'Offensive realism' and state motivations

One of the weak points of structural realist theories (or at least of Mearsheimer's, which has been the topic here recently) is their lack of a strong theory of state motivations. M. says states want more rather than less power, because that's the best way to be secure, or safe, in a world in which, according to M., "uncertainty about [other states'] intentions is unavoidable." (TGPP, p.31)  

In the body of the text of Tragedy of Great Power Politics, M. says that "the only assumption dealing with a specific motive that is common to all states says that their principal objective is to survive...." (p.32) But because "there are many possible causes of aggression" [what are they? he doesn't say] "and no state can be sure that another state is not motivated by one of them" (p.31), assuming that all states all the time want nothing more than survival is not warranted. Indeed, in an important end-note -- why this material is buried in an end-note rather than being in the text is rather perplexing -- M. makes clear that:

Security concerns alone cannot cause great powers to act aggressively. The possibility that at least one state might be motivated by non-security calculations is a necessary condition for offensive realism, as well as for any other structural theory of international politics that predicts security competition. (p.414 n.8)

Again, he doesn't say what these "non-security calculations" or motives are [except for a brief discussion on pp.46ff.], but this is nonetheless an important clarification. It's one that tends to get lost later in the text, however, for example at the beginning of ch.6 when he writes that "security considerations appear to have been the main driving force behind the aggressive policies of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union" in the twentieth century (p.170). This, of course, is in some tension with the statement in the end-note that "security concerns alone cannot cause great powers to act aggressively." It may not be a fatal logical contradiction; it's probably more the result of careless use of shorthand phrases (and, to be fair to M., I have quoted only part of the end-note here, not the whole thing). Still, someone who only reads the text of TGPP and doesn't read the notes is likely to be even more puzzled about this issue than someone who has read the notes.

Harknett and Yalcin, in their 2012 article "The Struggle for Autonomy," which I discussed in this post (where, I see, I also quoted the Mearsheimer end-note I've quoted here) recognized some of these problems about state motivation in realist theory and attempted to deal with the issue more satisfactorily than had been done previously. Although I was critical of their effort (not that I have gone back and carefully read that post), they should be given credit for having recognized and tried to address the problem.

Added later: For one useful discussion of this set of issues (and, of course, more thorough than the discussion in this post), see Jack Donnelly, Realism and International Relations (2000), ch.2, "Human Nature and State Motivation."

Robert Kagan's realist irrealism

From Kagan's piece (h/t S. Lemieux) in New Republic (which I've bookmarked for actual reading, as opposed to skimming, later):

In fact, the world “as it is” is a dangerous and often brutal place. There has been no transformation in human behavior or in international relations. In the twenty-first century, no less than in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, force remains the ultima ratio. The question, today as in the past, is not whether nations are willing to resort to force but whether they believe they can get away with it when they do. If there has been less aggression, less ethnic cleansing, less territorial conquest over the past 70 years, it is because the United States and its allies have both punished and deterred aggression, have intervened, sometimes, to prevent ethnic cleansing, and have gone to war to reverse territorial conquest. The restraint showed by other nations has not been a sign of human progress, the strengthening of international institutions, or the triumph of the rule of law. It has been a response to a global configuration of power that, until recently, has made restraint seem the safer course.

The first sentence is obviously correct: the world is indeed an often brutal place. The second sentence, particularly the second part of it, is  more questionable. And the portion in which the "U.S. and its allies" are credited with the decline of territorial conquest is very, very incomplete (to put it charitably), and w/r/t the GW Bush admin, downright weird. Territorial conquest (of the 19th/20th-cent-and-before sort) has declined because most states (I said "most" not "all") are no longer interested in conquering territory. It's not something their leaders think about and plan for. They know (they have learned) that invading other countries does not, as a rule, tend to solve their problems. That's a main reason why territorial conquest has declined since WW2, imho, though there are also other reasons, which I've written about here before.     

Yet another journal special issue on Realism

Int'l Politics, Nov. 2013
[link to table of contents]

Bull, Waltz, and the variety of grand theory

There was some interest in this earlier post, to which this post is a sort of follow-up. Its focus is two 'big' books, published around the same time, which are considered the touchstone works of, respectively, structural realism and the English School: Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics [TIP] (1979) and Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society [AS] (1977). A large amount has been written about both books and I won't try to canvass that literature. (I will mention, however, that the E-IR site has a downloadable collection of essays System, Society & the World: Exploring the English School [here].) I should note that this post says nothing new or startling and almost its entire contents would/should have been covered in a decent Intro to IR Theory course.     


Preliminaries

First, are TIP and AS even about the same subject? The question may seem odd; surely they are both about international politics (or world politics)? Bull writes at the outset that "this book is an inquiry into the nature of order in world politics" (AS, p.xi); Waltz writes that his aim is "to construct a theory of international politics that remedies the defects of present theories" (TIP, p.1). So Bull's focus, at first glance, might seem narrower: he says he is concerned "not with the whole of world politics but with one element in it: order" (AS, p.xi). However, the notion of 'order' he uses is general enough to undergird a discussion that, in its own way, is as sweeping as Waltz's. Both books are big-picture "grand theory," albeit very different examples of the genre. Waltz is self-consciously constructing a parsimonious theory that he claims meets "philosophy-of-science standards" (TIP, p.1), whereas Bull is not interested in constructing a theory of that kind (or, arguably, of any kind). Waltz's theory is a 'systems theory' in that it gives special importance to (one particular definition of) the structure of the international system as distinct from the 'units'; Bull's approach, while focusing on system-wide institutions that the 'units' themselves have created and through which they regulate their relations, is not a 'systems theory,' at least not in the Waltzian sense.

The past and continuing preoccupation of many IR theorists with the notions of 'system' and 'structure' has sparked a reaction by some (e.g., R. Jackson, The Global Covenant, p.31: "There is no international 'system' or 'structure' that exists and functions outside human decision, responsibility and control"), but the allure of 'structure' -- now often reformulated as 'networks' -- remains quite strong. (I won't address networks here, nor will I discuss the "practice turn" in IR theory, which perhaps has some connections to the English School.)


Waltz and "structure"

Structural realism is structural because it holds that the most important thing to know about international politics is the distribution of power across (or among) states, and this distribution is considered a  "structural" rather than a "unit-level" property. Thus, according to this way of thinking, the fact that the U.S. is the most militarily powerful country in the world is not considered a fact about, or a property of, the U.S.; rather, it is viewed as an aspect of the current system's structure. As Waltz put it: "How units stand in relation to one another, the way they are arranged or positioned, is not a property of the units. The arrangement of units is a property of the system." (TIP, p.80) "The distribution of capabilities is not a unit attribute, but rather a system-wide concept." (p.98)

Like many of his realist predecessors, Waltz stresses that the "ordering principle" of "anarchy," i.e., an absence of central authority or world government, means that states (the 'units') ultimately can look only to themselves to protect against (real or perceived) threats and to ensure their survival. The result, in his view, is a strong tendency for balances of power to form over and over, as states find it necessary to prevent the most powerful state in the system from becoming so powerful as to threaten their respective existences as independent entities. 

