Getting real about realism

I realized, looking back, that I was not as clear as I should have been in my last post. Sometimes I get lost in digressions and musings, which isn't always a bad thing, but having finally finished the 586 page Hobbes translation of The Peloponnesian War, I figured I would take the occasion to provide a concise summation on what I've taken away from it, insofar as the field of IR is concerned. The full thesis I was trying to convey may not have been as clear to me then as it is now, now that I have seen what becomes of the fateful conflict between Athens and Sparta. 

In sum, the father of classical realism has triggered within me a clean break from the realist persuasion in international relations. The reasons for this can be boiled down to a single proposition:

P1: Realism as a description and realism as a prescription are at odds 

For some reason, what has become painfully obvious is not so to the vast majority of scholars who have taken themselves to have learned something from Thucydides. What later commentators have referred to as the "Athenian thesis" - the thesis that, in essence, might truly does make right and the Athenians deserved their imperial dominion because of their strength - is in tension with the notion that Thucydides himself, who looked upon the imperial demos with a wary eye and who found much to fault in the conduct of the Athenians, was a consummate realist championing fealty to power over that of values and law. When one makes the normative judgement that might is right, you are in fact entering the world of values. Realism becomes another dreampolitik. 

So there is a grave mistake occurring, when those who see Thucydides' mere acknowledgement of the fact that power asymmetries are apt to cause conflict also see in this description a suggestion that power ought to be maximized in the international arena. It is the classic confusion of ought for is. Thucydides himself makes it clear in the dramatic structure of the historical narrative that the quest for power is more likely to prove the undoing of the state than enhance it. The Sicilian disaster follows the conquest of Melos. The plague follows Pericles' oration. Athens forgets fortune, but gambles anyway and comes away the loser. Realism as a prescription seems obviously wrong. If anything, The History of the Peloponnesian War is a cautionary tale. Quite apart from suggesting we must be guided by the facts of power, the book appears to warn us away from it. Bound up in tyche - or all of the future possibilities in play at some particular present moment and in some particular entity - power is unstable and inevitably dissolves, just like realism, into the opposite of its intention. The moral justification for this course of action is wholly distinct from the mere acknowledgement that power imbalances drive the behavior of individuals and states. The decision to raise it to an ideal can never be realist. Most scholars can agree on the description, while also advocating restraint despite in reality following the Athenians in calling for the exertion of power in areas outside of the immediate national interest. Following the Athenians, who simply ceased to be realist the moment they embarked upon the imperial project. 

One may go down the list of supposedly "realist" foreign policy practitioners and find the same tension at work. Kennan's "containment", Mearsheimer's "offensive realism", Walt's "offshore balancing", all of who called for restraint at one time or another in the name of realism, and all of whom offered prescriptions that ran against that very ethos, in the name of realism. 

What, then, is realism? It would seem to me that the term, if it is to accurately reflect any reality that matches the connotations associated with the word, cannot capture the suggestion that power is the fundamental variable that drives interactions between states while also encompassing the litany of policy prescriptions that call for an activist approach abroad, and which also nebulously defines "national security interests" in terms of checking hegemons, whether regional or otherwise, or rogue states that may one day pose a threat, in addition to suggesting that it is the foreign policy philosophy of "restraint". To suggest otherwise is to make realism indistinguishable from liberalism.

The problem with political realism

It's summer and I feel like garbage. I feel like I should be doing more than what I'm doing, which is nothing. I guess that's a contradiction. I can't do what I do-not. I have really learned nothing, both in life and in my reading. Art and life are supposed to be one and I suppose they are. They've both taught me nothing. 

So now I'm sitting here and the sun has just gone down in the sleepy little seaside hamlet. I came down from Maryland, where I've been living for the past nine months, because the incessant harassment on the part of my parents was getting to be too much, and to delay the inevitable any longer would have been a serious display of impropriety. So instead of sitting in my room in Maryland doing nothing, I got to sit on Long Island and deal with my moody prick of a father for a week. He's as cantankerous as ever (perhaps more-so) and my childhood home is in ruins. I used to revere the island because I thought I could see the beauty in its banality. I could appreciate a window pane or a patch of grass or a view atop a hill, but now the world has shrunk and it all feels alien. The memories have lost their grip and the sentiments have dulled. The only place where it's really strong is right here where I am now. It's sad. What's sadder is that I was sitting here typing out this very same subject matter one year ago. I thought things had changed. They didn't. They never do. Maybe they never will.

One thing that hasn't changed is my reading habits. I've finally gotten the opportunity to read Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. It was a long time coming. It is, after all, the foundational text in my professional discipline. International relations scholars pore through its pages in search of its universal and immemorial wisdom so that they may apply the lessons of the past to the present day. The problem, as it so often is, is that they appear to be all wrong about what it really means.

I have been sympathetic to the so-called "realist" school of thought in international relations for as long as I can remember. The dominant school of foreign policy in the United States, we are told, is a liberal idealism that seeks to export its ideology globally. It promotes democracy abroad in places that are anathema to it. It demands of other states an adherence to juridical equality, human rights, and individual liberties. It funnels billions in foreign aid to states across the world in a bid to enhance influence and also in a genuine effort to do good. The attempt to sustain a "rules-based international order" since around 1947 has been the practical consequence of this school's influence over the political class and its foreign policy apparatus. Attempts to alter the sway of liberalism over foreign policy has often gotten bogged down in what some have called "the Blob" - the network of national security officials, journalists, and civil servants with a sincere belief and interest in the power of this idea. 

