While I was reading the book under review, the news was dominated by the potential deal over nuclear weapons between the United States and Iran. The Obama administration’s efforts to reach an agreement, however, have been actively undermined by conservative politicians in the United States and Israel, who favor coercion over dialogue to win more favorable terms instead of realizing achievable results. The tension between conservative and liberal positions over a deal with Iran is at the heart of Diplomacy’s Value. When do states choose to engage in coercion, often making the perfect the enemy of the good, and when do they choose a style of negotiating more likely to achieve common or core interests?

The conventional wisdom in international relations is that political elites operate according to some singular logic. While IR scholars may disagree about whether decision makers use a rationalist logic that emphasizes coercive bargaining, a realist logic that highlights pragmatic statecraft, or a liberal logic that stresses the importance of reasoned dialogue to pursue joint gains, they usually agree that one of these approaches to negotiations likely dominates decision making in international politics.

In the book, Brian Rathbun attacks the conventional wisdom. No single logic, he argues, is capable of explaining the dramatic variation in the way that political elites have conducted international negotiations. Rather than focusing on a single logic, we should attend to variation in the “style” that diplomacy takes. Sometimes, states engage in coercive bargaining, wherein they view a negotiation as a zero-sum game, trying to gain leverage over their interlocutors to win as much of the pie as possible. In other cases, they use pragmatic statecraft, wherein negotiators are willing to sacrifice short-term or peripheral interests to long-term priorities. Reasoned dialogue, by contrast, occurs when states use dialogue and discussion to realize the best outcome for all parties.

When do states choose to rely on coercive bargaining, pragmatic statecraft, or reasoned dialogue? Rathbun answers this important question by trying to understand decision makers’ psychological dispositions, revealed through their political ideologies and party platforms. One part of the explanation relates to political elites’ social motivation. Rathbun argues that political elites who represent parties on the Left are more likely prosocial because of the Left’s commitments to equality and distributive justice, where “prosocial” means that they have a psychological predisposition to be willing to “forgo gains so that others might also share in the spoils” (p. 30). These prosocial political elites, he argues, are likely to engage in reasoned dialogue so as to find ways to help all parties profit from the outcome of international negotiation. Political elites on the Right, in contrast, are more likely to engage in pragmatic statecraft or treat negotiations as exercises in coercion because they are more proself, where “proself” means a commitment to in-group loyalty, akin to nationalism.

While differing levels of social motivation explain when states engage in reasoned dialogue, a second factor, epistemic motivation, explains when states engage in coercive bargaining or pragmatic statecraft. Political elites who represent parties on the far right usually have low epistemic motivation, implying that they are unable to learn about or adapt to negotiating partners who approach international negotiations with different styles. Therefore, they treat international politics as a coercive bargaining game, concentrating on short-term interests, and are often mired in peripheral, small-stakes contests with minor payoffs. Politicians representing the center-right, in contrast, are more able to adjust, producing a pragmatic statecraft that is flexible and can advance long-term interests.

The book largely focuses on showing that these differences in negotiating style mattered within Europe during the interwar period, such as the difficulties faced in negotiating the Locarno Treaty. By itself, Rathbun’s analysis of the 1920s marks this book as an important contribution to international relations scholarship, providing a fresh, elite-driven perspective on the interwar years and the difficulties Europeans faced reconciling British, French, and German aspirations. On Rathbun’s account, the reason cooperation was often difficult was that far-right European diplomats tended to think about negotiations, even among allies, as exercises in coercion, leading them to lose sight of their core interests as they pushed for small gains. In contrast, centrist or leftist parties selected leaders who adopted a style of negotiation that made concessions in order to establish trust and ensure that all parties gained. To demonstrate this argument, the author does an exemplary job of sifting through the evidentiary record, relying chiefly on primary source material, to closely follow shifting positions throughout the interwar period.

The most valuable payoff of Diplomacy’s Value is to show that diplomacy matters. The ability of states to cooperate, whether to form an alliance or to resolve enduring rivalries, is not fully determined by systemic-level factors, such as the distribution of capabilities. Rather, political elites’ ability to empathize with others and to learn, and their willingness to take others’ interests into account, concretely affects the prospects for cooperation. Moreover, the theoretical architecture of this book is particularly valuable. Scholars interested in diplomacy often discuss different negotiating styles, for example, by describing specific national styles or unpacking historical changes in diplomatic practice. This work, while valuable, is often difficult to translate into generalizable theories that plug into traditional debates. One contribution that the book makes is to develop an ideal-typical description of different kinds of diplomatic styles that translates well into the broader conversation by treating the use of coercive bargaining or reasoned dialogue as a variable rather than a constant.

Yet despite its many merits, the psychological approach favored by Rathbun may leave more questions than it answers. One problem is that the theoretical apparatus may be insufficiently subtle to make sense of individual-level variation in diplomatic styles. On the one hand, some individuals engage in different diplomatic styles depending on the object of their interaction. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, for example, likely engaged in coercive bargaining in North Vietnam, used pragmatic statecraft with respect to China, and sought reasoned dialogue with some allies. On the other hand, the book looks to political parties as representatives of styles in international negotiations, yet this may create puzzles when there are intraparty foreign policy debates. Within the United States, some of the most bitter foreign policy fights are within political parties, such as debates over the Democratic Party’s position on Vietnam in the 1960s or the Nixon administration’s decision to engage with the Soviets during détente despite Soviet restrictions on human rights and Jewish emigration in the 1970s. These kinds of intraparty rivalries present special problems for Rathbun’s analysis because the aim of his book is to directly map style to party.

Moreover, Diplomacy’s Value does not always situate itself well within larger debates in sociology and social psychology, which may come with some costs. For example, when Rathbun draws a distinction between proself and prosocial, the logic is monadic rather than dyadic, presuming that empathy is an ability that only varies because of political elites’ general dispositions. While there is likely much truth in such a view, one wonders whether the relationships between parties also matter. One may be disposed toward empathy in general, but be unlikely to empathize with some specific group when there is an enduring rivalry or culture of fear. Alternatively, one may be on the far right and therefore emphasize national goals in general, but identify thickly with a specific state or community overseas, making reasoned dialogue more likely. A fuller account of the origins of social motivation, in other words, may need to address a broader range of social influences that affect political elites’ attitudes toward one another.