What is hubris balancing?
By looking at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ryuta Ito explains how anger and overconfidence drive leaders to adopt unrealistic goals in conflicts.
Throughout history, world leaders have often overplayed their hands and pursued goals that may not be achievable, especially in cases of conflict. Policy-makers would do well to understand the potentially catastrophic risks that can come with overestimating their own abilities.
In this blogpost, Ryuta Ito introduces the new concept of ‘hubris balancing’ from his latest article. Using Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an example, he outlines the concept’s implications for how international actors make policy choices.
What is hubris balancing?
Hubris balancing occurs when international actors respond to perceived security threats in a manner that is irrationally aggressive and exceeds the limits of their abilities. As the term ‘hubris’ suggests, leaders are often driven by overconfidence and anger against hostile ideologies. Consequently, they adopt overly expansive goals and engage in overbalancing, which are often justified by inciting exclusionary nationalism.
What makes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a case of hubris balancing?
Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine deviates from rationalist explanations of how actors behave in the international arena and is marked with the irrationalities and self-deception that are hallmarks of hubris balancing. This can be illustrated in three ways.
First, Putin overestimated Russia’s military power and underestimated Ukrainian morale. This is a textbook example of overbalancing as Putin’s overconfidence and anger led him to misperceive the extent of threat posed by Ukraine and initiate a costly invasion. Second, Putin has also been driven by anger against western liberalism, which he perceives as a threat to traditional Russian conservatism. This anger led him to initiate the war against Ukraine as part of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between Russia and the West. Finally, the social aspect of Putin’s self-deception is illustrated by his incitement of nationalism in Russia. By distorting Russia–Ukraine history and asserting dubious claims, he raised nationalist sentiments in his country and secured domestic support for the war.
Why is the concept of self-deception important for understanding state behaviour?
Self-deception is an essential variable used to explain various important cases of overbalancing throughout history. A case in point is the Lyndon B. Johnson administration’s descent into the quagmire of the Vietnam War, which historians like Hannah Arendt, Barbara Tuchman and Lawrence Freedman attribute to his self-deception. Many of Johnson’s civilian advisors believed that north Vietnam could be pressured through threats against its population and economy, an overconfidence that led to the entirely unsuccessful Rolling Thunder air campaign from 1965 to 1968. Moreover, a pervasive and false optimism was prevalent among high-ranking Americans in Saigon, a sentiment that appeared to be essentially due to self-deception.
Although this constitutes just one example, self-deception plays a pivotal role in international affairs, particularly in conflicts, and helps us understand why leaders often misperceive situations and adopt unrealistic goals.
What are the policy implications of your research?
My research has two key policy implications. First, it unpacks how psychological factors drive war and diplomacy, and emphasizes the importance for international leaders to understand that their psychological biases can lead to policy failures. This, in turn, shows the importance of developing decision-making structures to tackle such biases.
One way in which international leaders can prevent self-deception in policy-making is by using ‘devil’s advocates’. A devil’s advocate is someone who takes on the role of challenging or criticizing the majority view in policy networks. Incorporating a dissenting voice may be helpful to counteract self-deception when it becomes widespread among elite policy-making groups.
Secondly, my research on why Putin invaded Ukraine clearly illustrates that leaders must pay careful attention to their adversaries’ mindsets. They should not necessarily assume them to be rational and calculating actors, since this is evidently not always the case.
Read Ryuta Ito’s article ‘Hubris balancing: classical realism, self-deception and Putin’s war against Ukraine’. It has been published in the September 2023 issue of International Affairs and is free to access until the end of November 2023.
Ryuta is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Human and Social Sciences of Hiroshima University.
All views expressed are individual not institutional.