Thus two main "expectations" of Waltz's theory are that "balances of power recurrently form, and states tend to emulate the successful policies of others." (p.124)  A problem with the first of these expectations or predictions is that it doesn't seem to match up very well with fairly large swaths of history. Waltz tries, to some extent, to anticipate this objection by stressing the difficulty of testing theories, especially those which yield general rather than specific expectations, and by noting that "[b]ecause only a loosely defined and inconstant condition of balance is predicted [by the theory], it is difficult to say that any given distribution of power falsifies the theory." (p.124) He cautions in the opening chapter that "the rigor and complication of tests must be geared to the precision or to the generality of the expectations inferred from the theory." (p.16) He never says explicitly 'don't subject this theory to overly rigorous tests because its expectations are general not precise,' but he comes very close to saying that.

Another main point readers usually take away from Theory has to do with "the stability of a bipolar world," to quote the title of Waltz's 1964 article on that subject. Partly in the interest of keeping this post to a reasonable length, I won't address that aspect of the book here.   

Note (1): The degree to which the entire 'realist tradition' is 'structural' in its emphases is a debatable question. For one perspective on the issue, see J. Parent & J. Baron, "Elder Abuse: How the Moderns Mistreat Classical Realism" (International Studies Review, June 2011).

Note (2): Waltz's definition of 'structure' is obviously not the only one possible. Contrast, for example, the view that "international structure consists fundamentally in shared knowledge...." (A. Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics [STIP], p.31)


Bull and the "element of society"

Unlike Waltz, Bull doesn't have to worry, at least not explicitly, about theory construction and testing because he doesn't see himself as doing science (see the so-called 'second great debate'). So whereas Waltz begins with a chapter about what a theory is, Bull doesn't need one. A separate point is that Bull rejects the idea of "value-free" social inquiry (see AS, p.xv), but he doesn't elaborate much on this, at least not in meta-theoretical terms, in the book.

As is well known, Bull distinguishes between an international system, in which states interact enough that "the behaviour of each [is] a necessary element in the calculations of the other" (p.10), and an international society, in which states, "recognising certain common interests and perhaps some common values,...regard themselves as bound by certain rules in their dealings with one another...." (p.13) As is also well known, he aligns himself with what he labels (aptly or not) "the Grotian tradition," which emphasizes the "element of co-operation and regulated intercourse among states." (p.41) It coexists, in different degrees at different times, with 'Hobbesian' and 'Kantian' elements (respectively, "state of war" and "transnational solidarity and conflict"). (pp.41,51)

The heart of The Anarchical Society is Part 2, where five institutions -- the balance of power, international law, diplomacy, war, and the special role of the great powers -- are assessed in terms of their contributions to 'international order'. This is preceded by a chapter on "Order versus Justice." Quoting a passage from that chapter (p.97) will give a taste of Bull's style and also show how normative considerations are woven into his analysis:

...not only is order in world politics valuable, there is also a sense in which it is prior to other goals, such as that of justice. It is does not follow from this, however, that order is to be preferred to justice in any given case. In fact ideas of both order and justice enter into the value systems, the justificatory or rhetorical stock-in-trade of all actors in world politics. The advocate of revolutionary justice looks forward to a time when a new order will consolidate the gains of the revolution. The proponent of order takes up his position partly because the existing order is, from his point of view, morally satisfactory, or not so unsatisfactory as to warrant its disturbance. The question of order versus justice will always be considered by the parties concerned in relation to the merits of a particular case.

For Waltz, the international system is a case of "order without an orderer and of organizational effects where formal organization is lacking." (TIP, p.89) To elucidate these characteristics Waltz looks to "microeconomic theory" (ibid.), in which actors' normative beliefs or commitments are basically irrelevant. For Bull, by contrast, actors' values influence how they behave, which in turn influences system-level outcomes. 

It's sometimes overlooked that Bull in AS sees international society as only one element of international politics. If you're a grad student writing a comprehensive exam, the statement that the English School "treat[s] the international system as a society governed by shared norms" (to quote Wendt, STIP, p.31) will get you through. However, in a brief section called "The Limitations of International Society" Bull writes that the element of international society "is always in competition with the elements of a state of war and of transnational solidarity or conflict" and thus "it is always erroneous to interpret international events as if international society were the sole or the dominant element." (p.51) The word "always" here seems too strong; why foreclose the possibility that there may be periods in which the element of international society is "dominant"? Whether that is the case today is a question best left for another occasion.

Gilbert on Kennan

In a blog post, Prof. Alan Gilbert of the Univ. of Denver praises Obama's recent speech on counter-terrorism policy, drones, and Guantanamo as a "turning point," while noting (among other things) that it should have come earlier and contending that presidents never do anything decent without mass pressure from below.

Toward the beginning of his remarks Gilbert, referencing his 1999 book Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy?, comments briefly and in passing on George Kennan:

In most foreign policy discussion and international relations as an academic field, realist theories - both official ones used in making/apologizing for American foreign policy and more sophisticated versions employed in the critical study of American errors and crimes, even systematic ones - abstain from the outset from looking at the consequences [of U.S. foreign policy] for democracy at home....

For instance, the leading post-World War II realist, George Kennan in American Diplomacy, pits sober, professional diplomacy against democratic crusades like Woodrow Wilson's in World War I.... But in the 1984 edition, responding to the disastrous American aggression in Vietnam, Kennan noticed the war complex, "our military-industrial addiction." He shifted to a more democratic, common-good oriented view without naming the shift.

Kennan opposed the Vietnam War from the start mainly on pragmatic grounds (he testified against it in congressional hearings in 1966), and Vietnam probably did influence his thinking.  There are tensions in Kennan's views deriving partly from the way in which moral considerations are often kept unacknowledged or beneath the surface, with the biggest exception to this being his increasingly passionate writings, starting in the 1980s, about nuclear weapons. But I think Kennan remained ambivalent, at best, about democracy until the end of his life. These tensions (or contradictions) run through much of his career, complicating the idea of an un-named shift "to a more democratic, common-good oriented view." Still, it is interesting that some of the language in American Diplomacy, originally published in 1951, changed in the 1984 edition.

P.s. A minor point: "One of the leading post-WWII realists" would have been better than "the leading," since Morgenthau, Niebuhr, and Kennan are usually given roughly equal billing as the key figures of post-1945 American Realism, with Arnold Wolfers, John Herz, and some others not far behind. (Generationally speaking, Waltz and Kissinger come after this group.)

Added later: It's possible to put a somewhat more uncomfortable (for lack of a better word) gloss on Kennan's position on Vietnam, which would note that, in addition to his (correct) judgment that Vietnam was not a vital U.S. interest, he just didn't care much about the Third World (as it was then called) and didn't think non-Europeans (or non-descendants of Europeans) had much capacity for self-government. But going into that would require another post.

[To find previous mentions of Kennan on this blog, type "Kennan" into the search box in the upper-left corner.]

Waltz and his legacy: a few reflections

I feel I should add my two cents to the torrent of IR-blogospheric comment on the late Kenneth Waltz, if only to justify my existence as a blogger. I never met Waltz[*] but like virtually every student of international relations I have read his two key books (not the third one). This post is basically a spur-of-the-moment thing, not the product of sustained thought, and it should be read with that in mind.

Man, the State and War (1959), hereafter MSW, and Theory of International Politics (1979), hereafter TIP, are rather different kinds of books, even if they both endorse a "structural" view of international politics. MSW is an analysis of what Great Thinkers in the (mostly) Western tradition have said about the causes of war. The book famously sorts these writers into three camps: those who locate the causes of war in human nature ("the first image"), in the characteristics of individual states ("the second image"), or in the 'anarchical' (meaning, essentially, no-world-government) structure of the international system ("the third image"). Waltz concludes that the third-image view is the most convincing, famously declaring that (to paraphrase him) wars occur because there is nothing to prevent them.

