Obama and the World

New Directions in US Foreign Policy

Inderjeet Parmar, Linda B. Miller, Mark Ledwidge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415715225
• eBook ISBN: 9781134753222
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This significantly revised, updated and extended second edition of New Directions in US Foreign Policy retains the strongest aspects of its original structure but adds a comprehensive account of the latest theoretical perspectives, the key actors and issues, and new policy directions. Offering a detailed and systematic outline of the field, this text:

• Explains how international relations theories such as realism, liberalism and constructivism can help us to interpret US foreign policy under President Obama
• Examines the key influential actors shaping foreign policy, from political parties and think tanks to religious groups and public opinion
• Explores the most important new policy directions under the Obama administration from the Arab Spring and the rise of China to African policy and multilateralism
• Supplies succinct presentation of relevant case material, and provides recommendations for further reading and web sources for pursuing future research.

Written by a distinguished line-up of contributors actively engaged in original research on the topics covered, and featuring twelve brand new chapters, this text provides a unique platform for rigorous debate over the contentious issues that surround US foreign policy. This wide-ranging text is essential reading for all students and scholars of US foreign policy.

Part 1

Theories

1 Realism and US foreign policy

Adam Quinn

Neither realism nor US foreign policy is a one-dimensional enterprise the content or purpose of which can be easily captured in a single set of uncontroversial propositions. That being the case, the relation between the two is apt to manifest higher levels of complexity than one might expect at first blush. Under the broad heading of ‘realism’, there exists a degree of diversity that is perhaps underappreciated when it comes to such important questions as the sustainability of a unipolar order, the optimal foreign policy course for a state in any given circumstances, or even the question of whether an individual state’s motives and decisions are truly susceptible to theoretical understanding. And as regards US foreign policy: fundamental disputes regarding its motivation, direction, and purpose are as old as the nation itself, and thick strands of literature in both history and political science have arisen apropos of the quest for a definitive interpretation (Quinn 2010: 10–30). A deal of this scope for diversity in interpretation will be apparent from the array of differing analyses contained within this volume.

Thus, in seeking to provide a summary of what realism might have to tell us about contemporary US policy, or vice versa, one faces two not-insignificant challenges: first, bringing to the task an understanding of realism that does that school of thought justice in terms of representativeness and acknowledgement of diversity; and second, formulating a similarly fair and balanced characterization of present US policy to which to apply it. This chapter will seek to address these necessary tasks in that order: first, clarifying what it might mean to take a realist approach to assessing anything in international relations, and then holding the present policy of the United States under President Obama up to examination through that lens. It concludes with the assessment that the Obama administration appears to represent an accommodation-oriented approach to managing a shift against the United States both in terms of the international distribution of power and its domestic capacity to harness resources for national security purposes. Whether the Obama administration is selfconsciously ‘realist’ in its policy is a matter for debate, as will be explained below, but the conclusion here is that its policies broadly and on the whole accord with the broad practical and normative thrust of realism, at least in its defensive forms, and in so doing stand in something of a contrast to those of his immediate predecessor.

What is a realist approach? A focus on power, limits, and restraint

Structural realisms

One strand of realist thought is the structural, or neo-realist, which places primary emphasis on the relative capabilities of states and the international distribution of power. A particular interest in the United States is only natural for structural realists, since as the most powerful single state in the international system, any conceptual approach making power and its distribution central to its concerns must concern itself as a matter of priority with America’s world role. The structural approach originates, at least in the eyes of most histories of the discipline, from the seminal work of Kenneth Waltz ([1979] 2010). In his theoretical model, Waltz posits a system of states struggling to preserve autonomy in an inescapably nonhierarchical international space. The imperatives imposed by this context are for states to tend towards self-interested realpolitik-style behaviour rather than the kinds of deep cooperation typically aspired to by liberal theorists, and to engage in tactical alliances to balance against the emergence of any prospective hegemonic power.

