Crisis in "realism"
Tim Murphy
Lenin's Tomb
www.leninology.blogspot.com
Crisis in "realism"
posted by lenin
Peter Gowan has an excellent article
http://www.newleftreview.net/?page=article&view=2639
in the latest New Left Review, which you unfortunately have to have a
subscription for in order to read fully. Gowan discusses the growing trend
for 'realist' theorists working in IR to take increasingly radical and
critical stances about US power. Andrew Bacevich is perhaps the most obvious
instance - a moderate conservative who revisited the Beards and William
Appleman Williams and found that their analysis of US power was closer to
the truth than that of many of his realist confederates (see American
Empire, 2002). But of course Mearsheimer and Walt have recently been highly
critical of US policy (and even, gasp, Israeli policy), and the topic of
Gowan's piece is a new book by Christopher Layne, Peace of Illusions, a
paleocon who writes for The American Conservative. Layne, for all the world,
sounds like a crude marxist in his analysis, if not his prescriptions.
Realism has a reputation for being right-wing, despite the fame of EH Carr,
because it has usually taken an apologetic position on US power during the
Cold War. The postwar realists were profoundly influenced by Carl Schmitt
and German conservatism more generally. As far as they were concerned, the
US was merely engaged in classic 'balance of power' politics, forming
strategic alliances and shoring up military power in order to avert the
threat of extinction which all states are theoretically vulnerable to (and,
in Grotian terms, the killing of states is the most heinous act possible).
This thesis, weak though it was, could not survive the collapse of the
Russian Empire: the US should, on realist assumptions, have pulled back from
its global entanglements. Layne therefore trawls through the diplomatic and
historical archives and arrives at the conclusion, shocking for bourgeois
doctrinaires but not at all surprising to marxists, that the normal rules of
realism don't apply to the US, which has not faced a serious threat of
extinction since the 19th Century. Layne uses the material he unearths to
show that "Wilson's 1917 decision to intervene in World War One was
motivated neither by security worries nor efforts at 'off-shore balancing'.
Equally, he argues persuasively that the Roosevelt administration was not
seriously worried about a German bridgehead being established in Latin
America in 1940-41". Rather "Roosevelt's sole concern was to ensure that the
British fleet sailed for Canada in the event of a capitulation. Lend-lease
was not the cause of Britain's failure to do a peace deal with Germany in
1940, but its effect." Moreover: "American strategy was to establish its
hegemony over the major industrial powers of Eurasia, once the Second World
War had created the conditions there for it to do so. The Cold War was
essentially an effect of this American choice to exploit the chaos in
Eurasia for a global hegemonic drive." Further: "On the issue of American
control over the Middle East, Layne cites a 1944 OSS report arguing that the
us would have three vital interests in the region: 'Oil, Airbases and Future
Markets'. The US would therefore have a 'security problem' in the region:
'this means in particular security from our present allies, almost all of
whom have fingers in the Moslem pie and who have shown themselves
particularly anxious to keep us out.'"
So now we know why the US government did not simply pull back at the end of
the Cold War: they weren't engaged in power-balancing. America's
empire-building has brought immense costs according to Layne - the usual but
not inaccurate mantra of libertarians: "a National Security State with a
bloated military-industrial complex; the huge resources devoted to military
power could have been better spent on prosperity for the American people.
Its expansionist thrust has undermined America's social institutions, and
aided the rise of the imperial presidency and erosion of the powers of
Congress. Above all, it has brought involvement in wars which are of little
or no importance for the US itself, as a concomitant for taking command of
other states' security interests."
Things become even more interesting when Layne starts to look at the
domestic sources of US foreign policy. Even in a realist discourse, in which
power is supposedly gazed upon and analysed unsentimentally, this sort of
business is usually strictly taboo. Layne asserts that "American elites 'are
the state'. Drawing on Thomas Ferguson's striking 1984 essay, 'From Normalcy
to New Deal', on the business coalition that formed around Roosevelt in the
1930s-again, an unusual source, even for a maverick Republican-Layne
provides an analysis of the social substance of the American state: 'at the
core . . . were large capital-intensive corporations that looked to overseas
markets and outward-looking investment banks'; around this core were
assembled 'the national media, important foundations, the big Wall Street
law firms, and organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations'. This
capitalist coalition, he argues, has been the driving force of the
open-door/global-hegemony strategy for the last six decades and remains in
power today." This, Gowan maintains, is an outdated analysis, missing the
way in which the capitalist elite has changed with the re-emergence of the
rentier class since the 1970s, (see his account in The Global Gamble, 1999).
Nevertheless, it comes closer to properly analysing the nature of the modern
state than most IR theory does (barring that of some critical marxists).
Another crucial point that Layne makes, and Gowan cites, is that America's
domestic capitalist regime is extremely fragile. Why should this be so? It
is not the hallowed Constitution that is threatened, nor the capitalist
class as such - but the very specific mode of rule that they have achieved
through anticommunist crusades and the promotion of a robust individualist
ideology, one in which the state is primarily a means of servicing the
interests of the capitalist class both domestically and globally, a highly
dependent relationship at that. A huge segment of the present elite cannot
do without the US maintaining the global system on its behalf.
And that's the curious situation we're in: utopians, cosmopolitans,
egalitarian theorists and activists - those whom marxists have tended to see
as close to their own tradition - are less likely to hit upon the truth
about the American Empire than the Hobbesian theorists who have always
despised appeals to the brotherhood of man, democratic peace and so on. By
the same turn, however, realists are finding it more and more difficult to
explain the actions of the American state within the strict terms of their
'balance of power' analysis. The increasing radicalisation of the empire
leads them to seek out lobbies - Israel or neocons or secret Trotskyists -
but sometimes, like Layne, they notice the existence of the capitalist
class.
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http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/11/crisis-in-realism.html
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