US power shifts

Gordon Adams uses a foreign-policy realist approach to poke holes in a fond bipartisan assumption, "Both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans are struggling to recreate a myth: that the US dominates the world by dint of power, values, wisdom, even God’s decisions. America, and only America, can bring order and security to the world. Any other option spells chaos." (Beyond Hegemony And A Liberal International Order LobeLog 05/17/2018)

I have a love-hate relationship with the "realist" school of foreign policy, prominently represented today by Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, and Famous earlier realists included Kenneth Walz, George Kennan, Reinhold Neibuhr, and Hans Morgenthau. I've been guilty in the past of confusing Hans Morgenthau with Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who served as Secretary of Treasury 1934-1945. The latter was involved in major foreign policy issues. But Hans Morgenthau is the one renowned for his theoretical contributions to foreign policy studies, notably with his 1948 book Politics Among Nations.

The article on Hans Morgenthau in the ever-trusty Encyclopaedia Britannica summarizes the bare bones of his Realist theory this way:

... Morgenthau maintained that politics is governed by distinct immutable laws of nature and that states could deduce rational and objectively correct actions from an understanding of these laws. Central to Morgenthau’s theory was the concept of power as the dominant goal in international politics and the definition of national interest in terms of power. His state-centred approach, which refused to identify the moral aspirations of a state with the objective moral laws that govern the universe, maintained that all state actions seek to keep, demonstrate, or increase power. He called for recognition of the nature and limits of power and for the use of traditional methods of diplomacy, including compromise.

On the one hand, that formulation doesn't work for me as an approach to foreign policy, because it suggests a kind of amorality in life-and-death decisions involving war and peace, and suggests an indifference or irrelevance to considerations of forms of government and ruling ideologies. That's the second part of my love/hate relationship with it. Also because the famous war criminal Henry Kissinger is thought to be a practitioner of it. The fact that I first encountered the theory in a conservative text in my first college political science class, which was also taught by a hardcore Nixon-Agnew conservative professor, probably adds to its bad vibe for me.

The "love" part is my experience that practitioners of the realist approach has to do with the fact that they often come up with a more realistic practical assessment of foreign policy situations than more explicitly ideological approaches. The realist view has its own ideological implications, but let's leave that aside for now. Approaching issues while seriously trying to apply the realist assumptions means one has to think carefully about how the leaders and political actors of other countries are making judgments about their own national interests. And the realist approaches assumes that all countries view their national interests in ways that at least implicitly have general legitimacy. Done right, it provides a counter-balance to the temptation to assume the outcome that would be most congenial to one's own ideology or interests is the most likely one. And recognizes that what may look like an important but secondary stake for one country may be regarded by another as an existential matter.

The adherents of the realist view viewed the "unipolar moment" of the global dominance of the United States after the fall of the Eastern Bloc governments and of the USSR as an inevitably transitory state of affairs. They predicted that other countries would seek ways to counter the overwhelming American dominance and create new alliances and approaches in pursuit of that goal. And, in fact, that process has proceeded as expected. Jeremi Suri described those shifting balances in an article from the transition time between the Presidential election and the beginning of Trump's Administration, Blustering Toward Armageddon The American Prospect 01/03/2017. His focus is on the major ways that the incoming Trump Administration might manage that shifting matrix of power relations in a way that could lead to disaster. Although his well-founded pessimism about Trump's ability to manage foreign affairs successfully also seems to be influenced by a perhaps overconfident faith in the ability of the US to be a benign influence in the Middle East, in particular.

Gordon Adams is skeptical that the two major parties fully appreciate that we are undergoing a "fundamental shift in global realities—the centrifugal redistribution of power and influence in the international system that has brought to an end the 'American century.' The United States has become just another power in a system for which it no longer sets or enforces the rules, if it ever really did."

But Adams thinks the Democrats are generally being unrealistic about what the feasible alternatives to Trumpist foreign policy are: "Both political parties fail to cope with this reality. Democrats and liberals insist that Trump’s foreign-policy decisions threaten the 'rules-based' international order America built and dominated. A simple change in leadership, they believe, can restore order and America’s primacy."