MSW is a very perceptive book that treats a subject of intrinsic interest, and for that reason it will continue to be read. But apart from the fact that (some) students are still required to read it, I doubt it exercises all that much influence over the field today. Few Ph.D. candidates in political science who "do" International Relations will write a dissertation these days about what this or that Great Thinker has said about the causes of war. Such dissertations are still written but I think they are rare, especially in the United States. Someone who is interested in both political/social theory and international relations is more likely nowadays to do what might be called critical disciplinary history (which is, for example, what Daniel Levine's book Recovering International Relations is, or so I gather from hearing him speak about it on one occasion before it was published). Disciplinary history is, obviously, about the development of the discipline or the field of International Relations; it is rather inward-focused. Waltz's MSW is not disciplinary history in this sense. That is not at all to criticize MSW, merely to note the difference.

The other aspect of MSW perhaps worth mentioning is that the phenomenon with which it was concerned, namely traditional interstate war, is now increasingly rare. When MSW was published in 1959, the Korean War had ended only six years before, World War II only fourteen years before. The Cold War was in full swing and there was no guarantee that it would not become hot. Today, although wars are, unfortunately, still with us, traditional interstate wars have become unusual events (the last really big one was the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s), and wars directly between two or more great powers are unheard of. Uncovering the causes of interstate war had an urgency in the 1950s which, at least arguably, it no longer has. The 'hot topic' now is civil war, as will be apparent to anyone who glances through the list of political science dissertations completed in 2012 (in the U.S.) that was recently published in PS. I am not saying MSW is passé or no longer relevant; it will always be 'relevant' because its subject is of intrinsic interest, meaning it has inherent interest regardless of what is going on in the world, just as the study of history has intrinsic interest regardless of what is going on in the world. I'm simply observing that the focus of attention in the field seems to have shifted to other things.

Turning now to Theory of International Politics. The reverberations of TIP are still being felt in the field in a much more direct way than those of MSW. The emphasis in TIP on the "shaping" influence of structure -- meaning, in essence, the distribution of capabilities (power) among states under anarchy -- is still a starting point for many, though by no means all, scholars of international politics. However, TIP has come under several different kinds of criticism since it was published -- in fact, too many to catalog exhaustively here. A sampling: Ruggie charged that Waltz in TIP ignored questions of historical change and transition between different kinds of state system, something the English School had always been more attuned to, while Wendt criticized Waltz for not seeing that 'power' and 'interest' are mostly made up of ideas and that the effects of power accordingly depend on the distribution of ideas in the system. Other writers threw doubt on the notion of 'anarchy' and the states-under-anarchy model. And finally (for the non-exhaustive purposes of this post), many have criticized what is perhaps the central substantive proposition of TIP, namely the argument that balances of power recurrently form and that, in Waltz's words, "if there is any distinctively political theory of international politics, balance-of-power theory is it." The other major aspect of TIP was Waltz's views on what 'theory' is; his epistemological-methodological position continues to be both influential and controversial, but I will pass over it here.

Despite all the criticisms, TIP will remain required reading for students, if only so that they can follow the flood of critiques it unleashed. The  appearance as recently as 2011 of a collection of essays about Waltz's work, Realism and World Politics (ed. Ken Booth), suggests that Waltz's writings will continue to generate interest and discussion for quite some time to come and will continue to be seen as canonical works in the field.

(Note: Post edited slightly after initial posting.)

Added later: Waltz's 1988 APSA presidential address, "Nuclear Myths and Political Realities," as published in the Sept. 1990 issue of APSR, is available here (pdf).
----
*I did hear him speak on one occasion but that doesn't amount to 'meeting'. 

References for reason-of-state post

These references go with this post (most but not all were cited in the post).

D.A. Bell, "Poker Lessons from Richelieu," Foreign Affairs (March/April 2012) [link]

R. Bireley, The Counter-Reformation Prince (1990)

R. Briggs, Early Modern France (2nd ed. 1998)

J. Donnelly, "Twentieth-Century Realism," in T. Nardin and D. Mapel, eds., Traditions of International Ethics (1992)

M. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace (1997)

M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978 (2007), ed. M. Senellart, tr. G. Burchell

A. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (1977)

S. Hoffmann, Duties Beyond Borders (1981)

R. Jackson, The Global Covenant (2000)

D.L. Jensen, ed., Machiavelli: Cynic, Patriot, or Political Scientist? (1960)

N. Machiavelli, The Prince (1532), tr. H. Mansfield (2nd ed. 1998)

F. Meinecke, Machiavellism, tr. D. Scott (1957)

C. Nederman, "Niccolò Machiavelli," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), ed. E. Zalta [link]

A. Wolfers, "Statesmanship and Moral Choice" (1949), reprinted in Discord and Collaboration (1962)

Reason of state and the ethics of statecraft

When was the last time a politician used the phrase "reason of state"? I'm not sure, but it must be quite a while. Phrases such as "the national interest" displaced "reason of state" in leaders' vocabularies long ago. But a brief historical look at reason of state may be interesting, at least (if you'll pardon the tautology) to those who are interested in this sort of thing.

The statesman most associated with the notion of raison d'état is Richelieu, who sided with Protestant princes/polities in the Thirty Years War, breaking the link between religion and foreign policy. Richelieu's main concern was to counter the Habsburgs, though not necessarily to defeat them: according to one historian, "French policy aimed to restore a balance in Germany, not to bring about a Protestant triumph" (R. Briggs, Early Modern France, 2d ed. 1998, pp.102-103). At any rate, as David Bell wrote last year in reviewing a recent biography of Richelieu, the Cardinal "was hardly the first European statesman to place national interest above moral or religious imperatives...."  No doubt that's true, but by now Richelieu's name is so firmly linked with reason of state that the connection is probably unshakeable.

While Richelieu is the politician most associated with reason of state, the writer most associated with the notion is Machiavelli, even though he never used the phrase. As Michel Foucault observed in one of his 1978 lectures at the Collège de France, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debates about reason of state were "conducted through" Machiavelli; the invocation of his name became, to some extent, a signaling device. In the debates of the time, opponents of Richelieu used the accusation of Machiavellism to signal that the lodestar of policy was the ruler's (in this case Louis XIII's) "whims or interests," not -- what reason of state more properly should have denoted -- an "autonomous and specific art of government," as Foucault put it. Writers more favorable to raison d'état were divided, some distancing themselves from the charge of Machiavellism, others praising the author of The Prince (see Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, trans. G. Burchell, pp.243, 245).

Controversies and polemics invoking Machiavelli began not long after the posthumous publication of The Prince in 1532, five years after his death. In 1559 the Church put all of Machiavelli's books on the Index of condemned works. Before that the English cardinal Reginald Pole had concluded that The Prince was devilish; Pole "issued a warning against Machiavelli" in his Apology for Emperor Charles V, which was "written in the late 1530s but not published for over two centuries" (R. Bireley,The Counter-Reformation Prince, 1990, p.15).

