Transcript
Page 1: Realism and Liberalism Reconsidered David C. Hendrickson

The Lion and the Lamb 93

David C. Hendrickson is professor of political science at Colorado College. His Peace Pact: The Lost World of theAmerican Founding has just been published by the University Press of Kansas.

The Lion and the LambRealism and Liberalism ReconsideredDavid C. Hendrickson

The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century

Michael MandelbaumNew York: PublicAffairs, 2002

The Tragedy of Great Power PoliticsJohn J. MearsheimerNew York: W. W. Norton, 2001

These two books, each a capstone in the author’s scholarly career, form a naturalcounterpoint to one another. Each claims fidelity to one of the two opposing vi-sions—of realism and of liberalism—thatdominate the contemporary study of inter-national politics in American universities.They stand, therefore, in ripe philosophicalantagonism. Both are preoccupied with thelessons to be learned from the past two cen-turies, with Mandelbaum insisting on theepochal significance associated with twogreat revolutions—the French and the In-dustrial—that have profoundly shaped themodern world, and Mearsheimer focusingon the history of warfare and great powercompetition since 1792. Though focusedmainly on the past, both insist that their respective eschatologies tell us vital thingsabout the world to come.

One would think, on first inspection,that these two scholars were easily gauged.Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago,is the blood-and-iron man, approvinglyquoting Bismarck on the need to keep Ger-many’s boot on the Poles forever, indeco-rously pointing to various acts of aggressionin the past 200 years that bear out his thesis

that states are committed to expansion andto the maximization of their power. Mandel-baum, of the Johns Hopkins School of Ad-vanced International Studies, on the otherhand, is of the peace, prosperity, and disar-mament school, propounding a liberal the-ory of history that emphasizes the progres-sive marginalization of the role of force inhuman affairs. Mandelbaum thinks it is theghost of Woodrow Wilson, not the defeated“offensive realists” of the past two centuries,whose ideas are now in the saddle and ridemankind.

Thus drawn, the contrast between liber-alism and realism will seem familiar, redo-lent perhaps of the disputes between Wil-son and Theodore Roosevelt, Jefferson andHamilton, Locke and Hobbes, or Grotiusand Machiavelli. The oddity is this: in the Iraq debate, the blood-and-iron man,Mearsheimer, is of the Peace Party; and thepeace, prosperity, and disarmament man,Mandelbaum, is of the War Party. Over thepast months, Mearsheimer has spoken elo-quently and persuasively against the war onIraq, upholding the continuing validity ofdeterrence and condemning as unnecessaryand dangerous the Bush administration’s

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new doctrine of preventive war (misnamedthe “strategy of preemption”).1 As if in sub-lime concordance with the “peace, love, anddope” school that he likes to make fun of inhis lectures, he has also recommended thedoing of good works in the Arab world so asto diminish the hatred of the masses againstus. Mandelbaum, by contrast, applauds the new liberal order that neoconservativehawks seek to implant in the Middle East.In order, he says, to “defend, maintain, andexpand peace, democracy and free markets,”the central purpose of American power inthe new millennium, the United Statesmust “strengthen peaceful foreign policies,democratic politics, and free markets wherethey are not securely rooted—above all, inRussia and China—and install them wherethey do not exist at all, notably in the Arabworld.”2

It is an interesting question, indeedsomething of a riddle, whether our two authors are contradicting themselves—whether Mandelbaum ought not, on hisown liberal premises, harshly condemn the exercise of imperialism, and whetherMearsheimer, if he were really true to “of-fensive realism,” should not welcome the exploitation and deepening of America’shegemonic position that would ensue from a successful war with Iraq. Are they or aren’t they?

