A little uncollegial in tone, perhaps, but otherwise this seems precisely right to me. “National interest” is a malign fiction. Individuals have interests, often very sharply opposed. To disaggregate these interests and acknowledge the conflicts among them is the first and elementary duty of honest political argument.

Eric needs to be stripped of all title, possessions and any form of credit and dropped into one of the little instant hells that his inhuman thinking causes. Something along the lines of the middle class in Argentina that starved to death less than 10 years ago in an economic policy that others that have no soul or humanity prescribed. This person only has at best a nodding acquaintance with anything resembling reality.

Even reviewing this crap is a waste of time. Why? What is the purpose of putting this crap out there as if it had any validity?

Eric’s claim that states ‘act rationally in their national interest.’ If you ever see anything like this, you really need to stop reading and file the book under fiction. Total unmitigated crap. Next thing you know the idiot will be saying that the US acts rationally and is a democratic republic, which is equivalent to the states act rationally horse manure. This is an oligarchy, it is, was, and always will be an oligarchy. The founding fathers intended that it be an oligarchy, they simply could not conceive of semi human plutocrats that would do all they could to steal every dollar. However this is the rational end of “states act rationally.”

It is probably too late for Eric to get a job he is qualified for. Hopefully the depression will prevent him from harming young easily influenced minds in a college or university.

And perhaps that is a problem with how nations act, not a problem with theoretically describing how they act.

I think the basic problem in international law theory is that we don’t have a good way of figuring out which strategic considerations are going to be taken into account. Is Saddam seeking nuclear weapons to ward of Iran, or is he just pretending to? Do internal political concerns predominate or external ones?

And the problem is that different countries have different leaders who INDIVIDUALLY may weight strategic concerns differently and who may be opaque to outsiders.

The problem isn’t that the theory allows for almost any rationale, but that we are studying human decision-makers, who allow for almost any rationale.

Isn’t this rather like saying that international labor and investment agreements reflect state interests in advancing the prosperity of workers and capitalists?

These are empirical concerns.

Because the analogue just didn’t do enough damage in the realm of economics? It’s well documented that human beings don’t act rationally in a variety of ways and that should be expected to carry over to states whose decisionmaking is dominated by a particular human being (i.e. dictatorships and monarchies), but even aside from those I would expect to see some empirical evidence of the rationality of state action precede adopting that as an axiom to found your theory, especially when nonstate organizations of human beings are also well known to participate in a variety of irrational behaviors.

Perhaps we ought to take a recent, concrete example and ask Posner to explain what rational interest of the United States was served by the 2003 invasion of Iraq. (It is little use to say that the US expected that to serve a rational interest but was mistaken, because that mistake itself was irrational and contradicts Posner’s axiom.)

On the other hand, Bloix’s alternative theory of internal causes explains the Iraq War quite well: the then-President of the US expected the war to increase his power, prestige, and chances of reelection, and he was right in the short term. This suggests that international law will not effectively influence the actions of a state unless it is respected (either normatively or because of its consequences) by the people or institutions with power within that state, with influence on its decisionmaking process.

A theory of international relations founded on false beliefs about the decisionmaking processes of states is as doomed as a theory of economics founded on false beliefs about the decisionmaking processes of firms and consumers.

I think you’re selling normative arguments a bit short there. Drawing the fact/value line isn’t quite that simple when the facts themselves are norms: an economistic interpretation of the law may miss as much as a similar interpretation of the Church. I think your parenthesised argument could be better rendered as “if international law is a good to the extent that it is lawlike, then we should not be discussing it in terms which make it easier for it to become less lawlike”.

Yep, got that. What’s the counterfactual?

“…it seems sensible to assume that trade law reflects state interests in advancing the prosperity of exporters and import-competers…”

There’s a huge assumption here, the same assumption, really, that ulderlay mercantilist thought, that the interests of importers do not matter. And, yet, in terms of national welfare, that seems a strong assumption, and one that must be justified somehow. What seems implicit here is the notion that the interests of exporters (must) trump other interests, probably (but again implicitly) because exporters hold more wealth and/or have more political power. Which alters the rational choice model somewhat, doesn’t it?

But what do I know about models of politics; I’m an economist.