Some Protestant writers also fiercely criticized Machiavelli. A key event in this connection was the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (August 1572) in which several thousand Protestants were killed in Paris (and more in the following days in other parts of France). Many Protestants blamed Catherine de Medici, an Italian and a Catholic and the French king Charles lX's mother, for the massacre, though she intended not a mass killing but "the elimination of a relatively small group" of Protestant leaders (Briggs, Early Modern France, pp.21-22). However, Catherine's intentions were probably unclear to everyone outside her inner circle.
 
The Huguenot lawyer and writer Innocent Gentillet penned a Contre-Machiavel or Discourse against Machiavelli (the full title is longer; it was written in Latin in 1571 [thus actually before the St. Bartholomew Massacre], then published in French in 1576 and in English in 1602 [or 1608, depending on which catalog entry one goes with]). Gentillet linked Catherine de Medici to "Italian statecraft" as allegedly exemplified by Machiavelli. Gentillet's book, as Robert Bireley notes, "was the first attempt at a systematic refutation of Machiavelli and was to have a far-reaching influence on Catholic as well as Protestant authors."  Interestingly, Gentillet referred to The Prince as the "Koran of the courtiers" (Bireley, Counter-Reformation Prince, p.17). 

As mentioned above, Machiavelli did have defenders. There was an attempt or two to argue that his views were compatible with the Bible (see Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p.245), and today at least a couple of scholars argue that Machiavelli was not hostile to Christianity (see C. Nederman's entry on Machiavelli in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, here [with a good bibliography]). A considered view is that "Machiavelli's whole work is based on the contrast between ordinary Christian ethics and the ethics of statecraft...not an 'immoral' code of behavior, except by Christian standards, but a different code of morality, which wills the means to the noble end of civic survival" (S. Hoffmann, Duties Beyond Borders (1981), p.23). And "[r]ather than an abstract sovereign institution, the state, for Machiavelli, was nothing less -- or more -- than the government, the prince himself at home and abroad" (M. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace (1997), p.97).

One might argue that the notion of raison d'état lives on, albeit in sometimes very attenuated form, in two ways: first, through the mushy idea of the national interest; second, through the view, famously stated by Weber in "Politics as a Vocation," that politicians must always weigh the likely consequences of their actions rather than just acting in accord with a principle regardless of likely results -- though in this second case the connection to reason of state is debatable.

Following the Weberian line, various writers have argued that the ethics of statecraft is "situational." As Robert Jackson puts it (in The Global Covenant (2000), pp.135-36), "scholars of international ethics should...lay open the conduct of statespeople to appropriate moral standards" but also should take into account the circumstances in which that conduct occurs. Stated in this general way, the position leaves open the questions of which moral standards apply in a given case and which circumstances are the more or less relevant ones. But those questions are probably best debated and answered in the context of specific decisions. (Note: I don't entirely agree with R. Jackson that the ethics of statecraft is "conservative more than progressive" (ibid., p.139) but won't pursue this here.)

P.s. A post on this subject shouldn't neglect to mention Friedrich Meinecke's 1924 book The Idea of Reason of State in Modern History (later translated into English under the title Machiavellism).

Added later: The chronology in this post, I've sort of belatedly realized, goes in reverse: it starts with the 17th cent. (Thirty Years' War), then goes back to the 16th cent. (French Wars of Religion). That's probably not the best way to have organized it, but you know, you get what you pay for here... ;)  

A new version of structural realism

In their recent article "The Struggle for Autonomy: A Realist Structural Theory of International Relations," International Studies Review v.14, Dec. 2012, pp.499-521 [gated; abstract here], Richard Harknett and Hasan Yalcin propose "a new variant" of structural realism (p.499). 

Harknett and Yalcin (H&Y) replace the struggle for power (or the struggle for power and peace, as Morgenthau's famous subtitle has it) with a 'struggle for autonomy'. Rather than assuming that states always want power or security, H&Y say that the only motive that can be derived from structure -- i.e. from 'anarchy' (lack of a central authority) and the distribution of capabilities -- is a desire "to possess the capacity to act in a sustained manner that preserves and enhances [units'] capacity to act into the future -- they merely want to remain autonomous" (p.506; italics omitted). However, if units (states or non-state actors) don't survive they can't remain autonomous, a point to which I'll return.

Before getting into the weeds, I'll try to give a brief overview of H&Y's approach. Some of their points, when put simply, seem cogent clear enough, if debatable. A problem with the article, though, is that the points are usually not put simply but wrapped up in verbiage and often inelegant sentences. (In some -- not all -- scholarly IR journals, there seems to be no copy-editing to speak of, which means that stylistically everything is left to the authors.)

H&Y argue that states respond to shifts in the distribution of power by adjusting their behavior, based on a calculation of what they want and what they think it's possible to get. When one state has a much larger share of power than all the rest, the other states will not embark on a likely fruitless revisionist quest to change the system. Rather, they will maneuver within it, seeking to enhance their freedom of action without directly challenging the leading state. (This, incidentally, is close to the situation Stephen Walt describes in Taming American Power, a book H&Y don't cite.) Conversely, when the distribution of capabilities is more even, states, H&Y say, will seek to advance their positions more directly and less subtly, leading to the likelihood of intensified security dilemmas and increasing the chances of major war. Put in this way, the argument is plausible enough to be tested, at least in a loose sense, through historical inquiry. The authors don't undertake such a test, though they do have a brief section at the end applying their theory to the Cold War, which they split into three periods characterized, they say, by different distributions of power between the U.S. and USSR.  

The authors distinguish their approach from the extant varieties of structural realism, i.e. defensive and offensive realism, on the grounds that those approaches supposedly assume invariant state motivations (i.e., states always seek to maximize either security or power). According to H&Y, both defensive and offensive realism have erred by taking motives as given, rather than seeing motives as shaped by structure. They write:

[S]tructure shapes not only behaviors but also identities and orientations of agents. In offensive and defensive realist theories, state identities and motivations are defined and assumed independently from the shaping power of structural factors. States are taken to have a specific motivation whatever the constraints and opportunities of structural conditions. Structure does not affect the survival motivation in neorealist theories of IR, which assume that even if there is no direct threat to state survival, it is a survival instinct that is driving action. In contrast, in the structural autonomy theory developed here, units rearrange not only their behaviors, but also their identities and motivations in response to the distribution of power (p.502; italics in original).

The description of structural realist theories in this passage is not, I think, entirely accurate. There is more going on in offensive realism than "a survival instinct." True, Mearsheimer does write that "the only assumption dealing with a specific motive that is common to all states says that their principal objective is to survive" (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p.32), but in an endnote (p.414, n.8) he writes: "Security concerns alone cannot cause great powers to act aggressively. The possibility that at least one state might be motivated by non-security calculations is a necessary condition for offensive realism, as well as for any other structural theory of international politics that predicts security competition."

H&Y insist that "one could assume a survival motivation" only in "an environment with no opportunity but full of threats" (p.509). The problem here, however, is that the word "motivation" has more than one meaning. "Motive," according to the dictionary I have at hand, can mean "some inner drive, impulse, intention, etc. that causes a person to do something or act in a certain way," but "motive" can also mean simply a "goal." And units can have a goal of surviving regardless of whether the environment is threatening or non-threatening. Indeed, as I mentioned before, a unit that doesn't survive obviously can't remain autonomous. In this sense autonomy presupposes survival. Now it is true that the rate of state death in the present international system is very low and thus survival is not often a motive in the causative meaning of "motive"; but survival can remain a goal even when the desire to survive is not an immediate driver of behavior. H&Y seem wrong to assert that the "traditional realist-ascribed motive of survival implies a logic in which helpless states would eventually require the delegation of state autonomy to a higher authority in a fearful environment populated by units wishing for survival" (p.509). Where do they get the notion that states in a "self-help" system are or may become "helpless"? It doesn't follow.

