Flawed Strategy: Why Smart Leaders Make Bad Decisions

Beatrice Heuser’s Flawed Strategy: Why Smart Leaders Make Bad Decisions delves into a basic question: why do smart, well-informed leaders still make such poor choices in war and crisis? Her aim is not to give us a new grand theory of International Relations, but to show why many of our existing ways of thinking about strategy are misleading. She challenges three habits. First, seeing leaders as ‘rational actors’. Second, treating states as single, unified players. And third, ignoring how beliefs, biases and bureaucratic politics shape real decisions. The book’s main contribution is to pull together insights from history, psychology and strategic studies into one clear, usable way of thinking about decision-making, instead of inventing a new abstract model.