Multilateralism Project

Monday, I submitted page proofs for a chapter in the forthcoming 2019 volume of  Canada Among Nations, an annual book about Canadian foreign policy to be published by Palgrave. David Carment of Carleton's NPSIA and Chris Sands of Johns Hopkins SAIS are editing the volume, entitled Canada–US Relations; Sovereignty or Shared Institutions?

My chapter (4) focuses on "'America First' and US-Canadian Relations." Though Canada is a primary concern, the paper discusses the threat "America First" poses to multilateralism and the liberal international order. As I've previously noted, President Trump has labeled Canada (and other allies) a threat to U.S. national security in order to impose steel and aluminum tariffs on these states. He also called Prime Minister Justin Trudeau "weak and dishonest" and repeatedly threatens to end NAFTA and bring "ruination" to Canada's economy.

My chapter discusses whether Trump's approach to international relations could be viewed as an especially intense version of realism that fails to recognize the potential virtues of multilateralism. Most of the institutions Trump threatens were built during the Cold War with the intent of aligning states with the US versus the Soviet bloc. Trump demonizes China, and at least one chapter in the new volume focuses on this strategy, but the President does not seem to recognize the potential  value of having allies working with the US to counter what he calls unfair and illegal Chinese trade practices. Every relationship is a transaction for Trump, a deal to be won or lost, and America can only win in his view if all other states lose -- even if that means demonizing long-time blue chip allies like Canada and Germany. Each relationship is ultimately bilateral and there is advantage to be taken.

I'm now working on a followup paper for a workshop on US-Canadian relations cohosted by last year's Carleton Fulbright scholar, James McCormick, at Iowa State in March. Former Library of Parliament International Affairs analyst Gerald Schmitz is the other host. I've been invited to submit that paper for consideration in a special issue of Canadian Foreign Policy Journal focusing on “America First”? Meeting the Challenges of the New Nationalism for Canada and the World.”  Schmitz is also helping to organize a one-day round-table in Ottawa on January 25th on "America First" and the International Order. I'm scheduled to partake via Skype.

For that paper and round-table, I'm expanding my work on multilateralism and looking at the proposals various western leaders are floating to save multilateralism in the wake of America First (and other threats), particularly in the areas of free trade and security.

Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland has since mid-year 2017 called for "finding ways for like-minded democracies to act on our values and fight for the multilateral order." Though Freeland has urged the U.S. to join in the fight to save multilateralism, in October Canada hosted a meeting to fix and reform the WTO. The government invited about a dozen major trading states (including the EU as a single entity in that list). However, notably, the US was not invited to this "like-minded" summit "because it doesn’t share the views of the 13 invited countries, the new Canadian trade minister says."

German Minister for Foreign Affairs Heiko Maas has been calling for "an alliance of multilateralists" linking states like Japan and Canada. He has openly worried about the U.S. threat to the current order, though he too has invited the U.S. to join with its allies in saving multilateralism.

French Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian similarly calls for a coalition of goodwill powers to address major international problems (including climate change). In his view, "Europe should align itself with countries like India, Australia, Mexico and other “powerful democracies” that share a commitment to multilateralism." Le Drian says the coalition should work with or without the U.S.

I'll stop with that list for now, but will end by noting that newly reelected Ohio U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D), who is sometimes mentioned as a 2020 presidential hopeful, was quoted in the Toronto Globe and Mail on November 3 outlining a potential alternative US strategy that would target China in a trade confrontation, but in a way that might fit with the multilateral aspirations of America's long-time allies:

Mr. Brown is trying to thread the needle: He trumpets his support for tariffs – and blasts Mr. Renacci for supporting free-trade deals under previous presidents – but criticizes Mr. Trump’s handling of the trade war. 

“You don’t play off steel workers against farmers, you don’t play off industry against agriculture, and he’s done that,” Mr. Brown said in an interview during a stop at a campaign office in a strip mall in Brunswick, Ohio, south of Cleveland. “You [should] align with our allies – Canada and Western Europe and Japan, maybe – to stop serial cheaters like China. But instead he attacked Chrystia Freeland for what she was doing and your Prime Minister.”

That approach could signal a Democratic justification for approving the new USMCA and a broader way forward for the party in 2020 -- a majority of the US population supports multilateralism and free trade (perhaps in polarized response to Trump's America First), but middle class blue collar workers in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are likely still vulnerable to protectionist appeals by politicians.



Visit this blog's homepage.

For 280 character IR and foreign policy talk, follow me on twitter.

Or for basketball, baseball, movies or other stuff, follow this personal twitter account.

Political Economy of Relative Gains

Realist IR scholars reject the possibility of meaningful international cooperation on the idea that not all states can benefit from such cooperation. That's wrong, liberal institutionalists retort, because classic trade theory demonstrates that cooperation can promote mutual "absolute" gain.

Realists counter with the point that mutual gains rarely result in equal distribution. Some states will benefit more from cooperation and these relative advantages mitigate against cooperation. Why would a state partake in an agreement that helps competitors more than it helps itself? Essentially, because realists see international politics as a struggle for power, states can prevent a redistribution of power by refusing to partake in meaningful cooperation.

