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| Metternich |
(I refer in this post to foreign policy realism as capital-r Realism to distinguish it from simply meaning empirical or "realistic".)
The more sensible versions of this outlook, e.g., Stephen Walt's, recognize that because actual human being make foreign policy, personal and collective political/ideological outlooks frame the goals and options around which those decisions are made. Somewhat more dogmatic versions grudgingly accept that some people may be motivated by ideology and foreign policy makers must take that into account in their own deliberations in which they exclude all ideology in favor of cold calculations of objective national interest.
Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer are the best-known American academic advocates of the Realist position. Both of them are outstanding and influential scholars. Their jointly-written book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007) reframed the political and scholarly discussions about the practical influence the nation of Israel has had on American foreign policy. It also provides a great example of the ways in which general ideological and political assumptions extensively interact with countries' more coldly pragmatic calculations of their short- and long-terms power advanatages.
Mearsheimer recently published a major article, Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order (International Security 43:4; Spring 2019) in which he makes a dramatic case that the post-1989 US-led liberal international order is in fact deeply flawed. And it provides an interesting look at some of the ideological/political assumptions he applies to a pragmatic Realist view of the present international order.
Much of Mearsheimer's article is an explanation of his framework for understanding "orders" in the world state system. He distinguishes between "bounded orders" and "international orders," the former being limited to particular groups of states, the latter universal. He also explains distinctions between realist, agnostic, and ideological orders, and between bipolar, multipolar, and unipolar systems. The distinction between (worldwide) international systems and international orders (worldwide or smaller) is central to the theoretical and historical account he presents in this article.
His discussion of "realist" orders among nations is especially intriguing. Because he argues that the Realist foreign policy viewpoint tells us based on experience that a certain variety of world system is incompatible with a "realist" order. "If the world is unipolar, the international order cannot be realist."
Mearsheimer (rightly) dismisses Francis Fukayama's "end of history" viewpoint. But his article does show some Hegelian touches, like that quotation.
Ideological assumptions
The background assumptions of Mearsheimer's analysis are important and informative about the strengths and weaknesses of the Realist viewpoint.
A key one is that Mearsheimer explicitly assumes that nationalism always wins out over liberal principles. He states this position in a drastic formulation, "Because nationalism is the most powerful political ideology on the planet, it invariably trumps [sic] liberalism whenever the two clash, thus undermining the [post-1989] order at its core." (my emphasis)
That statement highlights a problem of this ambiguous Realist framing of ideology. If "nationalism is the most powerful political ideology on the planet," then it's obvious that ideology will drive calculations of a country's approach to pursuing its national interest even in the most narrowly pragmatic sense. To a certain extent, Realism tries to operate with what we might call an anti-ideological ideology.
Also, in the current political moment in which authoritarian trends are growing internationally - a key development that Mearsheimer's article is trying to explain - the statement that "nationalism invariably trumps liberalism whenever the two clash" strikes me as too drastic and, well, unrealistic. And excessively pessimistic.
Problems identified, including how NATO expansion was done
Mearsheimer discusses what he views as the major problems of the post-1989 world order in which the US was the overwhelmingly strongest country, the unipolar moment as it is sometimes called. A key one is the role that interventionist practices have played in US and NATO policies, with both neoconservative militarism and humanitarian interventionism both used to justify them. "Spreading liberal democracy around the globe, which is of paramount importance for building such an order, not only is extremely difªcult, but often poisons relations with other countries and sometimes leads to disastrous wars," he writes. Even when applied with extreme cynicism, as the Cheney-Bush Administration did with the Iraq War, the idea of spreading democracy was a key political justification used to drive support for wars and interventions.
The most interesting criticism here is his view of how the US and its western European allies decided to approach NATO after 1989:
NATO expansion into Eastern Europe is a good example of the United States and its allies working to turn the bounded Western order into a liberal international order. One might think that moving NATO eastward was part of a classic deterrence strategy aimed at containing a potentially aggressive Russia. But it was not, as the West’s strategy was geared toward liberal ends. The objective was to integrate the countries of Eastern Europe — and maybe, one day, Russia as well — into the “security community” that had developed in Western Europe during the Cold War. There is no evidence that its chief architects — Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama — thought that Russia might invade its neighbors and thus needed to be contained, or that they thought Russian leaders had legitimate reasons for fearing NATO enlargement. [my emphasis]This is a big reason why I pay attention to Realist analyses despite my reservations about much of the Realist theoretical framework. This is Mearsheimer's way of saying, maybe we should have thought through much more carefully and seriously what we should do with NATO alliance after the fall of the Warsaw Pact.