The Liberal Theory of HistoryAt the center of Mandelbaum’s work is a“liberal theory of history” that is, he says,almost too good to be true, in which allthree elements of the liberal triad work toreinforce one another. Democracies tend toconduct peaceful foreign policies. Free mar-kets, over time, tend to promote democracyand peace. In tone and argument, the bookis similar to other works of the past decadecelebrating the liberal triumph. Mandel-baum aligns himself with Francis Fuku-yama’s view that liberal democracy has nocompetitors; insofar as “the end of history”means “the triumph and hegemony of lib-

eral forms” Mandelbaum too believes thatwe’ve reached it. Mandelbaum’s stress onWilson as the prophet of the post–Cold Warera recalls Tony Smith’s America’s Mission,and his focus on the wonders of the marketand the promise of globalization is closely intune with Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus andthe Olive Tree or Micklethwait and Wool-dridge’s Future Perfect.3 In holding thatdemocracies have made peace their passion,he goes beyond the theory of the liberaldemocratic peace advanced by MichaelDoyle, for whom “warlessness” is confinedto relations within the democratic camp.Unlike Joseph Nye, John Ruggie, or RobertKeohane, for whom international regimesand institutions matter greatly, Mandel-baum devotes no sustained attention to thattheme.4 After democracy and the market,the third leg of Mandelbaum’s liberal tripodis not institutionalism but disarmament—practices of “common security” that he asso-ciates with the transparency of militaryforces and operations, their configuration fordefense but not attack, and “the pervasiveand principled aversion to the use of forcefor all but defensive purposes.” Those arethe ideas that have conquered the world.

Mandelbaum is not quite an evangelistof the “liberal theory of history,” or at leastaffects an air of detachment from it. He log-ically unfolds what he takes to be its centralpropositions and insists that the theory ismostly right, but qualifies the argument ina few particulars. Newly formed democra-cies are sometimes bellicose, he acknowl-edges.5 Autocracies like Pinochet’s Chile, hespeculates, might be better able than fac-tion-ridden democracies to carry out painfuleconomic reforms and fit snugly into thegolden straitjacket. Most importantly, theliberal order could be overturned: “The po-litical decisions that created the conditionsin which international economic integrationflourished could be reversed.” Mandelbaum’sdeepest fear is that the United States willabandon its responsibilities to lead in themaintenance of the system. Prospects for

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global free trade, as for nuclear nonprolifera-tion, access to Persian Gulf oil, and peace inEurope and East Asia, rest on the same basicuncertainty: “whether the United States willcontinue to make large contributions to theprovision of international public goods.”6

Torn between his desire to declare liberalhegemony to be inevitable and his beliefthat American power is indispensable in thefunctioning of this order, Mandelbaum inthe end rejects determinism and concludesthat we need, like Lenin, to seize history bythe horns.

The book is oriented to history and so-cial science; other than general advice to de-fend, preserve, and expand the communityof liberal democracies, Mandelbaum offerslittle concrete policy advice. There are moresimiles in this book than you can shake astick at, surely a record for IR scholarship,and they add clarity and vivacity to thepresentation. Especially good is his analysiscomparing the course and outcome of theCold War to the process of evolution in na-ture, competition among rival firms in amarket, and religious conversion. As much acritic of illiberalism as a defender of liberal-ism, Mandelbaum develops the contrast infortunes between nations divided by theCold War—Germany, Korea, and China. Heemphasizes the terrible corruption and abuseof power that manifested itself in all formsof communist rule and argues persuasivelythat victory in the Cold War owed more topeaceful example than to arms. He laysgreat stress on the maintenance of close andintimate relations with Germany and Japan,subtly analyzes the prospects for integratingRussia and China into the free world colos-sus, and explains clearly (though in text-bookish fashion) the origins and subsequentdevelopment of the post–World War II in-ternational economic order. Mandelbaum is above all concerned with the relationsamong the twentieth century’s great powers;the Southern Hemisphere, with the excep-tion of the Middle East and the PersianGulf, is well off his radar screen. He treats

skeptically the prospects for humanitarianintervention, stressing that for public opin-ion the maximum allowable number of ca-sualties in such enterprises is zero, and hisadvice for developing countries irked byonerous IMF conditionality is to deal with it.Critiques of globalization, he says, are “inco-herent and stupid.”

I have three principal objections to hisargument.