Plus, on many truly difficult issues, there are going to be costs to cooperation -- similar to the dues union members pay for the benefit of membership. States have an incentive to free ride, rather than to pay costs to create gains. Thus, on many global issues that require genuine multilateral cooperation -- Kenneth Waltz mentioned “poverty, population, pollution, and proliferation” (209) -- states won't work together because they lack incentives.

Realists do not think much of existing international cooperation. Believe it or not, a prominent realist view of past trade practices suggests that they reflect typical interstate competition rather than real cooperation. Realists recognize that states form alliances when confronted by potential hegemons, but this is basically because their survival is potentially at stake. In lesser circumstances, a strong state might set up sham institutions to promote forms of cooperation that are in their individual interest and essentially coerce others to participate. This could include institutions that serve multiple purposes, promoting selfish security cooperation with small economic bribes.

Some empirical evidence supports the pessimistic view of international economic cooperation.

This is a quick and simplified account of a complex debate, of course, but I mention it because of this study result I read in The Atlantic last October.** Individual Americans apparently embrace this vision and reject the prospect of mutual benefit if the benefits provides relative gains to "competitors." IOW, people see other people as competitors:

In a survey of faculty, students, and staff at the Harvard School of Public Health, nearly half of the respondents said they’d prefer to live in a world where the average salary was $25,000 and they earned $50,000 than one where they earned $100,000 but the average was $200,000. Similarly, a majority favored relative over absolute advantage when it came to their own intelligence and attractiveness, their child’s intelligence and attractiveness, or praise from a superior. Apparently the survey respondents would rather the planet be filled with stupid, ugly children than have their own child left behind [1].

There are apparent lessons in this about the rise of Donald Trump and the populist/nationalist concerns of his supporters. Trump wants to build a wall along the southern US border, deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and impose new tariffs on major trading partners such as China and Mexico. Many economists predict that his policies would hurt the white working class more than others. However, their analysis is generally framed in terms of utility theory.

What if his voters don't care about utility as much as they do about perceived relative gains -- for them personally as well as for the US? Perhaps they are willing to be additionally impoverished so long as their competitors do worse -- whether that is undocumented Mexican workers or China.

The danger, of course, is that Trump voters are likely very wrong in how his presidency might influence the outcomes they desire. His tax policies, for example, basically continue long-term Republican plans to benefit the richest Americans -- and this link is from The Economist, not some lefty politician or organization. Would the U.S. win a trade war with China?


--------------------
** Yes, I'm cleaning out my office and have a stack of clippings.

Visit this blog's homepage.

For 140 character IR and foreign policy talk, follow me on twitter.

Or for basketball, baseball, movies or other stuff, follow this personal twitter account.

America's Enemies

This weekend, I'm spending some time preparing for my graduate seminar on international politics. As many IR scholars do, I typically begin with realism in order for the students to wrap their minds around some of the discipline's core ideas: states, interests, power, threats, security, etc.

Many IR theories position themselves vis-à-vis realism in order to critique, deconstruct, etc.

One obvious problem: realists tend to focus on great power competition and we seem to be in an age that lacks that feature of international politics. In any case, the American public certainly seems to think so. Last February, Mother Jones reported these interesting results of a recent Gallup survey:

Less than a quarter of respondents think that China is America's greatest enemy. The general public is not alone, of course, as John Mearsheimer, perhaps the most prominent academic realist, has long lamented the fact that policymakers fail to treat China as a serious foe.

I'm using the label "threat inflation" for this post because I'm far from convinced that the realists are correct. China and the US have some competing interests, but it also seems pretty clear that they also share many interests and are essentially partners in many endeavors.



Visit this blog's homepage.

For 140 character IR and foreign policy talk, follow me on twitter.

Or for basketball, baseball, movies or other stuff, follow this personal twitter account.

Mearsheimer Profile

Back in 1990, in the Atlantic Monthly, prominent neorealist IR theorist John Mearsheimer published a popular version of one of his best-known academic arguments: "Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War."

The next forty-five years in Europe are not likely to be so violent as the forty-five years before the Cold War, but they are likely to be substantially more violent than the past forty-five years, the era that we may someday look back upon not as the Cold War but as the Long Peace, in John Lewis Gaddis's phrase.

This pessimistic conclusion rests on the general argument that the distribution and character of military power among states are the root causes of war and peace.

His argument was based on the difficulty of assuring stability among a larger number of great powers -- and the higher chance that states would have different amounts of military power. Of course, Mearsheimer was also quite skeptical about the role democracy and economic interdependence might play in assuring peace, though he was also pessimistic that realist prescriptions could avoid war.

In short, the essay reflected most of the important ideas associated with Mearsheimer -- a pessimistic (if not tragic) realist emphasis on great power competition and the enduring prospects for war.

In the January/February 2012 issue of The Atlantic, Mearsheimer is profiled by the magazine's frequent contributor Robert Kaplan: "Why John J. Mearsheimer Is Right (About Some Things)." Kaplan highlights the University of Chicago scholar's ongoing interest in the threat of major power war. The essay gives a great deal of attention to the potential rising threat from China, a point Mearsheimer has been emphasizing for over a decade.

