Rational Actors

Stephen Walt has a question:

What impression do people in other countries get when they observe the divorced-from-reality nature of contemporary American political discourse? American pundits like to talk about how "irrational" our adversaries are (usually when they are trying to scare us into spending more on weapons or launching preventive wars), but do they ever stop to think about how goofy and irrational we appear to be to others?

I don't think so. Because we've got nothing on, say, South Korea:

And they called Tom Delay "the hammer"....