And he sounds considerably more skeptical than Jeremi Suri about the American ability to shape political matters in the Middle East to our liking:

In the Middle East, the power shift is palpable. The United States has treated Iran as a pariah since 1979, trying to stuff the ayatollahs back into some imaginary bottle, hoping that they will go away or be overthrown. This approach has failed, and the withdrawal from the nuclear deal will only make that failure more evident. Iran is a regional power, defending its interests, engaging other powers and movements inside and outside the region, such as Russia. US regime change in Iraq not only destabilized the region but helped usher the Iranians into this active regional role. The other influential countries in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia and Israel, will have to deal with this reality.

In addition to these three countries, Russia is also key to regional stability and instability. There’s no way of pushing the Russians out, short of direct conflict. Nor can Turkey be forced to comply with American policy. It is clearly asserting its own interests and influence in three directions at the same time: Central Asia and Russia, Europe, and the Middle East. The invasion of Iraq may have helped open this Pandora’s box. The US is rapidly becoming a marginal player in the chaotic security environment of the Middle East.

Leon Hadar adds a provocative wrinkle to this picture (Trump's Strategy for the Middle East Is Working The National Interest 05/17/2018):

... perhaps Americans should be experiencing a certain sense of pleasure, or Schadenfreude as they watch the Russians being drawn into what could prove to be a long and costly effort to “do something” in response to the growing military tensions between Israel and Iran and its allies in Syria, the Kremlin’s Middle Eastern protectorate. Good luck with that, President Putin!

He has a point!

Hadar recites some of the history of the US involvement in the Middle East. Which is not a story of "winning," which our current President pretends to think is the whole point of foreign policy. While we can certainly understand Russia's current expansion of influence in the Middle East as an instance of the Realist theory playing out in the real world, that doesn't mean that it hurts the United States more than it helps. And while the US should certainly try to promote peaceful relations in the Middle East, including a decent settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict, if Russia's luck in the region resembles that of the US the last couple of decades, that's a fate one should only wish onto an enemy.

Hadar argues:

While no one will be forcing the United States out of the Middle East anytime soon, it is true that under both former President Barack Obama and his successor in office, President Donald Trump, the decision not to intervene directly in the civil war in Syria, can be seen as part of an effort to reduce the level of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East. That does not amount to “isolationism” but it certainly challenges the axiom that Washington is required to immediately “do something” to resolve this or that conflict in the Middle East.

I tend to think he's overoptimistic there about American restraint. Obama did show a practical awareness that getting sucked in to a large intervention in the Syrian civil war would be a bad idea. But his Administration did try to put the American finger on the scales there, including direct support to some very dubious anti-government rebels. And the Obama/Hillary intervention in Libya with France and Britain was a reckless action with negative long-term consequences, and a disaster in the short-run, too. Albeit not as gigantic a disaster as the Iraq War. And I don't see that Trump has any policy goal as consistent as what Hadar calls "Trump’s goal of reducing U.S. military presence in the Middle East since it supposedly would lead to a confrontation between the United States and Iran."

Hadar may also have been letting hope get the better of judgment in his Don't Expect President Trump to Invade Iran The National Interest 02/21/2018. In the three months since then, Trump has brought on John Bolton as National Security Adviser and a buildup for a war with Iran sure looks like it's in process. But he does take a worthwhile shot at the way that the "Munich analogy" has served as musical accompaniment to some really bad foreign policy decisions:

For much of the post-1945 era, Western leaders, applying the lessons of World War II, operated under the assumption that the adoption of a policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany, symbolized by the agreement that the British and French leaders signed with Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1938, helped encourage German military aggression that eventually led to the breakout of war in Europe.

The result was that the United States and its Western allies held to the conviction that they needed to avert another Munich, which meant that they had to adopt a tough and uncompromising diplomatic and military stand against any potential aggressor, whom they were quick to compare to another Hitler.