The essential logic of this structural approach has since been developed and elaborated upon, with some sub-theoretical variations posited, by numerous subsequent realist thinkers. The most notable is Mearsheimer (2001), whose conception of realism embraces much of Waltz’s model, but also argues that states are more prone to excesses of ambition when it comes to the accumulation of power, and as a result have a tendency towards overreaching themselves, triggering conflict in the process. At the level of generalization-seeking IR theory, the primary fissure of debate within structural realism thus lies between Mearsheimer’s ‘offensive’ posture and the more ‘defensive’ realism of the Waltzian school which believes states might more often be satisfied with sub-hegemonic levels of power on their own part so long as what power they have is sufficient to protect their autonomy against hegemonic domination by any other. There is also debate to be had over the extent to which hard capabilities merit near-exclusive focus, as many take Waltz to imply, or whether the perception of aggressive intent, i.e. threat, constitutes a decisive factor in giving rise to conflict on the basis of any given distribution of capabilities (Walt 1985).

When it comes to assessing the present-day United States, the chief relevance of a structural realist perspective lies in its treatment of hegemonic power and the question of its sustainability. Realist thought, e.g. Gilpin (1987), can accommodate the view that if a state should obtain a concentration of power and capabilities outstripping all rivals, it may be able to establish a stable order constructed around its own preferences. Given its overwhelming superiority after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the post-Cold War United States seems to qualify readily as a hegemonic power, and the world order to qualify as ‘unipolar’, in realist terms. The most pressing question at present is, then, whether this state of affairs is capable of being sustained into the indefinite future thanks to the vast starting advantage provided by the present US lead across measures of power (Brooks and Wohlforth 2008) or whether the project of sustaining hegemonic power, not just regionally but across all regions of the globe, represents a bold aspiration likely to unravel with some imminence (Layne 2012). From the former perspective the United States represents something of a success story in realist terms, broadly victorious – in spite of some missteps – in its efforts to entrench itself as a sort of systemic overseer, its primacy beyond realistic challenge in the foreseeable future. From the second, it will soon represent the latest in a long line of cautionary tales illustrating the truth that the quest for global hegemony results in overextension and the stimulation of countervailing forces.

Classical and neoclassical realisms

The other major strand of realism, not necessarily entirely distinct in terms of scholarly personnel but distinguishable in terms of intellectual content, concerns itself primarily not just with the question of how the United States is situated within the distribution of power but also with the way it reacts to those circumstances in its policy choices. This brand of realism is sometimes termed ‘classical’ in order to distinguish it from structural frameworks of the Waltz/Mearsheimer kind. Classical realist analysis contains elements of both the descriptive and the normative. This is a necessary combination, since any approach which advances conclusions as to the wisdom and morality of policy can only do so on the basis of some working theory as to the way states’ actions come about and the consequences they are likely to bring.

Realist analysis of this sort regarding US foreign policy has almost invariably been more critical than complimentary. George Kennan (1984) famously scorned the American tendency to adopt ‘legalistic-moralistic’ approaches to international problems and failure to appreciate the primacy of national interests in determining state policy. Hans Morgenthau ([1951] 1982) and Henry Kissinger (1995) both lamented the dominance of the Wilsonian mindset in US political culture, under which policymakers reflexively seek solutions to confl ict premised on liberal transformation of others’ perception of their own interests and/or of the international system itself. Far better, they argued, to embrace the need for unsentimental pursuit of national interest, acknowledging the international space as one in which the United States is in contest with other nations pursuing contrary but equivalently legitimate interests. This is also an argument that this author has made at length elsewhere (Quinn 2010). Reinhold Niebuhr ([1952] 2008), meanwhile, adopted the most explicitly normative and moralistic stance, offering a critique highlighting the United States’ lack of insight into its own hubris. In claiming special insight into the direction of History and seeking superhuman levels of control over the management of global ‘progress’ towards universal embrace of some idealized version of America’s own values and practices, the United States was all too often the author of its own failure. In a grim irony, according to Niebuhr, the very things that made the United States a somewhat admirable power – its attachment to liberal values and strong sense of national purpose – were the flip side of the same coin as its vices, i.e. its tendency towards unreflective arrogance and overreach.