First, his treatment of the origins of theliberal outlook, which he identifies most often with the French Revolution but oc-casionally with vaguely specified Anglo-American precedents, is unsatisfactory. Infact, the French Revolution retained onlybriefly the liberal character given to it bythe 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Manand the Citizen and rapidly came to embodya host of illiberal tendencies. SuccessiveFrench governments ruled in accordancewith no constitution and had a fondness forplunder and force totally antithetical to lib-eralism—a point well appreciated by thetwo figures that represented the liberal im-pulse in France during those years, Ben-jamin Constant and Germaine Necker. In itsexpropriations, revolutionary violence, andcontempt for the law of nations, the FrenchRevolution was the predecessor of the Bol-shevik Revolution rather than of thepost–World War II order created underAmerican auspices.7

It was the United States, ignored inMandelbaum’s account until Woodrow Wil-son’s appearance on the scene, where liberalnostrums took root in 1776 and beyond. Allthree of the great precepts that Mandelbaumidentifies as central to liberalism—“peace asthe preferred basis for relations among coun-tries; democracy as the optimal way to or-ganize political life within them; and thefree market as the indispensable vehicle forproducing wealth”—were closely identifi-able with the American Revolution, farmore so than with the French Revolution.“America will grow with astonishing Ra-pidity,” wrote John Adams early in the war

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for independence, “and England, France andevery other Nation in Europe will be thebetter for her prosperity. Peace which is her dear Delight will be her Wealth andGlory.”8 The Founders knew well the “mili-tary system” of Europe, with its fatal effectson liberty, and came to understand how dif-ficult it was for democracies to cooperateeven for a cause they all regarded as vital.The institutions they contrived addressedboth problems and had purposes recogniz-ably akin to what Mandelbaum calls “com-mon security.”9 Throwing open the doors of commerce was also a deep impulse of the American Revolution. Even when theUnited States turned toward protectionism(briefly in the 1820s and 1830s, then deci-sively after the Civil War) the free tradezone established among the United Statescontinued to be seen as a key source of prosperity and security. In short, the greatthemes so characteristic of twentieth centuryAmerican internationalism, proclaimed byWoodrow Wilson during the fight over theLeague of Nations, were homegrown. It iswayward history that traces them to a conti-nental line featuring the French Revolution,Kant, and Napoleon.

A second objection resides in the man-ner in which Mandelbaum treats the role offorce in the contemporary world system. Tohear him tell it, the societies of the Westhave been “debellicized” and now combine aprofound aversion to war with an anxioussolicitude to make the compromises neces-sary for peace. Undoubtedly the most unfor-tunate passage in the book compares the ef-fects of the September 11 attacks to those of a badly stubbed toe. They have been farmore consequential than that comparisonimplies, illuminating power realities and at-titudes toward force of far-reaching mo-ment. It is weird to say that the September11 attacks “illustrated another defining fea-ture of the world of the twenty-first cen-tury: the transformation, or at least the dra-matic devaluation, of war.” It is pretty evi-dent that belief in the utility of force runs

high not only along Islam’s bloody bordersbut also in the United States, and equallyevident that neither the author himself northe larger American demos is immune fromthe fever.

Even in Europe, where Mandelbaum’sargument is strongest, we can see that theprogressive demilitarization of the continenthas diminished Europe’s political voice andmagnified that of America. NATO expansionhas meant and continues to mean the expan-sion of American political influence, tiltingthe balance from “old Europe” to “new Eu-rope” and making descriptions of Westernsecurity as being founded on “common secu-rity”—as opposed to American hegemony—increasingly unreal. Whereas Mandelbaumusually writes of the “core powers,” seldompausing to distinguish between America andEurope, the reality, as commentator RobertKagan has emphasized, is that Americansand Europeans come from different planetsin their attitude toward force.10 Ironically,Venus, having been smitten for a decadewith the enchanting vision of common secu-rity, has discovered that her partner fromMars has different ideas about the exercise ofmilitary power, and she can’t do a thing. Likethe proverbial battered wife, she can neitherfight him nor throw him out, so she puts upwith him while muttering imprecations un-der her breath. It is very likely that dictato-rial methods and disproportionate powerwill ultimately fuel a powerful countervail-ing movement in international society; fornow, however, it is unipolarity and unilater-alism, not “common security,” that definesthe character of the world security order.11