So if Egyptian nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser and Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh were “like Hitler,” failing to use military power in response to any bellicose action on their part would amount to appeasement.

Realism and US-Russia policy

Gilbert Doctorow of the American Committee for East West Accord looks at Henry Kissinger's views on Russian foreign policy in Trump and Revenge of the ‘Realists’ Consortium News 12/31/2016. He argues that despite his reputation as a scholar-statesman - and war criminal - Kissinger's basic view of Russian policy assumption in some ways is surprisingly simplistic:

... Kissinger’s thinking about Russian history is so clear one might imagine he knows what he is talking about. The question is of key importance because the Realist School is built upon the assumption that one can accurately appraise the strengths of all players and that one has a solid knowledge of the history and traditions of the players. In this it distinguishes itself from idealism, with its focus on universal values and disinterest in regional knowledge.

From Kissinger’s own academic career in studying European diplomacy in the Nineteenth Century, Russia should have been on his plate, given that the country was one of the three decisive players in the first half of the century (Holy Alliance) and one of the five or six decisive players in the second half of the century. However, that was manifestly not the case.

Kissinger is widely reputed to be a voracious reader. Yet, it is obvious that Russia has never and does not now figure among the topics he reads. In Diplomacy, for his analysis of Russia, he relied on the very dated Nineteenth Century classics of Russian history like Vasily Klyuchevsky that he read in translation during his graduate student days at Harvard.

Klyuchevsky is unquestionably a good starting point for students of Russian history. He was the father of the historiography that came down to Kissinger in the person of Michael Karpovich, the founder of Russian studies at Harvard. But his notion of Russia’s manifest destiny of borders moving out across the Eurasian land mass was part of a Liberal and anti-tsarist historiography. By today’s standards, reading Klyuchevsky has mainly curiosity value. To put the issue in terms closer to an American reader, it is as if Kissinger were using de Tocqueville as the key source for writing about contemporary America.

Doctorow also discusses the mixed nature of on Kissinger's positions on Russia. On the one hand, he places Kissinger "squarely among those responsible for getting us into the confrontation with Russia that reached its climax under Barack Obama." And, "beginning in the 1990s, Henry Kissinger modified his message of realism to accommodate the then-dominant American school of idealism, or values-based foreign policy."

But he also gives Kissinger credit for a more pragmatic, realistic view of Russia than that shared by neoconservatives and liberal hawks: "he is correctly perceived as a champion of the art of diplomacy, which is another word for compromise and deal-making. It is precisely diplomacy that has been sorely lacking in the U.S. government in recent decades. Under both Republican and Democratic presidents, ideology has held sway at the State Department and in the White House."

Doctorow also calls attention to this Spiegel interview, 'Do We Achieve World Order Through Chaos or Insight?' 11/13/2014, in which the former Secretary of State says:

SPIEGEL: So let's talk about a concrete example: How should the West react to the Russian annexation of Crimea? Do you fear this might mean that borders in the future are no longer incontrovertible?

Kissinger: Crimea is a symptom, not a cause. Furthermore, Crimea is a special case. Ukraine was part of Russia for a long time. You can't accept the principle that any country can just change the borders and take a province of another country. But if the West is honest with itself, it has to admit that there were mistakes on its side. The annexation of Crimea was not a move toward global conquest. It was not Hitler moving into Czechoslovakia.

SPIEGEL: What was it then?

Kissinger: One has to ask one's self this question: Putin spent tens of billions of dollars on the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The theme of the Olympics was that Russia is a progressive state tied to the West through its culture and, therefore, it presumably wants to be part of it. So it doesn't make any sense that a week after the close of the Olympics, Putin would take Crimea and start a war over Ukraine. So one has to ask one's self why did it happen?

SPIEGEL: What you're saying is that the West has at least a kind of responsibility for the escalation?