If you follow IR theory, none of the political science discussed by Kaplan is new. The piece does include several photos.

Because of my interests in political communication and deliberation, I'm including this quote from one of Mearsheimer's ex- students:

As Ashley J. Tellis, Mearsheimer’s former student and now, after a stint in the Bush administration, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, later tells me: “Realism is alien to the American tradition. It is consciously amoral, focused as it is on interests rather than on values in a debased world. But realism never dies, because it accurately reflects how states actually behave, behind the façade of their values-based rhetoric.”

Here, Tellis is echoing a point Mearsheimer has frequently made.

Again, for scholars, the article is filled with redundancies like that. If you've read several pieces by Mearsheimer, chances are you did not learn anything from this article.

Yet, it is kind of interesting that a national magazine profiled Mearsheimer at this time. If the U.S. soon enters into a long cold war with China, he'll be credited (or blamed) with framing the logic behind the competition. Alternatively, if the U.S. or Israel launches war against Iran out of concerns about nuclear proliferation, then Mearsheimer will likely emerge as a vocal critic (as he was in the Iraq war case) and so this article helps to establish his credentials to a wider audience outside the academy.

In short, the article is (mostly) an effort to rehabilitate Mearsheimer after he and Steve Walt published their article and book about the role of the Israeli lobby in American foreign policy. Kaplan says that work is polemical and not objective, so the piece does not serve as a complete rehabilitation. Indeed, within the media Kaplan says that The Israeli Lobby has "delegitimized" Mearsheimer.

Kaplan is occasionally described as a neocon and apparently served in the Israeli armed forces, so he may not be the most objective observer of Mearsheimer. Notably, neocons have long shared Mearsheimer's worries about China.

In short, the subtext makes for an interesting read.


Note: I updated the post March 1 to provide a real conclusion.

Visit this blog's homepage.

For 140 character IR and foreign policy talk, follow me on twitter.

Or for basketball, baseball, movies or other stuff, follow this personal twitter account.

Matthew Hoh in Louisville

Wednesday, Matthew Hoh was in town speaking to the Louisville Committee on Foreign Relations. A former marine, Hoh attained a measure of fame in September 2009 for becoming the first U.S. official to resign a policy position in response to America's Afghanistan policy. Hoh had been serving as the top civilian official from the State Department in Kabul Province.

LCFR events have long been "off the record," but Hoh didn't really talk about anything that hasn't been reflected in his public remarks and interviews.

Perhaps most importantly, Hoh talked about the publicly available findings of the Afghanistan Study Group, which in August 2010 produced A New Way Forward, Rethinking U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan (pdf). Hoh served as the group's Director.

Prominent signatories (group members, presumably) include thinkers from across the political spectrum -- from noted peace studies scholar David Cortright, progressive economist James K. Galbraith, and historian/blogger Juan Cole to conservative journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave. A number of realist IR theorists are also on board, including Michael Desch, Bob Jervis, Bob Pape, Barry Posen, and Steve Walt.

As Hoh emphasized in Louisville, the report concludes with a 5 point plan:

1) Emphasize Power-Sharing and Political Reconciliation.
2) Scale Back and Eventually Suspend Combat Operations in the South and Reduce the U.S. Military Footprint
3) Keep the Focus on Al Qaeda and Domestic Security.
4) Promote Economic Development.
5) Engage Global and Regional Stakeholders.

Read the report to learn more about the Group's diagnosis of why America's strategy in Afghanistan is flawed -- and for more detail about these recommendations. I found the entire argument quite similar to my long-time and persistent criticism of the Iraq war. US troops make good targets and are viewed as foreign occupiers by much of the population. The insurgency gains by the US presence -- and none of the on-the-ground fighting has anything to do with the effort to prevent terrorist attacks against western targets since those are planned and executed by a loose network of individuals far from the battlegrounds.

I sat at Hoh's table at lunch and we talked briefly about his experiences in the 18 months since he resigned. My hand was still raised when the meeting adjourned, so I didn't get to ask a final question:

Just how seriously is official Washington taking the Afghan Study Group's recommendations?


Visit this blog's homepage.

IR and Poker

I'm teaching neorealist theory in my master's IR seminar tonight and came across this passage from John Mearsheimer's 2001 book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics:

...the historical record shows that offense sometimes succeeds and sometimes does not. The trick for a sophisticated power maximizer is to figure out when to raise and when to fold."

Maybe I'll try to collect a number of references to poker (and perhaps other games) by IR theorists.

As readers may recall, for some time, I've been interested in narratives, metaphors and analogies.

Also, I've long argued that IR scholars should get together at an Annual ISA convention and play some Hold 'em.


Visit this blog's homepage.

Obama's Pragmatic Foreign Policy

I had some extra time on Friday afternoon, so I read Barack Obama's "The World Beyond Iraq" speech, which he delivered on March 19, 2008. That was the fifth anniversary of the start of the war. Don't confuse that speech with the widely covered foreign policy address he delivered in mid-July.

