Characteristics of the Foreign Policy Decision-Making System in Japan

In his pioneering essay, “The Element of Decision in the Pattern of of War,” Theodore Abel argues, on the basis of twenty-five sample studies, “The rational, calculating decision for war is reached far in advance of the actual outbreak of hostilities,” and “in no case is the decision precipitated by emotional tensions, sentimentality, crowd behavior, or other irrational motivation. In every case, the decision is based upon a careful weighing of chances and of anticipating consequences.” This thesis—that a state selects an action of war from a number of alternatives in a conscious decision to maximize its goals after a careful weighing of available means and of possible consequences—may be applied as a conceptual scheme which we could term the rational calculation model.