Kissinger: Yes, I am saying that. Europe and America did not understand the impact of these events, starting with the negotiations about Ukraine's economic relations with the European Union and culminating in the demonstrations in Kiev. All these, and their impact, should have been the subject of a dialogue with Russia. This does not mean the Russian response was appropriate.

SPIEGEL: It seems you have a lot of understanding for Putin. But isn't he doing exactly what you are warning of -- creating chaos in eastern Ukraine and threatening sovereignty?

Kissinger: Certainly. But Ukraine has always had a special significance for Russia. It was a mistake not to realize that.

SPIEGEL: Relations between the West and Russia are tenser now than they have been in decades. Should we be concerned about the prospects of a new Cold War?

Kissinger: There clearly is this danger, and we must not ignore it. I think a resumption of the Cold War would be a historic tragedy. If a conflict is avoidable, on a basis reflecting morality and security, one should try to avoid it.

SPIEGEL: But didn't the annexation of Crimea by Russia force the EU and US to react by imposing sanctions?

Kissinger: One, the West could not accept the annexation; some countermeasures were necessary. But nobody in the West has offered a concrete program to restore Crimea. Nobody is willing to fight over eastern Ukraine. That's a fact of life. So one could say we don't have to accept it, and we do not treat Crimea as a Russian territory under international law -- just as we continued to treat the Baltic states as independent throughout Soviet rule. [my emphasis in italics]

Doctorow also observes of Kissinger's 2001 book Does America Need a Foreign Policy?:

In his specific remarks on how America should conduct its foreign policy towards Russia, he urged moderation, continued readiness to assist the country with its transition to democracy and free markets, and attentiveness to Russia’s voice in international forums.

Note especially his comment on prospective NATO expansion into the Baltic States, which Kissinger believed in 2001 would be provocative, saying it would put NATO forces within 30 miles of St Petersburg, one of Russia’s largest population centers. He correctly foresaw that “Advancing the NATO integrated command this close to key centers of Russia might mortgage the possibilities of relating Russia to the emerging world order as a constructive member.”

Doctorow also describes what he calls "the soft underbelly of Realpolitik: realism can be only as useful as the expertise and judgment of its practitioner." Although that broad characterization could be made of any foreign policy approach, it's useful here in calling attention to the fact that the pragmatic calculations that the Realist school of foreign policy offers to provide can be highly misleading and even dysfunctional if the key information and assumptions are insufficiently grounded.

Eric Levitz takes a look at some of the anti-Russian hawkish sentiments among some foreign policy figures associated with the President-elect's incoming administration, Trump Allies Argue That Obama’s Sanctions on Russia Are Too Weak New York 12/30/2016:

The Heritage Foundation — which has played a central role in staffing Trump’s White House — argues that Obama’s sanctions are “too little, too late.” Is this the conservative think tank’s sly attempt to pressure Trump into adopting an even more hard-line stance against Russia?

Meanwhile, the man who was one mustache away from becoming Trump’s deputy secretary of State offered similar talking points on Fox News.

“I don’t think they will have much impact at all,” John Bolton said of the Obama administration’s sanctions on Friday. “The Russians have walked all over the Obama administration for eight years. It’s really been a pathetic performance. So what this last burst of activity has to do is hard to say. I do think it’s intended to try and box the Trump administration in. I think it will fail. This is simply an executive order. If President Trump decides to reverse it, it’s easy enough to do.”

Bolton went on to accuse the Obama administration of having “politicized” the process of intelligence gathering — a claim that’s belied by the president’s decision not to impose sanctions or release detailed intelligence reports until after Election Day. Nonetheless, Bolton suggested that Trump was correct to treat public intelligence reports with some skepticism.

Of course, it remains to be seen which of the major foreign policy factions in the incoming administration (neocons, America Firsters, Islamophobes) becomes the most significant.