A third flaw stems from Mandelbaum’sview that the commitment to liberalismmay require a revolutionary policy of ex-tending democracy by force of arms. Of allthe heresies prompted by the idea thatdemocracies are naturally pacific, surely thestrangest is the proposition that war is justi-fied to bring the democracy that will bringeverlasting peace. Mandelbaum himself ac-knowledges that implanting free institu-

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tions in Russia and China was like installingsoftware on a computer that didn’t have anoperating system; it is a mystery why amore violent procedure should work in theMiddle East and the Persian Gulf.12 The keypoint is not that the Arabs or the Persiansare incapable of democracy but rather thatwhether they are or not is something thatthey and not outsiders must determine; suchis the command of the existing internationallegal order. The arrogation of a right tooverturn existing governments and to initi-ate revolution is dangerous enough even ifauthorized by the United Nations; its uni-lateral assertion by the United States is athreat to the foundations of international order.

As much as “Wilsonianism in boots” hasbecome part of what people understand lib-eralism to require, such that it often posesas a moral duty, it is antithetical to thedeepest current in the liberal approach tointernational relations, with its principledopposition to the first use of force and its re-gard for international law and the society ofstates. Even for Wilson himself, the ostensi-ble paragon and progenitor of liberal inter-vention, the actual historical figure cannotbe claimed as good authority for the newimperialism. Everyone remembers that hewanted to teach the Mexicans “to elect goodmen” and helped drive the dictator Huertaout of power in 1914; forgotten is that Wil-son after 1915 stoutly resisted calls to inter-vene more deeply in Mexican affairs, believ-ing in the right of the Mexicans to deter-mine their future for themselves. Self-deter-mination and nonintervention—by whichhe meant resolution of the conflict by do-mestic and not foreign forces—were thenhis watchwords. He took the same view ofthe Russian Revolution, and his limited in-terventions in Russia were not undertakenfor the objective of intervening in Russia’scivil war. He was in principle opposed todoing that. Mandelbaum’s contrasting atti-tude appears in his comment that “it wasthe historical misfortune of both [Russia

and China] not to have been conquered, oc-cupied, and governed as was India.”

Machtpolitik Man“There is a certain satisfaction in comingdown to the lowest ground of politics,”Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed, “for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.” Mearsheimer certainly sits on the “lowestground.” For him, states do not pursue endsfor altruistic purposes, as they sometimes doin Mandelbaum’s world. States are insteadpower-maximizing units that must survivein a threatening world and that are alwayslooking out for number one. “Offensive real-ism,” the theory that Mearsheimer advo-cates, holds that “the overriding goal of eachstate is to maximize its share of world pow-er, which means gaining power at the ex-pense of other states.” The lulls and détentesthat dot international history are illusory, always harboring predators simply awaitinga better opportunity.

What accounts for the relentless accu-mulation of power after more power by the great powers? The answer, says Mear-sheimer, is three-fold, lying in the structureof the international system, which lacks acommon sovereign; the offensive capabilitiesthat states inevitably maintain; and uncer-tainty over enemy intentions. For Mear-sheimer, structural factors such as anarchyand the distribution of power “are whatmatter most for explaining internationalpolitics.” Little attention is paid “to indi-viduals or domestic political considerationssuch as ideology.” He also rejects “humannature realism,” according to which the loveof power arises from motives deep withinthe human breast; for Mearsheimer it is in-ternational political structure, not humannature, that matters (though he doesn’t ex-plain why states should respond predictablyto structure if human beings don’t have anature).