This is contrasted with realism, which calls for the antithesis to all of this. There are a variety of flavors one may pick and choose from, just as one may pick from the litter of liberalisms, but they all boil down to a few general characteristics. They call for restraint in our dealings with the world, an emphasis on power as the fundamental variable that drives interaction between states at the expense of ideological affinity or universalist crusading, and a reorientation of grand strategy around the national interest. Insecurity and fear in an anarchic international system fuel conflict. Realpolitik and pragmatism is the order of the day, not dreams of world harmony and universal democracy. 

This is all thought that to have received its earliest formulation in Thucydides' tract on the war between Sparta and Athens. The fundamental conflict that drives the narrative (and it is, indeed, more than just a summary of facts) is the conflict between realism and liberalism. Realism emerges as a submission to "necessity", a drive to achieve and expand the Athenian dominion. Liberalism manifests as a commitment to "law", dialogue, and justice. The irony of course is that the Athenian democracy often finds itself defending its actions by appealing to the natural necessity of the former, while the oligarchic Spartans couch their actions in terms of a defense of "liberty".

Something doesn't add up. Today's "restrainers", "offshore balancers" and "offensive realists" propose a course of action that would sidestep the blunders they see enervating American power in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and Afghanistan. And yet realist theory often makes diagnoses that conflict with the prescriptions of the supposed realists. Consider John Mearsheimer's realism, which calls for regional hegemons to eliminate potential rivals before they become the dominant powers in their own regional neighborhood. Consider Thucydides himself, who recounts in the famed Melian dialogue the negotiations between Athens and the besieged isle of Melos. In a passage that bears repeating, the Melian council counters Athenian arguments for surrender with their own: 

Mel: "But we know that in matter of war the event is sometimes otherwise than according to the difference of number in sides; and that if we yield presently, all our hope is lost; whereas if we hold out, we have yet a hope to keep ourselves up." 

Athens: "Hope, the comfort of danger, when such use it as have to spare, though it hurt them, yet it destroys them not. But to such as set their rest upon it (for it is a thing by nature prodigal), it at once by failing maketh itself known; and known, leaveth no place for future caution, which let not be your own case, you that are but weak and have no more but this one stake. Nor be like you unto many men, who, though they may presently save themselves by human means, will yet, when upon pressure of the enemy their most apparent hopes fail them, betake themselves to blind ones, as divination, oracles, and other such things which with hope destroy men." 

Mel: "We think it, you well know, a hard matter for us to combat your power and fortune, unless we might do it on equal terms. Nevertheless, we believe that, for fortune, we shall be nothing inferior, as having the gods on our side, because we stand innocent against men unjust; and for power, what is wanting will be supplied by our league with the Lacedaemonians, who are of necessity obliged, if for no other cause, yet for consanguinity's sake, and for their own honour, to defend us. So that we are confident, not altogether so much without reason as you think." 

The Athenians, by demanding the Melians submit to an outcome they would anyway impose on them by force, have forgotten the lesson of their own rise. When the Persian host marched into Greece, the city-states were small, squabbling polities with vastly inferior numbers. But as Pericles reminds the Athenians later on, it was their wisdom that mastered fortune and their courage that met the tests of Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea. Their victory was not ordained, it was not a consequence of law or natural necessity, it was hope, the comfort of danger, that destroyed them not. It did not fail, but made itself known all the same. Herein lies realism's positive and normative problem. A realist security policy bears more than a passing resemblance to a liberal one. Whether the motive is power or justice, both of these supposed rivals counsel assertive action in far-flung places. It transforms circumscribed suppositions about the nature of things, about man's innate drive for security and the anarchy he is forever presented with, into a reification of nature and sweeping presumptions about what actions these presumptions entail. It turns an "is" into an "ought", when no such thing is necessary. It turns these assumptions into a guide to conduct. Power is not the fundamental variable in Thucydides' world, and perhaps our own, instead it is fortune.  

Any realism that demands competition with great powers abroad has failed. It is a wonder that realist scholars have failed to note the contrary strategies offered by the Athenians at Melos and Nicias at the Athenian assembly immediately afterwards. In his debate with Alcibiades over the wisdom of the Sicilian expedition, Nicias does in fact counsel something approaching restraint. To expend wealth and resources on the domestic polity, to shore up control over their own neighborhood and confederacy, to gamble not with fortune. It is that same hope of the Melians turned inward and deployed to cautionary effect. The Athenians, of course, do not heed this warning and finally overstep, thanks largely to the machinations of Alcibiades himself (a topic which demands an entirely different post by itself). "Medism", as it turns out, denotes more than the suspicions the commons held towards great men. It was in fact a soul sickness infecting the heart of Athenian democracy. What was once Persia's to lose became Athens', and both lost it. The boundless aggression that the Melians warned the Athenians about, and which the Athenians dismissed, became the siren call of Alcibiades at the assembly. The realism of Nicias, in contrast to the supposed realism of the Alcibiadian spirit, begins to look more prudent, and more like isolationism. 

We spend far too much time detailing what states must do to attain power, instead of what they must do to lose it. And if the Melians are to be believed, we may find that it has very little to do with power (dis)equilibriums at all. The realist project must be tossed if it is to surrender belief and faith to the altar of their alleged necessities. For the experience of those who promulgate such doctrines would appear to contradict them. Democratic Athens, National Socialist Germany, and Napoleonic France all ceased to be realist states the moment they attempted to reorder the structure of the international system. But what to turn to? Liberalism won't do. We seek to avoid the blunders that both produce. The rule of law, particularly in its international guise, will have to be dissolved. In its place will be a Niciadian attitude aligned with what realism ought to be. A philosophy and strategy that reconciles the salience of power with its transience. In short, a foreign policy of limits.