International relations scholarship uses a term that doesn't seem to have become very common in the public discussions of Russian policy with neighboring states, "de facto states," to describe situations like South Ossetia in Georgia. Sergey Markedonov writes in De facto statehood in Eurasia: a political and security phenomenon Caucasus Survey 3:3 (2015):

... new internationally recognized states are not the only result of the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Another major consequence was the appearance of new formations also declaring their sovereignty. Known variously as “unrecognized states”, “quasi/pseudo-states” or “breakaway republics”, they play a significant role in geopolitical rivalries, conflict resolution processes and post-Soviet nation-building development despite a lack of formal-juridical recognition. In this article, we use the academically and politically neutral term “de facto states” to describe them.

De facto statehood is not, however, a phenomenon or product exclusively associated with the Soviet (or, to include the former Yugoslavia, socialist) disintegrations. Entities emerging as a result of revolutions, various practices of national self-determination (which was post-factum called liberation), or foreign policy games, but which did not gain broad or even limited recognition, had existed long before 1991. Even some European countries, such as France (after the French Revolution), the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium and Ireland, were not recognized for some period of time in the past. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the USSR existed for some time without international recognition (e.g. the USA recognized the “new realities in Eurasia” only in 1933). The People’s Republic of China had no representation in the United Nations (UN) from 1949 to 1971. China’s interests were represented by the Republic of China (Taiwan). The situation changed only after the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 2758 (“Restoration of the Lawful Rights of the People’s Republic of China in the United Nations”) on 25 October 1971.

Nevertheless, the Soviet Union’s disintegration produced an impressive list of entities that exist in reality but lack recognition by UN member countries. At present, there are six such entities: Abkhazia, South Ossetia, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR), the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic and the two alleged People’s Republics of Donbass (in south-eastern Ukraine). Two of these, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, have received limited recognition by individual countries. [my emphasis]

Crimea does not count as a "de facto state" in the same sense as those entities, because Crimea has been integrated into the nation of Russia itself, despite the widespread lack of international recognition of that annexation.

The Janus face of foreign policy "realism"

I read two posts today that together display the strengths and drawbacks of the "realist" theory of foreign policy thought.

Stephen Walt, my favorite advocate of the realist viewpoint, explains it briefly in What Would a Realist World Have Looked Like? Foreign Policy 01/08/2016:

Realism sees power as the centerpiece of political life and sees states as primarily concerned with ensuring their own security in a world where there’s no world government to protect them from others. Realists believe military power is essential to preserving a state’s independence and autonomy, but they recognize it is a crude instrument that often produces unintended consequences. Realists believe nationalism and other local identities are powerful and enduring; states are mostly selfish; altruism is rare; trust is hard to come by; and norms and institutions have a limited impact on what powerful states do. In short, realists have a generally pessimistic view of international affairs and are wary of efforts to remake the world according to some ideological blueprint, no matter how appealing it might be in the abstract.

He gives several examples of how a failure of realistic thinking has led to bad foreign policy decisions for the US.

Paul Pillar is also someone I often quote here. And his analyses are impressive. He identifies with the "realist" approach. But the examples he gives in The Forgotten Benefits of Offshore Balancing National Interest 01/27/2016 are a reminder of the grim side of foreign-policy "realism":

During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, for example, the United States was officially neutral. When it appeared that Iraq would have difficulty keeping up the fight, the Reagan administration tilted toward Baghdad—a tilt that, in light of history that would unfold two decades later, made for strange bedfellows. Saddam Hussein's role as the original aggressor, his use of chemical weapons, and humanitarian considerations involving the enormous costs of the war to both sides took a back seat to the idea that the United States would not benefit from either side being a clear winner. It would be better from the standpoint of U.S. interests and the prevention of anyone gaining regional hegemony to have both sides suffer from an exhausting stalemate. The idea was valid, although the same U.S. policymakers later mishandled policy toward the war with what became the Iran-Contra scandal. [my emphasis]

James Carden also discusses the extent to which the "realist" perspective has been sidelined in practice in official circles in How Neocons Banished Realism Consortium News 01/16/2016.

He notes, as Walt also indicates, that the "liberal interventionists" have become largely indistinguishable from the neocons in practice.