The theory is both descriptive and pre-scriptive. “States should behave according tothe dictates of offensive realism, because it

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outlines the best way to survive in a danger-ous world.” They should, that is to say, takeadvantage of opportunities for offensive war,and Mearsheimer instances Germany’s fail-ure to do so in 1905 when Russia was sud-denly enfeebled by defeat and revolution.Great powers that do not act as offensive realism says they should act are courtingdoom: “Such foolish behavior inevitably hasnegative consequences.” Despite recom-mending power maximization at every op-portunity, Mearsheimer nevertheless findsinternational politics to be “genuinely trag-ic” in character. “Great powers that have noreason to fight each other—that are merelyconcerned with their own survival—never-theless have little choice but to pursue pow-er and to seek to dominate the other statesin the system.”

In methodology, the book has the posi-tivist imprimatur characteristic of mostwork in the American science of interna-tional politics, an approach shared by manyof the liberals with whom Mearsheimer doesbattle. That is to say, Mearsheimer aims atthe identification of a simple law or law-likestatement (states are power-maximizers), of-fers a parsimonious theory (they are this waybecause of the structure of the system), andthen tries to show that 200 years of historybear out his thesis. In this world, states never learn lessons from their past misdeedsand catastrophes, or rather the lesson theylearn (unless they decide to give up thegreat power game) is that they must super-size their power.

Such positivist methods, deeply rootedin academia though they are, unfortunatelyhave severe limitations. Greatly lauded intheory, parsimony in practice invariablyyields a simplified view of the past, andpassing all these materials through a singlemeat grinder makes, organizationally andstylistically, for much repetition. To showthat the economic base matters (chapter 3),that land power is more important thanseapower or airpower (chapter 4), that con-quest pays (chapter 5), or that the interna-

tional system is populated by revisionistpowers (chapter 6), Mearsheimer trudgesthrough the same material (the great powercompetition of the last two centuries), butwith the unpleasing result that no singleevent is ever given a thorough or satisfyingexplanation.13

Mearsheimer’s proclivity to make time-less assertions about the relative value ofcompeting strategic arms (land, naval, air) isalso dubious, for the resolution of that ques-tion depends on the political objectives theyare meant to serve in any particular instance(which Mearsheimer typically leaves unspec-ified). Because Mearsheimer confines his fo-cus to interactions among the “great pow-ers,” of whom there remain precious few, histreatment is curiously circumscribed. Inconsidering naval power, for instance, hedoesn’t examine its political utility in cir-cumstances short of war or its military sig-nificance in wars against states of inferiorrank. Even committed continentalists andperceptive critics of “the British way of war-fare” such as Sir Michael Howard and PaulKennedy should certainly wince at Mear-sheimer’s systemic denigration of naval power and his cavalier dismissal of AlfredThayer Mahan and Julian Corbett. Enthusi-asts of airpower and of the “revolution inmilitary affairs” will write him off as an oldtank man feverishly re-gaming distant andnow irrelevant wars.14

The most serious lacuna in this book isthe absence of reflection on the nature andcharacter of the legal, ethical, and institu-tional restraints that the leaders of states areobliged to observe. For Mearsheimer, thereis no international society, or at least nonethat is relevant to the scientific study of in-ternational politics. He mentions such re-straints only for the purpose of dismissingtheir significance, and he displays littleknowledge of the role they have played inshaping international history. Exchange, reciprocity, good faith—as instruments bothof securing interest and of soothing the as-perities of interstate conflict—are given no

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recognition in Mearsheimer’s conceptualworld. International institutions, he affirms,are just “arenas for acting out power rela-tionships”; that they have anything to dowith legitimacy—or indeed that legitimacyitself is of any conceivable importance—isnot a thought that occurs to the author.

