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.
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