Paper accepted on 15 December 2025
https://doi.org/10.18485/sres.2025.4.2.2
ABSTRACT: What is the background of decisions, what precedes them, and how does that help us understand the events that follow them? These are the questions that people ask themselves when reading about certain events that have the potential to change the whole world. For more than two years now, we have been hearing that Russia brought back war to the European continent, the first after the Second World War, and that, in doing so, it violated international law and world order. However, many overlook the fact that an event like this happened at the beginning of 1999 when NATO, led by the US, launched an aggression on a sovereign country, FR Yugoslavia. This paper combines two existing models, the rational actor model and the belief system model, to find out what predated it and could have been avoided during the Rambouillet talks, as well as how one country decided to go into an impossible war and whether that was a rational decision.
KEY WORDS: Rationality, decision-making, belief system, conflict, perception.
