In the course of doing my MA at the University of Chicago, I’ve had the opportunity to take a class from John Mearsheimer. Mearsheimer is one of the most widely renowned structural realists in the international relations game today. He disagrees with much of US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, lamenting the US’s decision to expend its energies maintaining large military presences in regions of the world that contain no threats to the United States. Mearsheimer calls for a strategy of offshore balancing, in which the United States only intervenes in critical regions in order to prevent those regions from being dominated completely by another state. Otherwise, he recommends the US save its strength. I found myself curious today about what many of the world’s region’s power relationships might look like if the United States were to withdraw militarily and allow the powers in those regions to engage in security competition with one another, and I have taken some time to run the figures and make a vast plethora of charts to share with you.
Tag: Realism
Niall Ferguson is Wrong about World War I
I ran across a piece in The Guardian in which Niall Ferguson, a British historian, made the increasingly popular argument that it was in the British national interest to avoid participating in World War I, that the decision to do so was a mistake. This argument, which I am seeing made all over the place in the popular press (as 2014 is the 100-year anniversary of the 1914 start of the war), is deeply misguided. I contend that it was an absolute strategic necessity that Britain enter the war to prevent Germany from defeating France. Here’s why.
Continue reading “Niall Ferguson is Wrong about World War I”
Rethinking Realism
In international relations, realism commonly comes under attack. Realism is the belief that states are rational and that they pursue their interests and their interests exclusively through rational means. Realism is a descriptive theory–it makes claims about how the world is. Many people criticise realism on the grounds that this is very much not the whole story. It is often unclear what a state’s interests are in the first place, and there are many cases in which states act in ways that seem to run contrary to their interests. States sometimes make irrational mistakes. We know that states are not exclusively rational because we care who determines our foreign policy. If all leaders were rationally and pursued the same set of interests rationally, all leaders would be equivalent to one another in policy. Insofar as there are policy differences among different leaders, there is either disagreement about interests, more rational and less rational policies in pursuit of interests, or some combination of both of these things. This often makes realism seem reductionist. It ignores the way we construct our interests, taking them as given. It also ignores the mistakes that people make, the capacity for leaders to be incompetent. However, I do not think realism can be dismissed on these grounds. Instead, it requires re-framing.
Can We Be Moral Without the State?
I noticed an interesting consequence of the moral theory I outlined yesterday–if it’s true, it is not possible to be moral beyond a limited scope in the absence of a state. Let me explain what I mean. Continue reading “Can We Be Moral Without the State?”
Dead Baby Interventionism
Lately I’ve been noticing a new social networking trend–the tendency for people who are passionate about a given humanitarian crisis (examples include Syria, drones in Pakistan, Kony in the Congo–surprisingly, not Mali) to post pictures of various dead, injured, or disfigured babies or children who purportedly were killed, injured, or disfigured over the course of their respective conflicts. Accompanying the pictures is usually some caption designed to engender empathy (one such example I recall was “imagine if this were your child”). This strikes me as somewhat simplistic. Not much critical thought is being given to what the responsibilities of developed states are. Instead, the entire discussion is being reduced to “children are dying, this is bad, developed states can stop bad things, developed states should stop this”. So today I’d like to think about it a little bit deeper than that.
Benjamin Studebaker 