Is Paul Wolfowitz for Real?
Reprinted from Foreign Policy
By Daniel Drezner
August 27, 2009
Capitalization Matters
As I was reading Paul Wolfowitz's essay on Obama and realism, I kept thinking, "there's realism and then there's Realism."
Small "r" realism consists of a recognition that there are some unpleasant truths in world politics that must be acknowledged if one is going to pursue a prudent foreign policy. If a government amasses significant capabilities or acts aggressively, it will tend to trigger balancing coalitions. International institutions are often feckless and hypocritical. Forcible regime change is really, really hard. Implacable hostility to powerful actors with different ideologies won't work terribly well. Power is a relative measure and a resource that should be husbanded for important matters of state. You get the idea.
Big "R" Realism is a theoretical paradigm that makes certain assumptions about what drives powerful actors in world politics, and derives interesting predictions (and occasional prescriptions) from those assumptions. Many of these predictions match up with small "r" realism (balancing behavior, useless international institutions, etc.). Many go beyond them, however. According to Realism, regime type is unimportant in explaining world politics. The democratic peace is a mirage. Strong states are better at foreign policy. Not all Realists agree on everything, but they agree on some big and not obvious things, and they all seem to publish in International Security an awful lot (don't aske me to parse out the difference between defensive realists, neoclassical realists, structural realists, and offensive realists; if you do, well, I'm going to have this kind of reaction).
The difference between the two "realisms" is one of purpose. Small "r" realism is a set of guidelines for real, live policymakers, and is intended to foster prudence. Big "R" Realism is intended to be more provocative to the point of caricature -- i.e., to the point where Realists might have little difficulty incorporating zombies into their paradigm. It is certainly possible to be both. Behind closed doors, I have heard big "R" Realists proffer small "r" realist prescriptions that might contradict the academic paradigm. In public, it's funny how Realists who believe that anarchy and the distribution of power are the only things that matter nevertheless rail against the pernicious influence of ethnic lobbies.
Stephen Walt is a Realist with a capital "R", so I expect him to provide a vigorous response to Wolfowitz. I found the latter's essay to be occasionally insightful, occasionally hostage to the exact same paradigmatic blinders of Realism, and occasionally blurry about the distinction between realism and Realism.
Wolfowitz tries to get at this distinction in these paragraphs:
Of course foreign policy should be grounded in reality. Americans agree that foreign-policy goals should be achievable -- that the United States should match its ends with its means. What sensible person could argue with that? That is simply pragmatism. But "realism" as a doctrine (I'll spare you the quote marks henceforth) goes much further: In the words of one leading realist, the principal purpose of U.S. foreign policy should be "to manage relations between states" rather than "alter the nature of states."
.... let's stipulate that the issue here is not whether to use military force to promote changes in the nature of states; it's about whether -- and how -- to promote such changes peacefully. On that issue there is a genuine debate between realists and their critics. And a desire for pragmatism should not be confused with a specific foreign-policy doctrine that minimizes the importance of change within states.
On these points, Wolfowitz is mostly right and very wrong on one important issue. He's right to say that Obama might be a realist (pragmatist) but he's not a Realist. I also think he's right to say that regime type matters.
So he's right, but he's also banal in his rightness. No president will ever be a Realist. Few foreign policy leaders are so wedded to a theoretical doctrine that they don't think regime type matters at all. Henry Kissinger might have been a Realist in the academy, but in power he was a realist. Wolfowitz takes great pains to point out that George H.W. Bush didn't always act like a Realist -- but it's also true that George W. Bush stopped acting like a Neoconservative around 2004.
Presidents are politicians, and they'll discard ideas that don't work. And no promulgator of ideas in international relations should be brassy enough to think that their doctrine is always right.
What's missing from Wolfowitz's essay is any genuine assessment of the costs and benefits of the different policies available to the United States when dealing with, say, the likes of China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, or North Korea. Wolfowitz seems to think that more aggressive steps should be taken to foment internal regime change in these countries. In doing so, he cleverly contrasts it with the counterfactual of "doing nothing." But, as previously noted, the Obama administration has been ratcheting up containment policies against adversaries like Iran and North Korea. There's a lot of virtue in using containment to deal with these regimes -- and in the case of Pyongyang, the policy might be bearing fruit. The word "containment" never appears in Wolfowitz's essay, however. This suggests a kind of all-or-nothing logic to Wolfowitz's thinking that might explain certain policy blunders committed in the past decade.
One final note of warning. Wolfowitz's essay posits a debate between Realism and Neoconservatism as the faultline in U.S. foreign policy. While I'm certainly aware of this split, it's not the only one, or even the most important one, in the foreign-policy community. As much as Realists and Neocons enjoy sniping at each other now, this elides periods during which they were on the same side in the policy world. It also elides current issues on which they still agree: not relying on international institutions, confronting China, etc. Liberal institutionalism is hardly flaw-free -- but it is an equally viable perspective that needs to be considered when debating the future of American foreign policy.
• Daniel W. Drezner, a Foreign Policy blogger, is professor of international politics at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, a senior editor at The National Interest.