A Comment on Professor Reynolds's Note
| Author | Joseph Frankel |
| Published date | 01 September 1959 |
| Date | 01 September 1959 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.1959.tb01942.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
304
NOTES
AND REVIEW ARTICLES
terminology, there
is
an operational environment and a psychological environment, and in
their case also it is the latter which is relevant to decision-making.
So
it may not be true
that ‘The closer the decision-maker is to the top, the more remote is his psychological
environment from his operational one’ (p.
8)
(Mr. Frankel argues this
to
be
so
by instancing
the necessary abbreviation and distortion of information as it passes to the decision-maker
through a series of intermediaries), because his intuitional assessment of the psychological
environment of the decision-makers in the other states with which he is dealing may be
more exact than that of his better-informed advisers.
No
’omniscient observer’ of Hitler’s
operational environment in March
1936
could possibly have reached Hitler’s decision to
march his troops into the Rhineland, were it not for the one element-the psychological
environment of the French decision-makers. This element must accordingly feature in any
decision-making model in foreign policy, and it does of course introduce a new variable
interacting with the others. This is no reason for the model
to
be discarded, but it does
mean that it must be operated with even greater caution than would otherwise be required.
A
COMMENT
ON
PROFESSOR
REYNOLDS’S
NOTE
JOSEPH
FRANKEL
King’s College,
A
berdeen
IT
is encouraging that Professor Reynolds has found the model sufficiently useful to
propose elaborations which are in bearing with its basic structure.
The aim of the paper was to outline the approach, omitting any details likely to prove
distracting. This accounts for the major queries. For instance, reference to the foreign
environment was deliberately restricted in order
to
avoid likely controversies and to
accommodate any reader’s favourite scheme. The operational environment certainly should
include the psychological environments of foreign decision-makers. Here omission was due
to the necessity
of
a rather involved explanation since, in terms of David Easton’s ‘infinite
regress’, the psychological environment of every decision-maker includes the anticipation
of
the anticipations of other relevant decision-makers, the anticipation of their anticipation
of
this anticipation, and
so
on.
The valuable point made by Professor Reynolds that, at times, intuition can serve as
a
better basis for foreign policy than detailed information, demonstrates the utility of the
concept of operational environment. Here a comparison of the significant discrepancies
between the psychological and the operational environments which arise from alternative
policies provides
a
convenient yardstick
for
evaluation.
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