H&Y proceed to distinguish between "diffuse" and "concentrated" power structures. In diffuse power structures, a category that includes both bipolarity and multipolarity, gaps in power between units are relatively small; in concentrated power structures, as one might guess, power gaps are large and one unit is clearly more powerful than the rest. Diffuse structures are more war-prone, they argue, and against Waltz they maintain that bipolar systems (and balanced multipolar systems) are not more stable than the alternatives. They write:

In what in Waltzian terms would be considered a balanced system, states will feel less threatened (or more secure), but this does not translate into behavior promoting stability. Since the primary motivation is not security (or survival) but autonomy, "balanced" systems will not necessarily be stable, but rather have strong structurally induced incentives to change the power structure (and the relative distributions within it) to gain autonomy. The Cold War behavior of the two superpowers became more change-oriented during periods in which their power was more "balanced" with each seeking a breakout capacity via military technology, additional allies, exploitation of minor states (the competition over the Third World), or expanded realms of competition (the Space Race). The structure, itself, induced intense change-oriented policy, not stability-seeking on the part of the superpowers. (p.514)

This is interesting, but there is at least one problem with the argument in this section: H&Y maintain that a diffuse power structure decreases autonomy ("the very existence of other actors with equal capabilities decreases the level of autonomy for all" -- p.514), but it's not clear why this should be the case given their definition of autonomy, quoted above, as "the capacity to act in a sustained manner that preserves and enhances...capacity to act into the future" (p.506). What seems to happen in this part of the argument is that H&Y take autonomy to mean the degree of a unit's freedom of action, but that's not how they define autonomy at the beginning of the piece.   

***

Reading "The Struggle for Autonomy" raises, among other questions, the issue of what is the most promising direction for realist (or realist-inflected) theorizing about international politics. In their first footnote the authors say that "neo-classical realists with their multi-causal and multi-level frameworks are increasing the number of factors across the realist paradigm. This is a degenerative process from a structuralist perspective."  Yet neoclassical realism emerged precisely because structural realism is limited both in what it can explain and how well it can explain it. Waltz's main substantive generalization -- that given states-under-anarchy there is a strong tendency toward balancing -- has received sustained and quite persuasive criticism, and Mearsheimer's view that supposed uncertainty about intentions pushes great powers to act aggressively (albeit calculatedly) to each other is, if anything, even more questionable. Harknett and Yalcin think the problem, in effect, is that Waltz and Mearsheimer are not structural enough. But is this indeed the problem, or does it rather lie in structural realism's inability to take into account factors that matter -- domestic politics, regime type, ideology, bargaining, to name several? Parsimony is not desirable if parsimonious theories can't explain important outcomes.

Neoclassical realists bring in perceptions and domestic politics not because they want a "hybrid" theory for its own sake but in order to explain outcomes more satisfactorily. Even sticking with H&Y's example of the Cold War, as Lobell et al. observe (see the introduction to this edited volume) the system's structure by itself can't explain why the U.S. after 1945 opted for containment rather than "competitive cooperation" with the USSR. (In the interest of keeping this post shorter than a mini-treatise, I will not go into H&Y's discussion of the Cold War in detail. Suffice to say it is open to criticism.)

In short, it's far from clear, at least to me, that a "refinement of structural realism" (H&Y, p.499) in an even more structural direction is the way to go. To be more direct, I think it's not.  Those interested in these matters can of course read the article and reach their own conclusions.

Added later: There is another issue (well, lots of them but one I should have mentioned): The decreased likelihood of major war in the present period may have very much less to do with structural factors (i.e. with the "concentrated" power structure) and much more to do with  long-term trends and factors that are not structural. Since I've discussed this fairly extensively elsewhere on the blog (see the "decline of war" label under topics), I won't harp on it further here.

Added still later: For Waltz on the survival motive, see Theory of International Politics, pp.91-2.    

Dreadful (?) duo

History 89h. Henry Kissinger: Statecraft in Theory and Practice.

That's the title of an undergraduate seminar being taught by Niall Ferguson at Harvard this fall. A friend of mine described the combination of professor and subject as "unfathomably loathsome" (your mileage may vary, or it may not).

The course description in the catalog reads:

As National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger was the architect of the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, of the "opening" to China, and of the effort to salvage "peace with honor" in Vietnam. Yet Kissinger should be understood as a scholar as well as a statesman. Using selections from his writings, this seminar will assess Kissinger in his own terms and in the context of modern international history.

Who's going to take the course? Obviously some history students and maybe, I'd guess, some political science majors -- or, to use the school's official lingo, Government concentrators. Enrollment is limited to 15.

Although I can't abide Ferguson's politics (and cf. the recent justified outrage over his Newsweek piece), I have no idea what Ferguson is like as a teacher. If he welcomes a range of views and doesn't try to push his own line on students, the course might be, at least, non-terrible. (It might even be good.) If he does something else, well...

P.s. What if -- probably a very unlikely scenario -- Ferguson were co-teaching this with Stanley Hoffmann? Now that might have been really interesting.

'Human nature' is back

Reader [hereafter R] : What do you mean, "human nature is back"? Has it been on vacation?

LFC: Yes and no. For a while, it was not cricket in parts of the social sciences to talk about human nature, and to some extent this is still true. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, two evolutionary psychologists (who happen also to be married, to each other, I mean) got so perturbed about this some years ago that they began referring to the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM), by which they meant, among other things, a model that neglected 'human nature'. E.O. Wilson picked up the cudgel, taking much of social science to task in his book Consilience and predicting that eventually social science would disappear, would be absorbed into the natural sciences, and we'd be left with only the natural sciences and the humanities.

R: I shudder to think how that would go down with all the political scientists who are tearing their hair out at The Monkey Cage about the possible cutoff in National Science Foundation support for political science.

LFC: Quite. But that doesn't mean Wilson was right. I think he went somewhat overboard in Consilience myself.

R: Back to the main topic, please, whatever it is.

LFC: Ah yes. Well, Cosmides & Tooby should take a peek at what's happening in some corners of International Relations (IR) theory. It's not for the most part evo psych, to be sure, but in recent years there's been a lot of work on emotions and IR. And the latest issue of Int'l Studies Review has an article by Ty Solomon, "Human Nature and the Limits of the Self: Hans Morgenthau on Love and Power," which harks back to a piece Morgenthau wrote for Commentary in the early '60s in which he argued that love and power are both efforts to escape "existential loneliness." Morgenthau's "underexplored thoughts on these issues," according to Solomon, "are crucial for more fully comprehending his seminal critique of the modern liberal, rational subject." (p.215)

R: But how does all that fit in with the Morgenthau of the later 1960s, the opponent of the Vietnam War, advocate of civil rights, and speaker of truth to power? Don't M's political writings from later in the decade presuppose that "the modern liberal, rational subject," despite its/his/her limits, is capable at least of responding to appeals to reason and acting to improve the world, in however partial a way?

LFC: Good questions. But I want to stay with the human nature point. Solomon mentions Robert Schuett's 2010 book on Freud and realism (Political Realism, Freud, and Human Nature in International Relations), which is also reviewed later in the same issue of the journal. The subtitle of Schuett's book is "The Resurrection of the Realist Man."