Though ostensibly “realistic,” such anapproach stands in direct opposition to ourdaily experience of political life, in whichpolitical actors are continually in competi-tion for the moral high ground and battlefiercely for the mantle of legitimacy.15 A re-alism that shunts those factors aside is psy-chologically naïve as well as morally obtuse,for such factors are significant even if theyare only observed hypocritically (as, admit-tedly, they often are). The failure to grapplewith normative issues is also quite contraryto the richest vein in classical realism. Thegreatest of the realists, Thucydides, placedin continual dialectical antagonism theclaims of power and justice, and his Historyis “above all an investigation and a testingof the Athenian thesis on justice and on theplace of justice in the world of internationalpolitics.”16 Indeed, Mearsheimer’s dismissalof the normative dimension of internationalpolitics makes it difficult to understand why he describes international politics astragic in character, for tragedy requires ele-vation of character and the choice betweenirreconcilable but otherwise commandingvalues. If a state dedicated to power maxi-mization, and that alone, meets adversity inits inexorable advance toward domination, it is difficult to limn the tragic dimensionof its misfortune. Is it tragic when the badgo bad?

Related to Mearsheimer’s ethical void isanother shortcoming: in emphasizing pow-er-maximization as the rational objective ofthe state, Mearsheimer is seemingly oblivi-ous to the consideration that the people inconstitutional democracies might fear notonly threats from abroad but also overlycentralized power at home. In the long his-tory of reflection on the security predica-

ments of free states, as Daniel Deudney hasshown, domestic hierarchy or tyranny is assignificant a problem as international anar-chy or conquest. That crucial theme, thoughmissing from Mearsheimer, has long been atthe core of the republican security theory towhich Montesquieu and America’s Found-ing Fathers made such distinguished contri-butions. That theory is far more sophisti-cated and relevant than Mearsheimer’s offen-sive realism because it places the preserva-tion of free institutions and the control ofpower at the core of its concern.17 Mear-sheimer’s apparent unawareness of this her-itage is in keeping with his lack of interestin the history of international thought priorto the twentieth century, which lends to hiswork a parochial air. This unconsciousnessof his predecessors is probably just as well,for if Mearsheimer belongs anywhere in the history of international and strategicthought, it is with the schools of Wil-helmine Machtpolitik and Geopolitik.

The oddest feature of Mearsheimer’sbook is his treatment of the contemporaryinternational system. Instead of viewing itas an instance of unipolarity—that is, ofAmerican hegemony—he says it is bipolarin Europe and multipolar in Northeast Asia,with a certain Potemkin Village in the Eastand a still poor Middle Kingdom doingtheir best to match up with the Americanhyperpower. The United States, he allows,“is the most powerful state on the planet today,” but it “has no intention of trying to conquer” Europe and Northeast Asia.“There has never been a global hegemony,and there is not likely to be one anytimesoon.... Except for the unlikely event where-in one state achieves clear-cut nuclear supe-riority, it is virtually impossible for anystate to achieve global hegemony.” He alsowrites reassuringly that the pursuit of powerstops when regional hegemony is achievedand insists that “states do not become statusquo powers until they completely dominatethe system,” meaning, presumably, that theywill become status quo powers once they do.

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The Tragedy of Great Power Politics cameout just after 9/11, and it is unclear ifMearsheimer would revise these views inlight of the last 18 months. What has hap-pened—the Bush administration’s embraceof preventive war doctrine, the abrogation ofthe ABM Treaty, the determination to achievemilitary superiority in perpetuity, large in-creases in defense spending—underlines justhow unipolar the structure of world militarypower has become. The Bush Doctrine cer-tainly puts an exclamation point on thatfact, and the new combination of strategicdefenses and revolutionary accuracies now inprospect will enhance still further Americannuclear superiority; but the lineaments ofthe new world order, and the temptations to which they would subject the UnitedStates, were clearly adumbrated in 1990 and 1991.18

It cannot be said, moreover, that theUnited States became a status quo poweronce the collapse of the Soviet Union al-lowed it to dominate the international sys-tem; the reverse is true. From a status quopower in the years of containment and bipo-larity, the United States became a revolu-tionary power once it achieved unipolarity.As previous restraints on the exercise of U.S.power fell away, America embarked on anumber of enterprises (undertaking humani-tarian interventions, freeing oppressed mi-norities, waging preventive war) whosecommon theme was the erosion—if not rev-olutionary displacement—of the previousground norm of international society basedon the independence of states. Such re-straints as did exist in the 1990s on the ex-ercise of American power were largely inter-nal and have (momentarily, at least) beenswept away by 9/11 and its aftermath.