I was struck by how frequently Obama referenced pragmatism in the March foreign policy address -- five times! While Obama mentioned "reality" several times, he never used the word "realism" in this speech. Indeed, his all-American pragmatism surely suggests something different from realism -- emphasizing the commonsensical, practical and empirical, while downplaying both power and ideology.

The first two references to pragmatism come in consecutive paragraphs near the beginning of the speech -- prior to explaining the flaws of the overall Iraq strategy (even if "the surge" was a successful military tactic). Essentially, Obama contrasts his own pragmatism to George W. Bush's ideological foreign policy judgment in the case of Iraq:

History will catalog the reasons why we waged a war that didn't need to be fought, but two stand out. In 2002, when the fateful decisions about Iraq were made, there was a President for whom ideology overrode pragmatism, and there were too many politicians in Washington who spent too little time reading the intelligence reports, and too much time reading public opinion. The lesson of Iraq is that when we are making decisions about matters as grave as war, we need a policy rooted in reason and facts, not ideology and politics.

Now we are debating who should be our next Commander in Chief. I am running for President because it's time to turn the page on a failed ideology and a fundamentally flawed political strategy, so that we can make pragmatic judgments to keep our country safe. That's what I did when I stood up and opposed this war from the start, and said that we needed to finish the fight against al Qaeda.

Obama's next two references to pragmatism appear in the middle of the speech, in consecutive paragraphs about U.S. policy toward Pakistan and al Qaeda:

If we have actionable intelligence about high-level al Qaeda targets in Pakistan's border region, we must act if Pakistan will not or cannot. Senator Clinton, Senator McCain, and President Bush have all distorted and derided this position, suggesting that I would invade or bomb Pakistan. This is politics, pure and simple. My position, in fact, is the same pragmatic policy that all three of them have belatedly - if tacitly - acknowledged is one we should pursue. Indeed, it was months after I called for this policy that a top al Qaeda leader was taken out in Pakistan by an American aircraft. And remember that the same three individuals who now criticize me for supporting a targeted strike on the terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks, are the same three individuals that supported an invasion of Iraq - a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

It is precisely this kind of political point-scoring that has opened up the security gap in this country. We have a security gap when candidates say they will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell, but refuse to follow him where he actually goes. What we need in our next Commander in Chief is not a stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality or empty rhetoric about 3AM phone calls. What we need is a pragmatic strategy that focuses on fighting our real enemies, rebuilding alliances, and renewing our engagement with the world's people.

The last reference to pragmatism appears in the final line of the speech:

When America leads with principle and pragmatism, hope can triumph over fear. It is time, once again, for America to lead.

Google the words "foreign policy pragmatism," by the way, and you get references to pragmatism in Chinese, Russian and Indian foreign policy -- as well as pragmatism employed by JFK.

I should perhaps also note that Obama again references pragmatism in the closing paragraph of his July address. In this instance, he explains George Marshall's wisdom at the beginning of the cold war:

When General Marshall first spoke about the plan that would bear his name, the rubble of Berlin had not yet been built into a wall. But Marshall knew that even the fiercest of adversaries could forge bonds of friendship founded in freedom. He had the confidence to know that the purpose and pragmatism of the American people could outlast any foe. Today, the dangers and divisions that came with the dawn of the Cold War have receded. Now, the defeat of the threats of the past has been replaced by the transnational threats of today. We know what is needed. We know what can best be done. We know what must done. Now it falls to us to act with the same sense of purpose and pragmatism as an earlier generation, to join with friends and partners to lead the world anew.

Finally, in the scholarship on the democratization of international relations (and organizations), Molly Cochran has been offering pragmatism as a means superior to deliberative approaches.


Visit this blog's homepage.

At the Duck

Today, I posted "Iraq update" at the Duck of Minerva. It suggests some must-reading and notes a couple of recent government reports about conditions on the ground.

That seems to be my first post at the Duck in a month.

May 22, I blogged "Who said it?" comparing realist and human rights rhetoric.


Visit this blog's homepage.

Realist fantasies?

I finally got around to reading "The Israel Lobby," a controversial piece published in the London Review of Books, March 23, 2006, by John Mearsheimer of University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard.

The article has been much-discussed and raises all sorts of interesting empirical claims and substantive arguments. Mearsheimer and Walt, recall, authored a much-read article in advance of the Iraq war arguing that the looming military confrontation was unnecessary -- and likely a bad idea.

Since they are realists who believe that most states behave according to realist logic most of the time, the Iraq war poses something of a puzzle. Why did the US go to war? Their answer: it served the purposes of the Israeli lobby. Domestic interests, acting virtually as foreign agents, took the US into war against Iraq.

Despite this remarkable claim, and others, I am most interested in the authors' great emphasis on public debate.

Controlling the public debate is one of "the Lobby's" central strategic purposes, according to Mearsheimer and Walt.

it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena.

The Lobby uses its influence to control debate in Congress as well.

The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide. Accordingly, pro-Israel organisations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion.

The authors provide some evidence that the Lobby manages to dominate think tanks and media outlets and is working to stifle open debate on college campuses.