R: Hmm. This sounds somewhat reactionary, doesn't it? Realist Man [sic]? Have we just tossed several decades of IR feminist theory out the window?

LFC: I had to read some Freud many years ago, and I tend to the view that Freud's work is weakest when it's most speculative and when he's most openly doing social theory. I remember a casual conversation in which, fresh from writing an intemperate undergraduate paper on Civilization and Its Discontents, I denounced it as a terrible book. My interlocutor, a grad student, said cuttingly "you wish you could have written it." Well, I would not make such a sophomoric (and I was in fact a sophomore at the time) remark today. Still, Civilization and Its Discontents is not high on my list of subtle, nuanced works.

R: I don't care what you said in a college dining hall in 1977. You haven't answered the question about Morgenthau. You haven't answered the question about feminist theory.

LFC: What am I, an answer machine? This is a blog, not a PhD seminar. Go figure out your own answers.

R: ***!***#!!

LFC: Well, at least I gave you the last word. Sort of.

A puzzle (maybe)

This is a 'thinking aloud' type of post, but that's one of the things blogs are for, isn't it?

Here's the question: What explains the apparent disjunction disconnect between global downward trends in armed conflict, on the one hand, and U.S. military and foreign policy, on the other?

It's fairly clear that the amount of armed conflict in the world, while not negligible, has been declining for a few decades (though the decline may have leveled off in the last several years). Joshua Goldstein judges that "[d]espite...complexities and some ups and downs, the year 2010 was probably the most peaceful, in terms of battle deaths relative to population, in the history of the world." (Winning the War on War, p.247) John Mueller and Christopher Fettweis, among others, argue that great-power war is either obsolete or on the verge of becoming so, an argument that has to be taken quite seriously in my opinion.

Yet the U.S. continues to act, in many respects, as if the world has not really become much more peaceful than it was in, say, 1950. Yes, the numbers of U.S. soldiers in Europe and Asia have been reduced somewhat in recent years, but the U.S. continues to have alliances or other security agreements with numerous countries, military bases all over the world, thousands of troops still in Europe and Asia (primarily Japan and Korea), and aircraft carrier groups able to be dispatched to anywhere in the world. Plus the U.S. still has some tactical nuclear weapons in Europe (I actually wasn't aware of this until seeing a journal article about it the other day) and also has invested in regional missile defense systems (or, in the case of the Persian Gulf states, sold Patriot missiles to them) ostensibly as protection from an Iranian missile threat which seems to have been overestimated. Moreover, the U.S. is executing what appears to be either an encirclement or a balancing (depending on one's view) maneuver against China, via the creation of a new or refurbished 'strategic partnership' with Australia, the selling of jets to Indonesia, etc. It is true that the Pentagon, faced with budget constraints, is planning to shrink the size of the Army and Marines somewhat and also, for example, is having to reconsider its plans for a major build-up on Guam, but this does not basically change the U.S.'s global military position.

So, given -- at least for the sake of argument -- that the world is more peaceful and less dangerous than it has been in a long time, why don't U.S. actions in the military/security arena seem to reflect this reality?

Some possible answers:

(1) U.S. policy is simply irrational.

(2) U.S. policy-makers don't think great-power war is obsolete and are generally stuck in an outmoded mindset.

(3) The U.S. global military posture is driven by domestic institutional forces, i.e., the power of the Pentagon and large arms manufacturers to influence Congress and the importance (or at least perceived importance) of the 'military-industrial complex' to the health of the U.S. economy.

(4) U.S. policy is a holdover from the Cold War. Elaboration: With the dissolution of the USSR and the resulting absence of a true peer competitor, the U.S. should have substantially cut back on its global military presence and commitments, according to both one strand of realist logic and 'ordinary' logic. This is what John Mearsheimer, to cite one prominent example, predicted. It didn't happen: there was some retrenchment but nothing like what might have been expected. (And NATO, far from declaring its mission accomplished and disbanding, expanded.) The reason was perhaps a combination of vested institutional interests, path dependence, and plain old inertia.

(5) Al-Qaeda done it. According to this view, had it not been for the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent decade-long reaction or overreaction (Afghanistan, Iraq, drones, etc.), the U.S. global military presence would be much smaller today than it is.

(6) U.S. global military dominance is supporting the U.S. global economic position (or what remains of it).

With the exception of #1 (which basically evades the question), I'm inclined to think there may be something to all of these answers, though I'm also a bit skeptical of #6. I would put the most weight on #3 and #4. But, as we say in the blogosphere, your mileage may vary.

Update: Another explanation for the puzzle might be that Americans are "an unusually warlike people," as Stephen Rosen argued in a 2009 article. I never got around to reading (as opposed to skimming) this, but the link will take you there if you're interested.

The end of "big realism"?

From Dan Nexon's review (in Perspectives on Politics, Dec. 2011) of Barkin's Realist Constructivism and Glaser's Rational Theory of International Politics:

...Glaser's book occupies an important Janus-faced position. It stands as a (possibly definitive) coda for a series of debates that dominated the security subfield in the 1980s and 1990s. In its self-conscious transcendence of realism and presentation as a strategic-choice theory (albeit with realist roots), it may reflect the beginning of the end for "Big Realism" as a substantively distinctive mode of inquiry.

By "big realism" here, I assume Nexon means 'grand theory' of the last 30 years à la Waltz, Gilpin, Mearsheimer, and some others.

For other reactions to Glaser's book, see the video of the APSA roundtable which I linked in this post.

Abstract of the day

(That's a variation on Quote of the Day, in case you were wondering)

Sebastian Rosato and John Schuessler, "A Realist Foreign Policy for the United States," Perspectives on Politics (Dec. 2011). I haven't read the article, but here's the abstract:

What kind of policy can the United States pursue that ensures its security while minimizing the likelihood of war? We describe and defend a realist theory of foreign policy to guide American decision makers. Briefly, the theory says that if they want to ensure their security, great powers such as the United States should balance against other great powers. They should also take a relaxed view toward developments involving minor powers and, at most, should balance against hostile minor powers that inhabit strategically important regions of the world. We then show that had the great powers followed our theory's prescriptions, some of the most important wars of the past century might have been averted. Specifically, the world wars might not have occurred, and the United States might not have gone to war in either Vietnam or Iraq. In other words, realism as we conceive it offers the prospect of security without war. At the same time, we also argue that if the United States adopts an alternative liberal foreign policy, this is likely to result in more, rather than fewer, wars. We conclude by offering some theoretically-based proposals about how US decision makers should deal with China and Iran.

Stop the presses!! Did you know that if the great powers had balanced against Nazi Germany before '39, WW2 might have been averted?! Film at 11!! (or maybe that should be: Newsreel at 11!)

Ok, I'm sorry (sort of) for the sarcasm, but there were reasons -- very understandable ones in the historical context -- that there wasn't more balancing in the '30s. (Maybe the authors make that point and there wasn't space to put it in the abstract.) And I know, it's unfair to dump on an article solely on the basis of the abstract. (Blogging means having to say you're sorry ... again and again...)

The question at the beginning is, to be serious, a good one: "What kind of policy can the United States pursue that ensures its security while minimizing the likelihood of war?"

