The Dearth of Imagination in American Foreign Policy

A Critical View of Dominant IR Thinking and Policy; A Call to Action

The Suffocation of State-Centrism and Realism

Our leading politicians are stuck in a narrow, realist paradigm—too many have become intoxicated by the spirits of the Westphalian Treaty. Leading realist apologists in the international relations academy, from Hedley Bull to Kenneth Waltz to Robert Jervis, have all but carried this incendiary torch.

The dominant, state-centric perception of how the world operates has its roots in the 1648 Westphalian

Treaty’s delineations of “jurisdictions” (i.e. establishments of distinct political borders and sovereignty). Leading American statesmen, from Henry Kissinger to Zbigniew Brzezinski, by advocating state-centric solutions to more and more state-transcendent problems, continue to force a tired theory onto modern predicaments—a square peg for a round hole. The Treaty of Westphalia is over 350 years old; the world has changed. For too long the supremacy of the intangible boundary has dominated IR theory and subsequently popular intellectual and political perspectives.

In short, the dominance of the Realist school of thought needs to be supplanted. Realism’s state bias toward global affairs does not comport with the realities of the twenty-first century. Globalization is comprised of, is the result of, and gives life to many particulars—im/migration, disease, global warming, drug trafficking, human smuggling, the Internet, global news outlets, finance, transnational corporations (including private military firms), famine, poverty, and on and on. Because they easily transcend invisible, abstract, political boundaries, these phenomena are not foreign to any country. The contingencies of twenty-first century existence are global in the truest sense of the word. Voices that address said aspects with a worldly approach—that is, not foreign—must achieve status quo ranking in our policy debates. More internationalist perspectives, and less realist conceit, are needed in our literature and governments.

The titles alone of two prominent outlets for American foreign policy discourse, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, indicate problematic outlooks. The tone of these two magazines is one that looks out to the world; that is, everything occurring outside of our borders, no matter the level of American involvement, is “foreign.”

A telling example of why more liberal IR scholars must enter the public sphere is a recent essay by Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Hass. In 2008 he writes: The principal characteristic of twenty-first-century international relations is turning out to be nonpolarity: a world dominated not by one or two or even several states but rather by dozens of actors possessing and exercising various kinds of power.

This represents a tectonic shift from the past…Indeed, one of the cardinal features of the contemporary international system is that nation-states have lost their monopoly on power and in some domains their preeminence as well. States are being challenged from above, by regional and global organizations; from below, by militias; and from the side, by a variety of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and corporations. Power is now found in many hands and in many places.¹

These ideas are not new; critical IR theorists have been discussing the very same concepts for two decades or more already. The only real “tectonic shift” to come from Hass’s essay is not in recognizing the actuality of international affairs, but in the catching-up he and other mainstream American foreign policy experts are now involved in. While American Realists recently basked in what they saw as a “unipolar moment,” globalization and its various actors were in motion, filling voids of power, and acting where previously-dominant American and Soviet states once had interests. Critical IR theorists knew this, so why did it take so long for mainstream analysts to figure it out? This is exactly why critical research and analysis must be shared with policymakers and thinkers formulating American foreign policy.

Now, in realization of the lost (or never-was) “American moment,” Washington’s status quo cohort is scrambling to invent a new IR paradigm and concomitant American foreign policy agenda. Political moderates, Democratic “liberals,” and even conservatives now espouse a softer, global leadership agenda, but the implicit goal of all of these mainstream thinkers is of a world dominated by the United States—a benign hegemony, if you will. They assume that global development—namely democratic and economic—is dependent on an American vision. Underlying this thinking is the presupposition this will be accomplished under a statist approach. Neither of these pretensions, of course, is necessarily true.

Regretfully, the pages of our most widely read and respected policy journals are dominated by traditional, Realist, status quo thinking. Realist champions like Robert Jervis, Robert Kagan, Henry Kissinger, John Mearsheimer, Fareed Zakaria, and so many more regularly appear in these magazines. An increasingly integrated world demands new perspectives, but radical departures from IR tradition is lacking in our political conversation.

