Emotion Coming to China's Foreign Policy

In his magisterial account of the role of culture in international relations, American academic Richard New Lebow argues that rationality is just one of the factors (and is actually one of the weakest) involved when countries engage with each other. If nations were rational actors, history would have been quite different. Since time immemorial, countries have engaged in reckless wars and destructive behavior utterly at odds with what we would assume to be rational.