Here is, arguably, a better question: "In a world in which the likelihood of great-power war is vanishingly small, how should the U.S. reorient its foreign and defense policy to: (1) take account of that reality, (2) stop acting as if it's 1947 instead of 2011, and (3) generally come to its senses?"

Question for Stephen Walt: Who is a "genuine" realist?

Stephen Walt, in a recent post at his blog, applauds (with some qualifications) Peter Beinart for endorsing offshore balancing as a U.S. strategy, but bemoans the fact that Beinart fails to mention the various scholars (e.g., Mearsheimer, Layne, Porter, Walt himself, etc.) who have been advocating offshore balancing for the last decade or more.

Walt is upset by Beinart's omission because he claims it contributes to the continuing "marginalization" of realists in U.S. foreign policy debates. Walt seems to think that realists represent a distinctive position in those debates, being less inclined to "hubristic" interventionism than necons on the one hand and liberal internationalists on the other. Walt says that there are no "genuine" realists writing for any major media outlet in the United States. I guess he must not consider Kissinger, who writes (or least use to write) quite regular op-eds in the Wash. Post, a "genuine" realist.

Walt would better off, IMHO, if he advocated his preferred policies -- with many of which I'm largely in agreement -- without trying to appropriate the label "realism" exclusively for himself and those with whom he agrees. This muddies the waters without clarifying much and also distorts the disciplinary history of International Relations, a fairly cursory glance at which makes clear that there is far more encompassed by "realism" than is dreamt of in Walt's philosophy. Realism has meant different things to different people in different contexts, and for Walt to effectively narrow its meaning to "people in the U.S. academy who agree with me about the merits of a particular grand strategy [i.e., offshore balancing] " is itself arguably somewhat hubristic. Notice how he sneaks in the adjective "genuine" to qualify "realist". Presumably a genuine realist is someone who agrees with Walt and a false realist is someone who doesn't.

The maxims and phrases typically associated with realism, and especially its emphasis on the national interest, are so vague that they can accommodate a range of policy views. George Kennan, Walter Lippmann, Dean Acheson, Reinhold Neibuhr, and Hans Morgenthau were all realists, and as Joel Rosenthal has argued (Righteous Realists, 1991) they might have shared certain assumptions, e.g. that power brings with it responsibility (itself not the most specific of notions), but they certainly did not always agree on U.S. foreign policy. Walt's effort to associate realism with a particular set of policy prescriptions ignores that realism, like several other 'isms' one might mention, is too slippery and elusive a designation to be tied down in this way. I don't object to Walt's calling himself a realist ("a realist in an ideological age," as his blog's masthead proclaims). I object to his implication that he is a genuine realist and that others who might want to use the label, but who might disagree with him on some policy matter or other, are not genuine realists. This risks inviting fruitless discussions and detracting attention from the very policy prescriptions Walt wants to advance.

P.s. To further illustrate my point about the protean character of realism, consider this description, from a publisher's recent catalog, of The Realist Case for Global Reform, by William Scheuerman (whose book on Morgenthau, by the way, I think is very good). According to the Polity Books catalog description, Scheuerman reveals "a neglected tradition of Progressive Realism" and "concludes by considering how Progressive Realism informs the foreign policies of US President Barack Obama." So the President who one scholar (Walt) considers too influenced by liberal internationalism, another scholar (Scheuerman) sees as influenced by a version of realism! I rest my case (for now, at least).

Is Walt right about China?

Short answer: I don't think so. (Hat tip here for drawing my attention to Walt's post.)

Elaboration: Walt says that if China were to establish a secure sphere of influence in its region, that would free up China to devote more attention to the stirring up of trouble in the western hemisphere. It could forge closer ties with countries in the U.S. backyard and ratchet up tensions. Remember the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Etc. I'm not convinced by this notion that the U.S. must prevent any other great power from achieving a regional sphere of influence. (Walt reaches back for authority to Kennan's American Diplomacy but a more recent statement of this view is in Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.)

In my view, this is the most misleading paragraph in Walt's post:

... this logic reflects the realist view that it is to U.S. advantage to keep Eurasia divided among many separate powers, and to help prevent any single power from establishing the same sort of regional hegemony that the United States has long enjoyed in the Western hemisphere. That is why the United States eventually entered World War I (to prevent a German victory), and it is why Roosevelt began preparing the nation for war in the late 1930s and entered with enthusiasm after Pearl Harbor. In each case, powerful countries were threatening to establish regional hegemony in a key area, and so the United States joined with others to prevent this.

The problem with this analysis is that Nazi Germany and imperial Japan were not just seeking "to establish regional hegemony in a key area"; they were expanding by military aggression and conquering and occupying other sovereign states. Nazi domination of Europe was unacceptable not only on strategic but also on moral grounds. Until someone comes up with a more detailed, convincing scenario about how a Chinese sphere of influence or regional hegemony threatens the U.S., I will remain skeptical.

However, I will concede this much to Walt's view: intentions are difficult to read precisely and there is a case for hedging bets by maintaining U.S. alliances with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and other countries in the region. But does the U.S. need to send Marines to northern Australia? Does it need to sell advanced F-16 jets to Indonesia? For that matter, does it need as many as 28,500 soldiers in South Korea?

Views that emphasize a "contest" between the U.S. and China (see e.g. W.R. Mead's recent post) can be self-fulfilling prophecies, as Walt himself acknowledges in passing. In the lingo of contemporary bureaucratic diplomat-ese, this is unhelpful.

The decline of war (Part II)

In my previous post on this subject, I promised to follow up with some observations on the relation between global politics and global economics over the past couple of decades. For various reasons this has proved beyond me at the moment, so I'll confine this post to noting the case of one writer who acknowledged the decline of violent conflict but refused to accord it the significance it would seem to warrant. The case to be mentioned is probably not unique but rather is an indication of how hard it is for some analysts to discard assumptions about the permanence of conflict that have been central to discourse on international politics for centuries. Longevity does not equal validity, however, and the fact that these assumptions have been repeated endlessly does not make them correct.

Writing in 2007 about the shape of what he termed the post-American world, Fareed Zakaria observed that "war and organized violence have declined dramatically over the last two decades." [1] There has been, he wrote, "a broad trend away from wars among major countries, the kind of conflict that produces massive casualties." [2] However, in the very next breath Zakaria felt constrained to point out that "numbers [of casualties] are not the only measure of evil," [3] which is true but not particularly relevant. "I don't believe," he declared, "that war has become obsolete or any such foolishness. Human nature remains what it is and international politics what it is." [4]

"Human nature remains what it is and international politics what it is." This statement has basically no analytical content. It is an expression of faith, the same faith to which Robert Gilpin pledged allegiance when he wrote: "One must suspect that if somehow Thucydides were placed in our midst, he would (following an appropriate short course in geography, economics, and modern technology) have little trouble in understanding the power struggle of our age." [5] (Gilpin wrote this 30 years ago but plenty of people, including perhaps Gilpin himself, would write the same thing today.)

Would Thucydides, stepping out of a time machine, not bat an eye at a world in which there has been no great-power war for more than half a century (and in which no great-power war is looming on the horizon)? I'll let readers supply their own answers to that question.
--------
Notes
1. Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (W.W. Norton), p. 8. The book was published in 2008, meaning that it was written in 2007.
2. Ibid., p. 9.
3. Ibid., p. 10.
4. Ibid., pp. 9-10.
5. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge U.P., 1981), p. 211.