The Democrats are Just as Guilty In the United States this is not a Left/Right issue—it is a problem that spans the political spectrum. To think the realist worldview is limited to the Republican Party is misleading. The Center-Left of the American political spectrum (i.e. Democratic Party) also obstinately clings to a jingoistic statist approach. Democratic stalwarts like Madeline Albright, Samuel Berger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, are regularly featured in Foreign Affairs, or publish attention-grabbing books, but just like their conservative counterparts, there is a dearth of creative thinking and courageous policy recommendations.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor under President Carter and current foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama, recently published a book declaring the United States has a choice to make: Either we assume the path of global leadership, or we pursue one of international dominance.² This is not an exceptional claim, since many Americans assume the twenty-first century will be characterized by one of these two paths. According to Brzezinksi, a post-Bush, American dominant world, is either, a) shaped by American pursuance of soft power (e.g. diplomacy) in combination with smarter, sanctioned uses of military might; or b) constituted of continued American militaristic, unilateral bellicosity. The former, of course, is the broader foreign policy members on both sides of the aisle most advocate (currently, to say otherwise is political suicide).

Brzezinski’s The Choice is hardly imaginative; indeed William Pfaff called it “a nuanced expression of the conventional wisdom among American foreign policy experts.”³ “Brzezinski’s book is a disappointing work,” Pfaff writes, “in that its assumptions about the nature of contemporary international relations, and about the demands and ultimate objectives of American foreign policy, do not fundamentally challenge those of the Bush administration and those who support its general approach.” Pfaff cuts a clear indictment of Brzezinski’s insipid policy advice, but leading IR analysts in the Democratic Party continue to regurgitate the same tiresome scheming. Brzezinski is, after all, advising the potential successor to George Bush. A real, fundamental shift in the outlook of American IR policymakers will not occur with a Democrat in the White House. Former national security advisor to Bill Clinton, Samuel Berger claims, “What Democrats must offer is a sense of realism,” because “true Realists” (as opposed to the flawed Realists in the Bush administration?) “understand the linkage between the way countries are governed and their external behavior.” Meanwhile, contributions from major Democratic presidential candidates to Foreign Affairs in the last year were any number of things: moderate, bellicose, trite, old wine in new bottles, conservative, unimaginative. They were much, but they were not progressive, creative, or fresh. Former candidate Bill Richardson, for one, even titled his contribution “A New Realism.” The point that Democrats and Republicans operate on the same, assumed (and misguided) framework is further underscored by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s recent bland contribution to the magazine, espousing a “new American realism.”

The fundamental problem with Brzezinski’s, Berger’s, and Hass’s approach, and that of leading moderate” or “liberal” thinkers in Washington, is the realism underpinning their understanding of, and approach to, the world system. Berger, for one, calls for a “forward-looking realism, without the ideological rigidity that has alienated our natural allies around the world.” The tragic irony is, however, because of its statist bias, realism, forward looking or not, is constrained by the very rigidity that prevents the emergence of innovate policymaking. Realism has not only gotten the U.S. into the follies of Vietnam and Iraq, but it lies behind the tragedies of, for example, not intervening in Myanmar to provide aid to tsunami victims. It is realism that will, if we were to stumble into a war with Iran, underpin the IR philosophy behind the next president, Republican or Democrat.

The world cannot be compartmentalized by state borders or larger, simplistic, abstract conceptions. The same realist mentality that gave us conservatives’ brain-child theory on the “clash of civilizations” is the same philosophy that drives some Democratic Party understandings of the world. As William Pfaff curtly, and rightly, points out: the tired, dominant, realist mentality driving Washington, DC., like Brzezinski’s “global Balkans,” is a concept unfortunately slated to join the “reductive vocabulary of current American foreign affairs discussion, alongside ‘clash of civilizations,’ ‘end of history,’ ‘Mars vs. Venus,’ and ‘old Europe vs. new’—all of them false.”⁴

The maladies of the international system transcend political borders. We must wean ourselves of the Westphalian bias from which so many of our policymakers formulate foreign policy. Realism can be a vicious ideology—it must be replaced by a more internationalist, horizontal IR paradigm.