Here's the punchline -- and remember they're supposed to be hard-nosed realists, not "fantasy theorists" interested in public deliberation:

the Lobby’s campaign to quash debate about Israel is unhealthy for democracy. Silencing sceptics by organising blacklists and boycotts – or by suggesting that critics are anti-semites – violates the principle of open debate on which democracy depends. The inability of Congress to conduct a genuine debate on these important issues paralyses the entire process of democratic deliberation. Israel’s backers should be free to make their case and to challenge those who disagree with them, but efforts to stifle debate by intimidation must be roundly condemned....

Although the Lobby remains a powerful force, the adverse effects of its influence are increasingly difficult to hide. Powerful states can maintain flawed policies for quite some time, but reality cannot be ignored for ever. What is needed is a candid discussion of the Lobby’s influence and a more open debate about US interests in this vital region. Israel’s well-being is one of those interests, but its continued occupation of the West Bank and its broader regional agenda are not. Open debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided US support and could move the US to a position more consistent with its own national interest, with the interests of the other states in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as well.

A more complete version of this article is available at a Harvard website, as is a critique penned by Alan Dershowitz.



Visit this blog's homepage.

Filed as: Mearsheimer Walt

Stop worrying and love the bomb

I really enjoy reading foreign policy op-ed pieces authored by realist scholars of international relations.

Then again, who doesn't love contrarian thinkers?

February 27, Barry Posen published the latest provocative op-ed piece, "We Can Live With a Nuclear Iran," in the New York Times:

An Iranian nuclear arsenal, policymakers fear, could touch off a regional arms race while emboldening Tehran to undertake aggressive, even reckless, actions.

But these outcomes are not inevitable, nor are they beyond the capacity of the United States and its allies to defuse. Indeed, while it's seldom a positive thing when a new nuclear power emerges, there is reason to believe that we could readily manage a nuclear Iran.

Actually, this editorial is fairly tame by realist standards.

Here are the opening lines from a press release issued three years ago today by Columbia University, which was entitled, "Spread of Nuclear Weapons Nothing to Fear, Says Waltz":

It does not matter if Iraq and North Korea possess or develop weapons of mass destruction, according to Kenneth Waltz, adjunct professor of political science and senior research scholar in the Institute of War and Peace. Nuclear deterrence, he says, will prevent either country from ever using them.

Similarly, John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt argued in advance of the war with Iraq that the US could easily deter even a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein:

In fact, the historical record shows that the United States can contain Iraq effectively - even if Saddam has nuclear weapons - just as it contained the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Mearsheimer wrote these words in Foreign Affairs Summer 1993:

The conventional wisdom about Ukraine's nuclear weapons is wrong. In fact, as soon as it declared independence, Ukraine should have been quietly encouraged to fashion its own nuclear deterrent.

In August 1990, Mearsheimer published these words in The Atlantic:

the United States should encourage the limited and carefully managed proliferation of nuclear weapons in Europe. The best hope for avoiding war in post-Cold War Europe is nuclear deterrence; hence some nuclear proliferation is necessary, to compensate for the withdrawal of the Soviet and American nuclear arsenals from Central Europe. Ideally, as I have argued, nuclear weapons would spread to Germany but to no other state.

If you haven't seen "Dr. Strangelove," do yourself a favor and rent it this weekend.


3/3/06 Update: How could I forget Pakistan and India? Mearsheimer, May 29, 1998, on "PBS Newshour":

I think once the two sides develop rather robust and large nuclear deterrence that you'll have a relatively stable situation, much like you had between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War....The fact of the matter is that nuclear weapons are an excellent deterrent. And for a country that feels threatened, especially by a neighbor that has nuclear weapons, it's not very likely that that country is going to shoot nuclear weapons.

Mearsheimer acknowledged an elevated risk of war in the early stages of their proliferation since they had small deterrent forces with imperfect command and control. Of course, he also advocated that the US provide them with various kinds of technology to secure their nuclear forces.




Visit this blog's homepage.

Filed as: nuclear proliferation

Most influential IR scholars

The November/December Foreign Policy (free registration required) has a piece worth reading called "Inside the Ivory Tower," by Susan Peterson, Michael J. Tierney, and Daniel Maliniak (all of the college of William and Mary). The article begins with a statement and asks an interesting question:

Professors of international relations shape future policy debates and mold the next generation of leaders. So who are these dons of diplomacy, and what do they believe?

Bill Petti mentioned this piece over a month ago on Duck of Minerva (my second home). The complete report is on Mike Tierney's website.

I won't get into the details of the piece, but want to focus on one survey result, which allowed the authors to identify the "top 25 scholars with the greatest impact on the discipline over the past 20 years."

In this post, I have listed the rank order of the top 25 scholars, with the date of their birth and current institution. For the top 10, I have included my subjective listing of the scholar's most influential IR publication (and date published). Many of these scholars, of course, are notable for many other publications, including some in comparative politics or other fields. The authors point out this finding:

One thing that stands out about these high achievers, though, is how similar they are: Nearly all are white men older than 50.

More on that below.