"Realism is stuck in the 19th century"

The quote is from remarks by Randall Schweller at a roundtable on Charles Glaser's Rational Theory of International Politics held at last year's APSA annual meeting. Video here.

Prophets?

Hans Morgenthau having come up here recently (see my post of Jan. 28), I was interested to note this from Patrick Porter in which he describes his current project: a study of "U.S. defence intellectuals from Pearl Harbor to Iraq."

...starting with Walter Lippmann, it moves through Hans Morgenthau, Bernard Brodie, Edward Luttwak and finishing with Andrew Bacevich.

These figures are rich subjects in themselves, and they are powerful points of entry into a deeper study of the history of US self-criticism and pessimism...

The main argument is that these were Jeremiah figures – not cold technicians or detached ‘realists’, but prophets moved by a passionate ideology of their own that reworked European genealogies of skepticism about the American project. These are the figures we turn to repeatedly in crisis, so I thought a study of how their dissent and criticism ‘works’ and how they believed the republic could be re-educated in statecraft would be a nice little contribution to the growing literature on American strategic minds.

A great deal has already been written about Morgenthau and Lippmann, and the latter has been the subject of a superb biography, Ronald Steel's Walter Lippmann and the American Century. Still, grouping these two with Brodie, Luttwak, and Bacevich is interesting, partly because Brodie and Luttwak are much more easily classifiable as 'defense intellectuals' than Morgenthau, Lippmann or Bacevich. I bet the result will be worth reading (which is not an ironclad promise on my part to read it -- always useful to have an escape clause).

P.S. For another book that views some well-known Realists as Jeremiah figures, see here.

Morgenthau once more

An interesting post on realism (by dptrombly at Slouching Towards Columbia) raises the question of realists' attitudes toward public participation in, and influence over, foreign policy. The post suggests that Hans Morgenthau (1904-1980) and Henry Kissinger shared an elitism and a wariness about the participation of mass publics:

For the European realists who emigrated to the United States, mass politics was potentially the gateway to disorder and horror. Morgenthau’s “hidden dialogue” with [Carl] Schmitt is evident in both of their major works, and Kissinger’s admiration for Spengler and Metternich hardly lends itself to favorable opinions towards liberalism. Both thinkers acclimated themselves to their new homeland’s political traditions, but not without criticism. These German Jewish intellectuals inherited the Weimar-era sense of Verfallsgeschichte [history of decline] that seems rather lacking in the chastened internationalists and skeptical social scientists who practice and debate realist foreign policy today.

There is clearly some truth in this. In Morgenthau's case, however, Carl Schmitt was only one of several important influences on him; other influences, notably his mentor Hugo Sinzheimer, were on the left in Weimar's politics. (Sinzheimer was a prominent lawyer at the center of a circle of young leftist intellectuals.)

Fast forward to Morgenthau in his later years: From the late 1950s on, he developed a critique of American politics and society which informed his later strong and vocal opposition to the Vietnam War and which has been well analyzed by William Scheuerman in Hans Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond (2009). This critique, as expressed for example in The Purpose of American Politics (1960), drew on, among other things, a Tocquevillian concern about the threat of conformism and "the prospect of a novel form of mass-based or democratic despotism" (Scheuerman, p.189). This theme, which perhaps also reflected the wave of concern in the 1950s with the dangers posed by "mass society," does reflect a wariness of mass publics, and yet elitism does not seem quite the right word for it. Morgenthau in The Purpose of American Politics was also critical of capitalism in its consumerist guise and called for an expansion of the welfare state (Scheuerman, p.191).

Perhaps more significantly, in the 1960s a good deal of Morgenthau's writing about civil rights and other U.S. domestic issues strongly suggests that he thought too little democracy, not too much, was at the root of the country's problems. For example, in an essay published in Commentary (the old Commentary) in January 1964, Morgenthau began by declaring (echoing his Purpose of American Politics): "The unequal condition of the black American has been an endemic denial of the purpose for the sake of which the United States of America was created and which, in aspiration and partial fulfillment, has remained the distinctive characteristic of American society: equality in freedom." ("The Coming Test of American Democracy," reprinted in Morgenthau, Truth and Power [1970], pp. 209-210)

Morgenthau went on to argue in this piece (written shortly after John F. Kennedy's assassination) that the related problems of segregation and structural unemployment threatened a breakdown of democracy and a descent into violence. He observed that the governments of Southern states already were ruling by violence and decried the power exerted by Southern legislators in Congress. (pp. 213-214)

In the Epilogue to the 1970 collection Truth and Power, which is undoubtedly one of the most radical-sounding pieces Morgenthau ever wrote -- parts of it read as if they could have been written by, say, the authors of the Port Huron Statement (the founding document of SDS) -- Morgenthau saw the American student revolt as "a national manifestation of a world-wide revulsion against the world as it is," a world that "sacrifices human ends to technological means, as well as the needs of the many to the enrichment and power of the few," a world in which mechanized and bureaucratized institutions exercise unprecedented power over individuals, drain life of meaning, and confront the student with "a Kafkaesque [condition] ...of make-believe, a gigantic hoax where nothing is as it appears to be and upon which what he feels, thinks, aspires to, and does has no effect except to provide inducements for harassment and repression." (Truth and Power, pp.433, 434, 437).

American society, Morgenthau concluded here, had chosen preservation of the status quo over its original animating purpose. "Abroad, the United States has become the antirevolutionary power par excellence, because our fear of Communism has smothered our rational insight into the inevitability of radical change in the Third World. Our interventions in Indochina and the Dominican Republic are monuments to that fear. At home, our commitment to making all Americans equal in freedom has been at war with our fear of change and our conformist subservience to the powers-that-be." (ibid.,p.439)

And here is the last paragraph (p.439), which should be read in light of his belief that nuclear war under the then-prevailing trends was not only likely but virtually certain:

The extent of the repression in store for the dissenters will depend upon the subjective estimate of the seriousness the powers-that-be place upon the threat to the status quo. Considering the thus far marginal nature of the threat, society will need only resort to marginally totalitarian methods. The dissenters will people our prisons, our graveyards, our Bohemias, or -- as utter cynics -- our positions of power. Those last will not be unlike the Marxist-Leninists of the Soviet Union: They will mouth a litany of slogans which they not only do not believe in but which they also despise. Such a society can carry on for a while, like a body without a soul, but sooner or later it must either recover its soul -- that is, the purpose that has given it life -- or disintegrate from within. Perhaps, then, a new society, with a new purpose, will be built upon the ruins of the old; or perhaps nothing will be left but ruins for later generations to behold.

In sum, although Morgenthau was perhaps not an especially profound or original democratic theorist (his most acute insights lay elsewhere), he did come to insist that the normative core of liberal democracy ("equality in freedom" as he called it) had to be reflected in U.S. foreign policy, and that U.S. foreign policy, in order to be justifiable and effective, had to retain a very close connection to the country's moral foundations. If one still wants to label Morgenthau a classical realist, his version of classical realism is arguably quite compatible with an enlightened, egalitarian, and progressive version of liberal democracy.

P.S. It may be of interest to note that Morgenthau was an original trustee of the Institute for Policy Studies and served on its board of trustees for five years. (Source: Letter of Marcus Raskin in The Washington Post's Book World, Sept. 22, 1991)

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Note: I also discussed Morgenthau, in a different connection, in this post.

Update: Response by DPTrombly.