That expansion of ambition, the reverseof what Mearsheimer expected, shows thathis emphasis on structure is not particularlyilluminating today, or is so only because itunderlines the significance of the structuraltransformation brought by the end of theCold War. None of the categories that he

uses, awkwardly, to interpret past structuralconfigurations—bipolarity, balanced multi-polarity, and unbalanced multipolarity—captures the power realities now ascendant.That is not a knock against realism, butrather a reminder that our old friend “libidodominando”—the long-forgotten impulserecognized in “human nature realism”—can still get it up after all these years.

The Riddle SolvedWhat, then, is the answer to the questionposed earlier? Are they or aren’t they contra-dicting themselves? For Mandelbaum, I be-lieve, the answer is “yes”: he has taken thegentle doctrine of liberalism, one of the no-blest inventions of the human race, andtransmogrified it into an instrument of war.This commitment to permanent revolutionhas no doubt impressive precedents in his-tory to fall back on, but they are not liberalprecedents. At best, the new imperialism isa bastard offspring of the old liberalism, atworst a repudiation and betrayal of its coreteaching.

The emergence of Machtpolitik Man asa spear carrier for the Peace Party is a bittrickier. Mearsheimer’s compelling explana-tion, with Stephen Walt, of why contain-ment and deterrence are more prudent thanpreventive war demonstrates the continu-ing relevance of realist analysis; here Mear-sheimer’s amoralism is not a vice but avirtue because he is not tempted to confusemoral indignation with the cool assessmentof enemy motives. As a result, he sees Sad-dam’s motives and calculations much moreclearly.19

“Offensive realism,” nevertheless, holdsforth only the flimsiest of barriers to theabuse of power. Taken in the abstract, itsupports the general principle that weshould expand our power into every nookand cranny of the world. Noting that “thehistorical record shows that offense some-times succeeds and sometimes does not,”Mearsheimer insists that “the trick for a so-phisticated power maximizer is to figure out

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when to raise and when to fold.” Mear-sheimer, certainly, is not obligated by histheory to counsel conquest and occupation,especially given his acute appreciation of thelogic of deterrence, but it is easy to see whya powerful state that lives by his maximwould acquire a fondness for military meth-ods and be tempted by the kind of deed henow detests. The appropriate verdict forMearsheimer recalls an old New Yorker car-toon, in which a stern judge lectures a hap-less defendant: “You’re not guilty, butyou’re very, very close.”

Mearsheimer’s “realism” needs (as, in-deed, does Mandelbaum’s “liberalism”) thesteadiness and the ruling-out of wild ven-tures that are provided by traditional stan-dards of international law, such as the normagainst preventive war, just as it needsrecognition that international institutionsand the consensual methods they encourageare a potentially salutary check upon largeand threatening concentrations of power.Above all, Mearsheimer’s realism needs anAristotelian doctrine of the mean, an un-derstanding that power, like other valuedthings in life, is also subject to the laws ofexcess and defect, and that always wantingmore is a vice no less fatal than not havingenough. On such terms, come to think of it,might realism and liberalism—the lion andthe lamb—lie down together in peace.•Notes

1. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt,“An Unnecessary War,” Foreign Policy, January/Febru-ary 2003, pp. 50–59.

2. Michael Mandelbaum, “The Inadequacy ofAmerican Power,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 81, (Septem-ber/October 2002), p. 62.

3. See Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The UnitedStates and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in theTwentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-sity Press, 1994); Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus andthe Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,2000); John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge,A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Promise of Global-ization (New York: Random House, 2003).

4. See Joseph S. Nye, Jr., The Paradox of Ameri-can Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go ItAlone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002);John Gerard Ruggie, Winning the Peace: America andWorld Order in the New Era (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1996); Robert O. Keohane, “Inter-national Institutions: Can Interdependence Work?”Foreign Policy, no. 110 (spring 1998), pp. 82–96.

