[JeffSnazz]

> States can make bad calls in the short term but you’ll often find they are rational decisions regardless of if they don’t turn out well.

This line of reasoning only makes sense when compared with counterfactuals, which seems like a waste of everyone's time. It's easy enough to justify an arbitrary action as rational if you have no basis of comparison.

Anyway, "rational self-interest of the state" is not the same thing as "rational". There are other ends other than self-interest of the state—for instance, self-interest of the constituents of the state, or self-interest of humanity. All states put their own existence before the welfare of their people. A state is not a natural thing outside the vying of capital to institute economic stability for the ends of its own empowerment.