The thing all these analyses have in common is a conviction that American policymakers have historically had a weakness for the pursuit of outlandish objectives centred on the universal adoption of the American worldview, at the expense of a more focused pursuit of national interests defined in a more restrained way. While there may be something admirable in the determined idealism required to pursue liberal ideals, realists argue, there is also moral legitimacy, even virtue, to be found via the insight that defining one’s own interests, and one’s own conception of the good, is ambition enough for any nation. Rather than professing to possess unique insight into the true interests of others, and insisting upon righteous transformation of the international order or conversion of adversaries to the American worldview, far better to take the humbler path of seeking merely to defend the core security needs of the US homeland and way of life. To entertain visions of spreading some American design for life to all lands, to project on to the rest of the world an imagined desire to emulate American norms, or to indulge in fantasies of the unalloyed power that would be required for the US to command foreign nations in the approved direction of History: these are the sorts of projects against which the realist sensibility revolts. In more recent years, the case for such an interpretation has been made by inheritors of the tradition (Lieven and Hulsman 2007; Bacevich 2009).

It is perhaps important to note that this clash between realists and liberal worldviews is not quite the same thing as the often-invoked divide between values and interests as priorities for American policy, signal though that also is in standard taxonomies of US thought. Even administrations that articulate what a realist would consider outlandish ideological objectives, such as the George W. Bush administration and its professed ambition to ‘end tyranny’ (Bush 2005), will often take the trouble to argue that their strategy marries both values and interests since the attainment of their objectives would be to America’s advantage (Rice 2005). The question, from a realist perspective, is not simply whether an administration uses the word ‘interests’ when it articulates its strategy; they always do. It is whether it defines those interests in a way that is restrained. A realistic policy is one that is focused on the defence of core American security concerns and the protection of American society from radical disruption arising from events overseas. Realists are not inclined to see this as requiring or mandating the constitutional transformation of other societies, or the fundamentals of the international order. This moderation of objectives stems in no small part from realism’s acute mindfulness of the limits of the possible when it comes to what American power can achieve beyond its own borders, and for this reason regards transformational objectives with a sceptical eye.

In recent decades, there has also been an effort to interweave three strands: the structural realist model’s belief in the primacy of the international distribution of power; the classical emphasis on the internal qualities of nation states; and the trend in the academy towards placing observations about international behaviour in the framework and language of progressive social scientific research (Kitchen 2010, 2012; Quinn 2013). The resulting body of scholarship has become known, thanks to Gideon Rose (1998), as neoclassical realism. Much might be said regarding this trend which need not be noted here, but with regard to the study of US policy specifically, the neoclassical school has made at least two significant contributions. The first is Fareed Zakaria’s demonstration that the United States’ rise to the status of global power was thanks not merely to the accumulation of the resources needed to weigh more heavily in the global scales, but also to the ability of the state to mobilize and harness those resources for the purposes of foreign and security policy. Only once placed under the command of government can national wealth be turned to international power. The second is Colin Dueck’s argument that the political culture of the United States has served as a variable mediating the conversion of its growing material capabilities into magnified global policy ambitions. Essentially, it was the historically embedded reluctance of American leaders to adopt in any straightforward sense the political sensibilities of realist power-politics that led them to become the ‘reluctant crusaders’ for liberal transformation bemoaned by realists in the latter half of the 20th century, since crusading liberalism provided an alternative means of pursuing the international engagement made unavoidable by expanded American power. A similar argument, minus the terminology of variables, has been made by this author elsewhere (Quinn 2010): the reason liberal universalism became so central to American ideology in the 20th century was that it was the only ideological and rhetorical bridge available to move the American polity from so-called ‘isolationist’ principles to internationalist thinking, since an explicitly realist balance-of-power approach was considered politically taboo.

In summary, there is more than one simple ‘realism’ in play in international relations, and hence in order to provide an audit of current American policy in light of realism one needs to be more specific as to which types or elements of realism one has in mind. Nevertheless, from what has gone before it is possible to discern some questions which would be on any realist’s mind in assessing the Obama administration’s efforts: how is the international distribution of power changing, and with what consequences for American freedom of action? Is the Obama administration steering a course which reflects an accurate understanding of this trend, or one which runs contrary to it? Has the administration been restrained in its conception of American objectives and sought to match the scale of its strategic plans to the likely available resources? Has its approach to the world reflected the realist emphasis on moderation and restraint in the s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Theories
• Part 2 Non-state actors
• Part 3 New problems, paradigms, and policies
• Part 4 A view from practitioners
• Afterword: Securing freedom: Obama, the NSA, and US foreign policy
• Index