1. Robert O. Keohane (1941), Princeton, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (1984)

2. Kenneth N. Waltz (1924), Emeritus California-Berkeley and Columbia, Theory of International Politics (1979)

3. Alexander Wendt (1958), Ohio State, Social Theory of International Politics (1999).

4. Samuel P. Huntington (1927), Harvard, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1998).

5. John J. Mearsheimer (1947), University of Chicago, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001)

6. Joseph S. Nye (1941), Harvard, coauthor (with Keohane) of Power and Interdependence: world politics in transition (1977).

7. Robert Jervis (1940), Columbia, The Logic of Images in International Relations (1970).

8. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (1946), New York University and Stanford's Hoover Institution, The War Trap (1981)

9. Bruce M. Russett (1935), Yale, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (1994).

10. Robert Gilpin (1930), Emeritus Princeton, The Political Economy of International Relations (1987).

Other than Wendt, who is a genuine anomoly (age 47), the youngest man on this list is Mearsheimer (age 58). Though I've listed books written in the 1990s and aughts, Huntington published the classic Political Order in Changing Societies in 1968, and both Russett and Mearsheimer were well-known liberals and realists long before penning their recent major works. Half of the works in the top 10 could be read when I started graduate school, more than 20 years ago.

None of the scholars ranked 11 through 25 received mention by even 10% of the respondents to the survey. Still, all are male. Most are more than 50 years old and were well-known when I was in grad school.

11. Peter J. Katzenstein (1945), Cornell
12. Stephen D. Krasner (1942), Stanford
13. James N. Rosenau, George Washington
14. John Ruggie (1944), Harvard
15. Michael Doyle (1948), Columbia
16. James D. Fearon, Stanford
17. Immanuel Wallerstein (1930), Yale
18. Robert Cox (1926), Emeritus York (Toronto)
19. Hans J. Morgenthau (1904-1980), Chicago
20. Francis Fukuyama (1952), Johns Hopkins SAIS
21. J. David Singer (1925), Michigan
22. Stephen Walt (1955), Harvard
23. Jack L. Snyder, Columbia
23. Robert Axelrod (1943), Michigan
23. Stanley Hoffman (1928), Harvard

Walt is the youngest man listed and he just turned 50. I couldn't find birth dates for Rosenau, Fearon and Snyder. In 1999, Fearon won the Karl Deutsch Award for young IR scholars, so it is apparently safe to assume that he is closer to 40 than 50. Rosenau's first book in the Library of Congress catalog was published in 1951 and Snyder's first publication for RAND came out in 1976. In comments at the Duck of Minerva, I wrote:

there aren't any women and I think there are some major oversights. I'm guessing that in 10 years, many of these scholars will be on the list: Mike Barnett, Jeff Checkel, Marty Finnemore, David Held, Andrew Moravcsik, Thomas Risse, Kathryn Sikkink, and Anne-Marie Slaughter.

If you don't recognize those names, they are younger than those listed above, some are women, some are based abroad, and most are sympathetic to theoretical traditions that are neither realist nor liberal. They've read Wendt (and Ruggie and Cox) and are influenced by the "constructivist turn" in IR. The William and Mary team made note:

When respondents were asked who is currently doing the most interesting research, four women, led by Martha Finnemore at George Washington University and Kathryn Sikkink at the University of Minnesota, scored highly.

Does it matter that the field of IR is dominated by white males eligible for AARP cards? Disclosure: I'm only a few years away from that demographic.

A better question: how much does it matter?

Let me ask readers two different questions:

What are the most influential IR books and articles published in the past 15 years (since 1990)?

Who are the field's most important thinkers under age 50?

Feel free to leave comments or to send me an email.


Update: Thanks to a reader, I fixed Wendt's birth year. The prior figure (1966) certainly didn't seem right given the publication of the agent structure IO article in 1987.

Visit this blog's homepage.

Scowcroft and his best friend's son

I finally got around to reading the October 2005 piece on Brent Scowcroft in The New Yorker. Writer Jeffrey Goldberg clearly got former GHW Bush National Security Advisor Scowcroft to talk fairly openly about his very strong disagreements with the current Bush administration.

Scowcroft is a realist and thus makes arguments about Iraq that are like those made by academics Stephen Walt and John Mearshimer. Mearsheimer's last book was about the tragedy of international politics, and Scowcroft shares the same basic pessimism:

“I believe in the fallibility of human nature,” Scowcroft told me. “We continually step on our best aspirations. We’re humans. Given a chance to screw up, we will.”

Like academic realists, Scowcroft doesn't think much of Wilsonianism:

Scowcroft does not believe that the promotion of American-style democracy abroad is a sufficiently good reason to use force. “I thought we ought to make it our duty to help make the world friendlier for the growth of liberal regimes,” he said. “You encourage democracy over time, with assistance, and aid, the traditional way. Not how the neocons do it.”

Scowcroft says simply, "Iraq feeds terrorism."

People in the White House, like former protégé Condi Rice, feel betrayed by Scowcroft. It works both ways:

"She says we’re going to democratize Iraq, and I said, ‘Condi, you’re not going to democratize Iraq.’"

...