5. Mandelbaum here follows the argument ofJack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratizationand Nationalist Conflict (New York: W. W. Norton,2000).

6. Mandelbaum, “Inadequacy of American Power,” p. 70.

7. Mandelbaum acknowledges that Napoleonrepresented liberal precepts “in a way that was, bythe standards of the late twentieth century, at bestimperfect,” but he does seem to place Napoleon inthe classic liberal line. A clearer understanding ofBonaparte’s place in history was entertained by “thegreat mass” of nineteenth-century Americans, who,as Alexander Hill Everett remarked in 1830, consid-ered Napoleon as a “tyrant, usurper, and enemy ofliberty.” If forced to bear oppression, Everett went onto say, Americans “should much prefer a good, easy,hereditary, gouty despot, who would ask for nothingbut a skilful cook, and a well-stocked deer park, to afiery usurper of first-rate talent, who would alwaysbe on horseback, wasting the blood and treasure ofhis people in vain attempts to gratify his wild andwanton ambition. Tyrant for tyrant, we should cer-tainly prefer King Log to King Stork, Louis toNapoleon; and we consider this preference as not only not inconsistent with, but as the natural andnecessary result of a love of liberty” (Alexander HillEverett, “The Tone of British Criticism,” in ProsePieces and Correspondence, ed. Elizabeth Evans [St.Paul, Minn.: John Colet Press, 1975], p. 26).

8. John Adams to James Warren, The Papers ofJohn Adams, ed. Robert J. Taylor et al. (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), vol. 6, p. 346.

9. See David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: TheLost World of the American Founding (Lawrence, Kan.:University Press of Kansas, 2003) on this theme.

10. Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: Amer-ica and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).

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11. See Stephen G. Brooks and William C.Wohlforth, “American Primacy in Perspective,” For-eign Affairs, vol. 81 (July/August 2002), pp. 20–33;and Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar MomentRevisited,” The National Interest, vol. 70 (winter2002/03), pp. 5–17.

12. How far Mandelbaum would go in this proj-ect beyond Iraq is unclear from the book, where hewrites tersely that the majority of the countries thatpose the greatest threat to Western security—Iraq,Iran, Syria, and Libya—are located in the MiddleEast, and the “obvious solution to this general prob-lem is to replace the governments of the countries inquestion with regimes opposed to launching or as-sisting attacks on others.” Mandelbaum goes on tosay, enigmatically, that “the countries of the world’score had ready answers” to the question of how gov-ernments pledged to common security were to befostered, but then abruptly ends his discussion anddoes not return to the question in subsequent pages.

13. Mandelbaum’s work is immune from thisobjection. Though he too propounds and tests a fewsimple propositions, he does not do so in the neo-positivist vein. His work contains many historicaland analytical sections that are models of lucid expo-sition, making The Ideas That Conquered the World,unlike The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, quite suit-able for an upper-level undergraduate course in inter-national relations. An esteemed colleague has used itto evident satisfaction in a course on contemporarypolitical philosophy.

14. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall ofBritish Naval Mastery (London: Macmillan, 1983);Michael Howard, The Continental Commitment: TheDilemma of British Defence Policy in the Era of the TwoWorld Wars (London: Temple Smith, 1972). The con-temporary American equivalent of the old Britishstrategy of “gunboats and gurkhas”—relying onAmerican airpower and local ground forces—is wellprobed in Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: TheRealities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).Mearsheimer minimizes the obvious potency of thisformula.

15. See on this point the excellent study ofRobert Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conductin a World of States (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2000).

16. Thomas L. Pangle and Peter J. Ahrensdorf,Justice Among Nations: On the Moral Basis of Power andPeace (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas,1999), p.15.

17. See Daniel Deudney, Bounding Power: Repub-lican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village(forthcoming).

18. Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrick-son, The Imperial Temptation: The New World Order andAmerica’s Purpose (New York: Council on Foreign Re-lations Press, 1992).

19. Mearsheimer and Walt, “An UnnecessaryWar.”

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