There’s realism and then there’s realism

I liked the way Lawrence Kaplan starts his cover story in The New Republic (subscription required) on the resurgence of realism in American foreign policy circles:

In Washington, being a member of a “coalition” or a “committee” is to a foreign policy wonk what being a supernumerary at the Metropolitan Opera is to a New York arts patron or a good seat at the Ivy is to a Hollywood mogul: an emblem of status.

It gets better from there:

Indeed, it appears nearly everyone in Washington is a realist now. Neatly summarizing the revised wisdom, The Washington Post‘s George Will recently argued that America’s errors in Iraq flow not so much from the bungled implementation of the democratic idea as from the idea itself–“the Jeffersonian poetry of democratic universalism.” The new realism, moreover, has already been enshrined in official policy. The Bush team still employs high-minded rhetoric about America’s democratic mission abroad, but, in practice, it has reverted to a more humble focus. The Kerry campaign, too, has abandoned any pretense of democratic idealism. Strategic chokepoints, oil wells, alliances–these are the things that animate Kerry’s “realistic” vision of the world. Which is too bad. Because, no matter what you think of Iraq, realism can’t win the war on terrorism….. [T]he very realists whom Bush decries are now running his foreign policy. The Pentagon’s neoconservative democratizers have been losing influence for months now. The nadir came three weeks ago, when the National Security Council (NSC) signed off on a raid on the home of former Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi–without informing the Pentagon beforehand. The neoconservatives’ decline was already apparent last October, when, in an attempt to centralize Iraq policy at the NSC, Condoleezza Rice formed the Iraq Stabilization Group–again, without consulting the Pentagon. The official chosen to chair the group, Rice’s boss in the first Bush administration, Robert Blackwill, has “reduced the Defense Department’s influence to zero,” says a senior administration official. Iraq czar L. Paul Bremer, who worked with Blackwill under Kissinger, now reports to his fellow realist at the White House rather than to the Pentagon. On the NSC itself, Blackwill, who shares the title of deputy national security adviser with Stephen Hadley, a Pentagon ally, “has sucked the air out of” his colleague, according to a White House official. As for the other locus of democratic idealism in the White House, the Valerie Plame investigation has consumed the vice president’s foreign policy team. Meanwhile, Dick Cheney has been soliciting advice from Kissinger, and members of the Bush team claim that Rice, chastened by her prewar foray into the world of democracy promotion, has been doing the same from Scowcroft…. The genesis of the new realism is, of course, America’s problems creating democracy in Iraq. But today’s problems in Iraq do not derive from failures of democracy. They derive from failures of security, which have made democracy difficult to achieve. Those failures owe to a well-chronicled fact–the United States lacks the troop levels required to provide security. It should be axiomatic that, as former Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) adviser and democracy expert Larry Diamond puts it, “you can’t have a democratic state unless you have a state, and the fundamental, irreducible condition of a state is that it has a monopoly on the means of violence.” In Iraq today, not even the U.S. Army, much less the interim government, possesses such a monopoly. Nor is it clear that the Bush team’s particular recipe for building a democratic Iraq amounted to much more than a cartoon version of democratization. “The distinction between liberation and democratization, which requires a strategy and instruments,” says former U.S. Information Agency Director Penn Kemble, “was an idea never understood by the administration.” Indeed, it was precisely the equation of the absence of oppression with the existence of democracy–exemplified by Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous “freedom’s untidy” comment during the postwar looting–that underpinned the White House’s assumption that it could rapidly draw down U.S. forces after toppling Saddam. It took the United States years to transform Germany and Japan. In Iraq, by contrast, the CPA already has its bags packed…. A recent study by Princeton’s Alan Krueger and Czech scholar Jitka Maleckova analyzed data on terrorist attacks and measured it against the characteristics of the terrorists’ countries of origin. The study found that “the only variable that was consistently associated with the number of terrorists was the Freedom House index of political rights and civil liberties. Countries with more freedom were less likely to be the birthplace of international terrorists.” Unfortunately, according to the U.N.’s Arab Human Development Report, not a single Arab state offers such freedoms. One could plausibly have argued before September 11 that this was none of America’s business. But, on that day, the Arab world’s predicament became our own–thrusting the United States into a war of ideas to which realism has no adequate response.

Kaplan makes some good points — but I have two moderate carps with the piece: 1) Not everyone who opposes the administration is a realist. The Committee that Kaplan fronts the piece with is entitled “The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.” Semantic as this may sound, “realistic” is not the same thing as “realist.” A quick glance at the coalition’s statement of principles reveals that what binds this coalition together is an opposition to American empire — but that can come from several sources. For example — as I argued a few months ago in TNR Online — realists dislike the neocon enthusiasm for nation-building, whereas liberal institutionalists dislike the neocon disdain for multilateralism. While realists and liberal institutionalists might disagree with neoconservatives on empire-building, they don’t agree on a lot of other dimensions of policy. The list of signatories paints a similar picture — while there are a large number of true-blue realists on the list, there are also people, like Charles Kupchan, who would not fit that label (though, admittedly, most of the other people on that list are realists). Kaplan doesn’t help matters by labeling G. John Ikenberry in the essay as a “prominent realist.” No offense against John — who’s a fine scholar and a star in the discipline — but that ain’t right. If you read Ikenberry’s principal work, After Victory, it’s clear that he’s quite the fan of multilateral institutions as a binding mechanism on hegemonic powers. This is hardly a controversial position to adopt in the gamut of international relations theory — but it flatly contradicts all varieties of realism. As someone in the same department as “today’s premier realist,” John J. Mearsheimer, let me put it this way: I’ve served with realists (on committees). I know realists. Realists are friends of mine — and John Ikenberry is no realist. Kaplan’s confusion of “realistic/pragmatic” with “realist” reveals a small but telling weakness among some neoconservatives — their tendency to lump all of their intellectual adversaries into the same undifferentiated box. It is only through appreciating the nuances of alternative points of view that one can hone one’s own arguments and policy proposals — and I don’t think a lot of neocons do this all that much. Which brings me to a related point: 2) Kaplan wants to absolve the neocons of all blame: Kaplan’s essay rightly excoriates administration realists (read: Rumsfeld) for failing to follow through on nation-building. And it is certainly true that some neocons (Kagan, Kristol, Pollack) wanted the U.S. to be large and in charge in Iraq. However, Kaplan is way too quick to dismiss the errors of the neocons who were actually in power. It was not just Rumsfeld that believed we could do nation-building on the cheap — it was Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle as well. Perle in particular thought that it would be easy to topple the Baathist regime and hand the keys of government to Chalabi. Kaplan seems to adopt a similar position in his TNR essay when he scolds the Chalabi raid. Kaplan is correct to point out the faulty assumptions made by administration realists in the post-war administration of Iraq. But he is incorrect not to say that many of those assumptions were generated by the neocons.