A Call to Action

International relations scholars and policy advisors must invoke and act upon rules that move beyond the state sovereignty debate touted by the majority of American academics and policymakers. The tradition of elevating state borders as fundamentally primary in creating a global, political architecture must be made history. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia is quickly exhausting its usefulness in organizing the activity of humanity. Realism can neither satisfactorily explain nor solve the ills brought forth by an increasingly integrated world. Nor can it tackle emergent meta-phenomena (e.g. Structural Violence). “The lad does not care for the child’s rattle;”⁵ and so it is that we must dispose of the rusty playthings of IR theory and grow up with the world.

Strides have been made in the direction of overcoming the state-based paradigm—the United Nations, Convention on Genocide, Universal Declaration of Human Rights are just three examples—but while these are auspicious steps toward effective, positive global governance, there is much yet to be accomplished. The justification for intervention in Kosovo in the late 1990s (humanitarian) was a step forward; the failure to invoke the same moral imperative in Rwanda in 1994 was two steps backwards.

The establishment of the International Criminal Court is a positive move; the less than unanimous ratification thereof represents a failure of courage and morals. Westphalian and realist transcendence begins with a declaration: Political borders are no longer the penultimate element to international organization. The next step is to act on that statement. International organization should be understood as a complex universe of multifaceted, multi-nodal power structures and relationships crisscrossing state borders, economic classes, institutions, organizations, and so on. International organization, then, is not simplistic; it is not “black-and-white” or “us and them,” nor entirely horizontal (flat) or vertical (hierarchical).

Policy advice and scholarship must convey this profound reality of twenty-first century international relations. Because academics inform the political sphere, we can influence (overtly or covertly) the framework and direction of the political conversation in this country. In order to subvert realist dogma, a dialogue must be carefully and persistently be constructed, one that better reflects the achievements, failures, and enigmas that transnationalism and globalization have wrought. The task requires that we do what we can in the halls of the academy, in governing bodies, and in the public square. Since none of these institutions will seek our guidance, we must meet and challenge them by fully immersing ourselves and our efforts into their realms. Ways in which this can be accomplished include, but are certainly not limited to:

• Infiltrating federal governments, as well as the United Nations, World Trade Organization, World Bank, and other, major international organs in order to pressure transformation from the inside;

• Rising to the editorial positions of influential publications and publishing houses to increase visibility of critical and creative IR thinking;

• Leveraging the power of tenured professorial positions—at universities and colleges across this country, large and small—to further education in critical IR scholarship;

• Writing articles, opinions, and essays for mainstream magazines and newspapers (large and small). Look beyond obscure, pedantic, academic journals for outlets of critical thought;

• Initiating exchanges of progressive ideas with international counterparts where political stalemates and egoism do not allow for official exchanges; and,

• Presenting our ideas, in papers, essays, analysis, etc, to politicians and officials in international organizations on a regular basis, as well as seeking collaborative forums with scholars in influential think tanks.

Students in the orbits of progressive, forward-thinking institutions are obligated to imagine the world we want to live in—and act on our idealizations. Dismissing this responsibility as futile because realists have conquered the intellectual and policymaking landscape is immoral and cowardly. It is not easy, far from it; we must be prepared to dig in our heels for a long, arduous, and highly contentious effort. We should begin in earnest immediately.

Notes

1. Hass, Richard. “The Age of Nonpolarity: What will Follow U.S. Dominance,” Foreign Affairs (May/June 2008).

2. Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership (New York: Basic Books 2005).

3. Pfaff, William. “The American Mission?” New York Review of Books (April 8, 2004).

4. ibid.

5. de la Mare, Walter. Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination (London: Sidgwick and Jackson 1919).

***

This essay originally appeared in Contexts (October 2008).