together, create a product that is greater than the sum of its terrific parts.

The first three chapters in Section 1 of the volume collectively make the case that it is impossible to understand the dynamics of crisis, conflict, and war without taking seriously the individuals in the room making life and death decisions. Chapter 1 focuses on threat perception, or how leaders recognize and interpret dangerous features of the environment around them. Don Casler and Keren Yarhi-Milo dive into the key factors threat assessments are based on—adversary capabilities, intentions, resolve, and past actions—and why different people might interpret threats differently, ranging from cognitive biases to their prior experiences and demographic characteristics. In Chapter 2, Tyler Jost et al. take on the role of advisors. They explain how advisors exercise power, where their ideas originate from, and the various ways leaders influence the process of who advises them and in what manner. Chapter 3, authored by Rose McDermott, addresses the question of how emotions affect crisis decision-making. McDermott shows that leaders are both subject to, and manipulators of, emotions.

Section 2 of the volume contains the rest of the substantive chapters and alternates between a scholarly perspective on a given aspect of crisis decision-making and senior-leader perspectives that illustrate how that feature manifests in practice. The first batch, Chapters 4 through 6, deal with diplomacy. The academic perspective, provided by Marcus Holmes in Chapter 4, argues that while there are many challenges surrounding face-to-face diplomacy, it can work—under the right conditions. Catherine Ashton’s and Dennis Ross’ subsequent chapters on nuclear negotiations with Iran and the Israel-Palestine issue, respectively, showcase the value of this kind of diplomacy in spades. Ashton and Ross, two highly experienced diplomats involved in some of the toughest negotiations in recent memory, offer thoughtful perspectives on the value of face-to-face diplomacy and personal rapport more generally when it comes to trying to find consensus on thorny global challenges.

The second batch of chapters, Chapters 7 and 8, deal with coercive diplomacy. The first of these, by Reid Pauly and Jessica Chen Weiss, meticulously walks through the scholarly literature on coercion. They provide an overview of the factors that make coercive threats more likely to succeed—e.g., their credibility and the offer of assurances if demands are met—as well as the tools leaders use for increasing the credibility of threats, why deterring adversaries is generally easier than compelling them, and more. In Chapter 8, John Sullivan, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, details the limits of coercive diplomacy in the lead up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Sullivan acknowledges that the Biden administration issued various warnings to Vladimir Putin, to include economic sanctions and cutting Russia off from the financial system, but to no avail.

The third batch of chapters, Chapters 9 through 11, focuses on secret statecraft. Austin Carson’s contribution describes the latest scholarly research on covert operations, walking through its many forms and explaining why leaders are attracted to the quiet option and what might give them pause before using it. The subsequent two chapters discuss U.S. operations against Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the then-leader of ISIS, and Osama bin Laden, the longtime leader of al Qaeda and mastermind of 9/11. The former is authored by Robert O’Brien, who served as National Security Advisor during President Trump’s first term. The bin Laden chapter is authored by Leon Panetta, who served as CIA director and then defense secretary under President Obama. Each account, written by true insiders, offers a peek behind the curtain of two of the most daring, high-value covert operations of the last two decades.

Chapter 12 shifts the focus to the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) initiative. While it is the only chapter in the volume without a clearly delineated pairing of a pure academic perspective with a pure practitioner perspective, Jennifer Klein et al. nicely lay out the scholarly underpinnings of WPS as a contributor to conflict resolution and crisis stability as well as its evolution in the policy arena, both in the context of the United States and as a global issue.

The last batch of substantive chapters, Chapters 13 and 14, work through the role of public opinion in crisis decision-making from scholarly and practitioner perspectives. In Chapter 13, Elizabeth Saunders and Jessica Weeks identify several pathways through which public opinion matters. Two of these pathways are bottom up, affecting which leaders are selected and what they do once in office. The third is top down, wherein leaders shape and manipulate public opinion. In Chapter 14, Victoria Nuland, a senior decision-maker that served in several presidential administrations, relays first-hand knowledge of how public opinion affects critical foreign policy decisions. Consistent with Saunders and Weeks’ findings, Nuland holds that public opinion is a feedback loop, with presidents seeking to shape the narrative at home and abroad while also responding to the reactions that bubble up from below.

The concluding chapter by Clinton and Yarhi-Milo offers an excellent recap of what the volume teaches us about crisis decision-making and identifies areas that would benefit from additional research to include the role of group dynamics, public opinion in an increasingly polarized and digitized world, and potential differences between democracies and autocracies. The remainder of this review builds on that discussion by identifying a couple of big-picture observations and lessons that warrant further research and consideration.

One major takeaway from this volume is that it is impossible to understand crisis decision-making without taking individuals—their psychology, backgrounds, and emotional states—seriously. As Clinton and Yarhi-Milo write: “The rationalist framework, as an approach to understanding international affairs and human or state behavior, cannot explain outcomes like the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But the psychology of individual leaders can” (424). Indeed, it is evident across the chapters that the leaders in the room where key decisions are made have a profound influence on outcomes. Differences in things like personality and risk tolerance clearly matter. And yet, there is plenty in this volume, including in the practitioner chapters, which suggests that forces beyond the psychology of leaders also influence the contours of crises, from electoral considerations to balance of power dynamics, strategic culture, and regime type. Beyond the obvious—that crisis decision-making is multifaceted—this volume provides a strong foundation for additional research to better understand the conditions under which psychological factors override these other considerations, when they work in tandem, and how to tell the difference.

In a related vein, while the pairing of academic perspectives on a specific aspect of crisis decision-making with practitioner perspectives on the same theme (e.g., face-to-face diplomacy, public opinion) makes good, logical sense from a structural standpoint, it is apparent that these neat divisions, especially for the practitioners, are necessarily somewhat artificial. To take just one example, Ashton’s account of the Iran nuclear deal, in addition to showcasing the value of face-to-face diplomacy—the ostensible aim of that chapter—acknowledges the role of domestic audiences inside the U.S. and Iran alongside a host of other factors as being relevant to negotiations. As intimated above, the influence of, say, electoral politics or escalation concerns does not negate the role of psychology. Rather, it suggests that more robust collaboration between scholars and practitioners akin to what Clinton and Yarhi-Milo have done here can help parse which factors are most salient and which might have only played a marginal role in cases of interest.

In closing, Inside the Situation Room makes a significant contribution to recent efforts to “bridge the gap” between scholars and practitioners by practicing what it preaches, bringing representatives from the two communities together in direct dialogue to advance mutual understanding of shared problems. While this volume will be of obvious interest to aspiring leaders in undergraduate and graduate programs, it has a great deal to offer to scholars and policymakers alike. For the former, it provides a superb overview of the state-of-the-art in crisis decision-making research and first-hand accounts of how key concepts researchers care about manifested in practice. For the latter, it showcases the value academic scholarship can bring to bear in helping make sense of important historical cases, offering frameworks for thinking about today’s challenges, and ideally helping to inform the policy options for addressing them.

The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not represent those of the U.S. Naval War College, the Department of the Navy, or any other U.S. Government entity.