“What the realist fears is the consequences of idealism,” he said. “The reason I part with the neocons is that I don’t think in any reasonable time frame the objective of democratizing the Middle East can be successful. If you can do it, fine, but I don’t you think you can, and in the process of trying to do it you can make the Middle East a lot worse.” He added, “I’m a realist in the sense that I’m a cynic about human nature.”

Some insiders think the former General speaks for the elder Bush.

Indeed, other Bush I officials, like James Baker, are also prominent outsiders now. I guess that frees them to criticize:

“We always made sure the President was hearing all the possibilities,” John Sununu, who served as chief of staff to George H. W. Bush, said. “That’s one of the differences between the first Bush Administration and this Bush Administration.”

The article is filled with criticism of various players in the current administration.

Hidden realism?

University of Chicago political scientist John J. Mearsheimer often argues that liberal political rhetoric is used to sell foreign policies that might otherwise be unpalatable. States, especially great powers like the US, pursue policies that are consistent with realism. They are self-interested and especially concerned about the distribution of power.

So what do we make of last Thursday's Inaugural address, which seemed to be about "freedom" and "liberty"? Plenty of analysts say this was Bush channeling Woodrow Wilson -- and Ronald Reagan. And they very strongly imply that Bush meant every word. Some are even calling it a new (or perhaps revised) "Bush doctrine of liberty."

White House spinners insist that the speech wasn't merely about ideas, but rather was a fusion of ideas and power politics. In The Washington Post, January 22, 2005, Dan Balz and Jim VandeHei talked to Presidential speechwriter Michael J. Gerson who emphasized that the US intends to use its power to achieve its ideals:

Bush's speech appeared to put the United States on a course in which moralism and idealism, rather than realpolitik, form the philosophical foundations of foreign policy. But White House officials said that is a misreading of how Bush operates. "His goals are deeply idealistic," Gerson said. "His methods are deeply realistic. In fact, that was one of the themes of the speech, that this traditional divide between realism and idealism is no longer adequate for the conduct of American foreign policy."

Condi Rice has previously talked (quite often, actually) about the marriage between material power and values.

There is an old argument between the so-called "realistic" school of foreign affairs and the "idealistic" school. To oversimplify, realists downplay the importance of values and the internal structures of states, emphasizing instead the balance of power as the key to stability and peace. Idealists emphasize the primacy of values, such as freedom and democracy and human rights in ensuring that just political order is obtained. As a professor, I recognize that this debate has won tenure for and sustained the careers of many generations of scholars. As a policymaker, I can tell you that these categories obscure reality.

In real life, power and values are married completely. Power matters in the conduct of world affairs. Great powers matter a great deal -- they have the ability to influence the lives of millions and change history. And the values of great powers matter as well.

From there, it's only a hop, skip and a jump to the Orwellian phrase used in NSS 2002, "a balance of power that favors freedom."

I'm not 100% sure whether to side with Mearsheimer or Gerson and Rice in this discussion, but Fareed Zakaria offers a very interesting point:

Bush has also pushed higher on the agenda the question of American hypocrisy....

The chasm between rhetoric and reality, while inevitable, is striking. The Bush administration has not been particularly vociferous in holding dictators to account—no more or less, really, than other recent administrations. Vladimir Putin has presided over the most significant reversal of freedoms across the globe, only to be praised by Bush as a soulmate. More scandalously, the president has sided with Putin in his interpretation of the Chechen war as a defensive action against terrorists....

...when democratic Taiwan stood up to communist China last year, Bush publicly admonished it, siding with Beijing. When brave dissidents in Saudi Arabia were jailed for proposing the possibility of a constitutional monarchy in that country, the administration barely mentioned it. Crown Prince Abdullah, who rules one of the eight most repressive countries in the world (according to Freedom House), is one of a handful of leaders to have been invited to the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. (The elected leaders of, say, India, France, Turkey and Indonesia have never been accorded this courtesy.) The president has met with and given aid to Islam Karimov, the dictator of Uzbekistan, who presides over one of the nastiest regimes in the world today, far more repressive than Iran’s, to take just one example.

Zakaria's article is very good and well worth reading in its entirety. I'd like to think that it ties in nicely with my previous blog entries about American hypocrisy.

Bush's war rhetoric

Yesterday, I blogged about a somewhat narrow academic question -- focusing on realist scholars and their view of international relations.

Still, the underlying question is quite important. Does the US pursue its ideals in world politics, or does it merely talk about ideals while employing brute force to achieve instrumental interests?

When I was working on candidate Bush's foreign policy promises from the 2000 campaign (ultimately published in International Studies Perspectives), I discovered that a lot of Bush advisors claimed to be hard-nosed realists who rejected Clintonian idealism. Condi Rice's Foreign Affairs article stressed that it can be hard to separate realism and idealism in the real world, but she clearly preferred to be considered a realist.

However, much has changed since 2000. For one thing, a group of neoconservative foreign policy intellectuals has assumed more power within the administration than many thought was likely. Paul Wolfowitz, "Scooter" Libby, John Bolton and other alums of the Project for a New American Century are in many ways idealists.

As Edward Rhodes of Rutgers has argued, Bush administration policy and rhetoric since 9/11 seems downright Wilsonian. He wrote an article in Survival called "The Imperial Logic of Bush's Liberal Agenda."