His fellow Über-Realist Stephen Walt was more explicitly critical of the NATO expansion last year (NATO Isn’t What You Think It Is Foreign Policy 07/26/2018):
If Trump is mostly confused about NATO, its most ardent defenders remain committed to a set of truisms and dogmas that were questionable when first advanced and have become less and less defensible with time. Chief among these myths is the idea that NATO expansion would create a vast zone of peace in Europe and give the alliance a new and lofty purpose in the wake of the Cold War.In other words, over-optimistic assumptions on NATO expansion created problems that could probably have been reduced or avoided by a more pragmatic and less short-sighted approach.
It hasn’t quite worked out that way. For starters, NATO expansion poisoned relations with Russia and played a central role in creating conflicts between Russia and Georgia and Russia and Ukraine. It’s not the only reason, of course, and I’m not saying Moscow’s responses were legal, proper, justified, or based on an accurate perception of NATO’s intent. I’m only suggesting that Russia’s response was not surprising, especially in light of Russia’s own history and the George H.W. Bush administration’s earlier pledges not to move NATO “one inch eastward” following German reunification. The architects of expansion may have genuinely believed that moving NATO eastward posed no threat to Russia; unfortunately, Russia’s leaders never got the memo (and wouldn’t have believed it if they had).
Furthermore, expanding NATO increased the number of places the alliance was formally obligated to defend (most notably the Baltic states) but without significantly increasing the resources available to perform that task. Once again, proponents of expansion assumed these commitments would never have to be honored, only to wake up and discover they had written a blank check that might be difficult to cover. And we now know that expansion brought in some new members whose commitment to liberal democracy has proved to be fairly shallow. This situation may not be a fatal flaw, insofar as NATO has tolerated nondemocratic members (e.g., Turkey) in the past, but it undermines the proponents’ claim that NATO is a security community based on shared democratic values and an essential element of a liberal world order. [my emphasis]
Mearsheimer is making a related but distinct point about NATO expansion. He is arguing by choosing the unipolar strategy of creating a "liberal" order as distinct from the "agnostic" approach, US leaders made themselves for prone to create the kinds of complications that Walt describes. An agnostic order in a unipolar world system or a "realist" order in a bipolar or multipolar system would likely not have been so quick to make the kinds of mistakes Walt describes with NATO expansion.
He also states that he expects the NATO alliance to endure into the future:
... the United States will want to keep European countries from selling dual-use technologies to China and to help put economic pressure on Beijing when necessary. In return, U.S. military forces will remain in Europe, keeping NATO alive and continuing to serve as the pacifier in that region. Given that virtually every European leader would like to see that happen, the threat of leaving should give the United States significant leverage in getting the Europeans to cooperate on the economic front against China.Questions raised about the Realist outlook
The idea that a unipolar world system cannot produce or allow a "realist" order is a reminder of a contradiction at the basis of the Realist foreign policy outlook. In that case, Mearsheimer seems to be arguing that a Realist understanding of the world shows that at last one kind of international arrangement cannot maintain a world order that operates under Realist assumptions.
Another way of describing that view would be that it assumes that Realism as an approach to foreign policy is actually only useful in describing a Metternichian world, not one in which a single power had the dominance the US did between 1989-2015.
Mearshimer himself defines that time frame for the so-called unipolar moment. "This article assumes that the world became multipolar in or close to 2016, and that the shift away from unipolarity is a death sentence for the liberal international order, which is in the process of collapsing and will be replaced by realist orders." But he does describe the Liberal internationalist order as still persisting in 2019. So he's not proposing that this process operates on a rigid calendar schedule.
This piece also raises the question of to what extent this Realist view assumes not just consistent pursuit of national interest but rationality in that pursuit.
In the view he elaborates here, "agnostic" and "liberal" orders are only options for a unipolar world system. A liberal order promotes internal liberal democracy as a governmental form. In an agnostic order, the unipolar power would be indifferent to the internal forms of government. But I'm inclined to think and hope that the prospects for the expansion of democratic forms of governance are not as gloomy as his analysis seems to imply.
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