The nominal goal of Emotional Choices is to answer a simple question: Why and under what conditions will political leaders either yield to or defy the coercive threats of more powerful adversaries? This is a puzzle because coercive threats have such low success rates—are more likely, in fact, to fail than not to fail—and because, Robin Markwica argues, rational choice theory does not adequately explain the success and failure of coercive threats.

Markwica avers that the emotional experiences of the targets of coercive threats—specifically, feelings of fear, anger, hope, pride and humiliation—when confronted with coercive threats are a powerful explanation of how the targets will behave in response to a coercive threat. These emotions shape both what and how decision makers thought when confronted with coercive threats (appraisal tendencies) and what they were moved to do (action tendencies).

Markwica begins by describing how emotions are embedded in and molded by their cultural context: emotion norms, “socially learned standards of appropriate affective experience and expression” (p. 59), orient people to the emotions they are supposed to be feeling and expressing in a given context. Emotional experiences, he says, are also shaped by actors’ self-conceptions and identities. Markwica then uses “appraisal theory” to argue that “each discrete emotion has its own particular logic” (p. 66). Appraisal theory, from psychology, suggests that emotions affect both cognitive appraisals by decision makers (what and how people think) and their action tendencies (what people want and do).

Markwica then outlines how each of the emotions he tracks could affect decision makers by disposing them to have distinct appraisal and action tendencies, depending on the context and timing of the stimulus. To summarize and simplify, Markwica draws observations from psychology on each of the emotions he tracks. Fear, for example, often prompts an attentional bias toward potential threats and could cause actors to fight, freeze, or flee. Anger tends to boost individuals’ sense of agency, power, and control, as well as prompting them to make optimistic risk assessments. Hope may boost creativity and persistence, but it can also bolster a tendency toward a confirmation bias. Pride can both cause people to be more persistent and to ignore their own weaknesses. And humiliation can cause people to withdraw or, alternatively, to resist the humiliator. The cause, context, and intensity of the emotion make a crucial difference in how actors experience and respond to the events that provoked it.

Markwica acknowledges that, although his theory assumes that emotions are discrete, emotions may be mixed—melding or co-occurring. “Fear, for instance, is associated with a bias in favor of low-risk options, whereas anger is related to a preference for high risk alternatives. Experiments suggest that such contrasting tendencies are likely to inhibit and blunt each other’s influence” (p. 90).

In the chapter, “Inferring Actors’ Emotions,” Markwica develops indicators and methods for inferring actors’ emotions in their cultural and strategic context, as well as in the context of their particular emotional disposition. Texts, emotional displays such as exclamations, and reporting by observers can provide clues to decision makers’ emotions.

The rubber meets the road in the two case studies: how emotions affected Nikita Khrushchev’s actions and decisions in the Cuban Missile Crisis and how Saddam Hussein responded in the 1991 Gulf War. In both instances, Markwica primarily focuses on the decisions of the two leaders of these centralized governments, because they each “wielded supreme power in their choice behavior” (p. 32). Markwica is able to make use of new documents, interviews, and memoirs, and although I am familiar with both of these cases, I certainly learned from his marshaling of new evidence. Cutting to the chase, Markwica divides the two crises into 16 decision points (8 in each case) and finds some role for emotions in 50% of the decisions. For instance, he argues that Khrushchev’s fear that President John F. Kennedy would lose control, and that this could lead to nuclear war, motivated him to yield and agree to withdraw the missiles from Cuba. Saddam Hussein’s pride led him to act aggressively, hold onto Kuwait, and discount the evidence of his military’s shortcomings in comparison to the coalition arrayed against Iraq.

This is a strong book on theoretical, methodological, and empirical grounds, and I could sing its praises for the remainder of my word count. But I won’t. I will instead respond to the author’s careful presentation with a few general observations. First, the focus on new evidence regarding both Khrushchev’s and Hussein’s emotions is excellent. Markwica also brings in evidence of other decision makers’ affects. However, and this goes to case selection and making a bit more of the material at hand, Markwica might have explored in these cases two other dynamics: groupthink and the force of ideology. In other words, it is not just that these particular leaders had enormous power; the dynamic of groupthink may have been at greater play than the author acknowledges. If that is so, we might ask how the grip of groupthink was broken and by whom. With regard to ideology, in Iraq, Baath Party ideology and pan-Arabism may have been important, and in both cases the hold of militarist beliefs and of assumptions was at work.

Second, in the conclusion Markwica mentions that gender is worth exploring, and in both cases he shows that the leaders were concerned about their own or their state’s perceived masculinity. Khrushchev worried that the United States had “gloated over our impotence” with regard to U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union (p. 135), and Hussein, who saw himself as the Arab Knight, apparently told his deputy director of intelligence that he was concerned that his solders were “becoming women” (p. 249) in the face of the US assault. These examples are quite blatant, but the theme of humiliation and threats to masculinity are an undercurrent throughout the cases and perhaps deserved theoretical attention.

Although Markwica is not overclaiming anything, the implications of his theory go beyond the question that motivates the book. He seeks to dramatically revise, if not overturn, our understanding of foreign policy decision making by developing a theory of “emotional choice,” in contrast to rational choice theory. However, Markwica is careful to say that he does not see feeling and thinking “as separate or antithetical processes” (p. 21). Rather, the question is “which of these logics plays the greatest role in a decision process and how the interplay between them unfolds over time” (p. 26). A “logic of affect” is thus intended to complement the logics of consequences and appropriateness. In the conclusion he writes, “It was the combination of rational, normative, and emotional choice that accounted for the trajectories of the missile crisis and the Gulf conflict” (p. 261). Yet, the causes of behavior—emotions, rational calculations, and normative arguments—might seem overdetermined in these outcomes. I suspect that it will, in fact, be rare that we can say only one of these logics was at work and then pinpoint the force of that causal logic.

Markwica summarizes reams of research on emotion from other fields, applies it to the field of international relations, and has provided scholars with an interesting and synthetic contribution. The result is a new “logic of affect,” a focused analysis of the problem of coercive diplomacy in these cases, and policy-relevant conclusions for those who wish to successfully wield coercive diplomatic threats.