President Bush's references to freedom, democracy, elections and other American ideals means something completely different if the realist John Mearsheimer is even half right. If these words are mere cover for selfish American interventionism, the rhetoric is totally hypocritical and the policy is likely quite dangerous.

The realist scholar Christopher Layne predicted that the Iraq war would become a quagmire back in March (Mearsheimer too has hit on this theme)! More importantly, Layne argued this:

"The administration’s policy has revealed the United States before the world as an aggressive hegemon engaged in the naked aggrandizement of its own power. "

In sum, liberal imperialism is still imperialism.

And the debate I discussed yesterday isn't merely academic.

War rhetoric

Many international relations theorists are self-proclaimed "realists." Traditionally, realists focus most of their attention on the self-interested behavior of powerful nation-states -- who are far more likely to get what they want in world politics. Yet, their behavior can be constrained by the "balance of power." Essentially, great powers can be deterred, depending upon the international context, even though they have a lot of clout and freedom of action.

Realists typically clash with idealists, who believe that the domestic characteristics of states matter a great deal. Democracies behave differently than non-democracies. For example, they do not go to war with one another. Idealists also value international institutions, which realists typically view as fairly unimportant since interstate cooperation tends to create disparate benefits among them.

Anyway, realists reject the idealist argument since they think all states behave about the same. University of Chicago realist John J. Mearsheimer argues, for example, that "you can't discriminate between morally virtuous states and malign states in the international system. For Realists, all states are basically black boxes that behave the same way. If the United States has to be ruthless, the United States will be ruthless. That's the argument that Realists make."

This has profound implications for understanding American foreign policy (even though the theory purports to explain international relations, not the behavior of a single state) because, as Mearsheimer argues, idealism is more widely embraced by the American people and makes for better political rhetoric.

However, Mearsheimer clearly believes that the US embraces realism even as its leaders sometimes mouth idealist words:

"We behave in the world according to Realistic dictates on almost every occasion. What's affected by the point you're making is that rhetoric. In other words, we act according to the dictates of realpolitik, but we justify our policies in terms of liberal ideologies. So what is going on here is that in many cases, elites speak one language [in public], and act according to a different logic and speak a different language behind closed doors."

Why am I bringing this up? Well, Mearsheimer was one of the most prominent academic critics of the buildup to war in Iraq. With Stephen Walt of Harvard, he authored op-ed pieces, wrote a fairly long article for Foreign Policy, and circulated a widely debated paper within academic circles. Walt and Mearsheimer thought Iraq could be readily deterred or contained and that war was unnecessary. He has since called the attack a big mistake.

Mearsheimer would likely argue that the US behavior was exceptional in a wide context. After all, if he was providing realist advice, and if policymakers almost always act on realist advice, then the most recent case must have been very unusual. A true anamoly.

Then again, there might be a problem with realism -- and its policy advice. Mearsheimer famously argued in 1990 that Germany should develop nuclear weapons to assure a balance of power in Europe (he also predicted the collapse of NATO). A few years later, in argued that the Ukraine should keep its nuclear weapons to balance Russia.

For some time, Mearsheimer's been arguing that the US should be worrying about the future containment of China. In his latest book, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Mearsheimer argues "that a rising China is the most dangerous potential threat to the United States in the early twenty-first century."

By his own admission, the US has not been behaving as if this is the case:

"This analysis suggests that the United States has a profound interest in seeing Chinese economic growth slow considerably in the years ahead. For much of the past decade, however, the United States has pursued a strategy intended to have the opposite effect....This U.S. policy on China is misguided."

A graduate student and I have started looking somewhat systematically at realist policy advice, so I'm not sure what to conclude from all this yet.

It might be, however, that Mearsheimer is tired of having his realist advice ignored. In Thursday's New York Times (registration required), he defends international institutions and genuine cooperation. [Remember: In the academic world, he is one of the staunchest critics of these organizations. He titles one famous piece "The False Promise of International Institutions."]:

"But as we're finding out with regard to Iraq, Iran and North Korea, we need the Europeans and we need institutions like the U.N. The fact is that the United States can't run the world by itself, and the problem is, we've done a lot of damage in our relations with allies, and people are not terribly enthusiastic about helping us now."

Perhaps Mearsheimer is a closet liberal? He certainly admires many idealist virtues, such as public debate about ideas and the scrutiny of public officials.

"The beauty of the American system is that we have all these private institutions, and even public institutions like Berkeley, where with the tenure system, professors are free to say whatever they want, and suffer hardly any consequences in terms of losing their jobs. Therefore, I think we have a very important responsibility to talk about important issues, and to challenge conventional wisdoms that other people might be unwilling to challenge. We have a real social responsibility here.

I'm not making the argument here, by the way, for coming up with particular answers to important questions. In fact, if different scholars come up with different answers, fine. But in a democracy like the United States, you want to have a very healthy public debate about the key issues of the day. And I think that scholars can go a long way towards making that debate richer and healthier."

Heck, he's even said on television that the anti-war movement can limit political leaders' decisions about war and peace.