I posed a question in another forum last week about the Mearsheimer/Walt paper, and thought the results were interesting enough to repost here:
Drezner has a round-up of some of the more worthwhile responses to the Mearsheimer & Walt paper on the Israel lobby. I thought Jacob Levy’s thoughts were particularly interesting. Mr. Bell Jar was a student of Mearsheimer’s in the 1980s, and had already mentioned to me how odd it was for Mearsheimer to entertain the idea that a domestic political lobby might be exerting any significant influence on U.S. foreign policy, since the realist school Mearsheimer has helped to create pretty much dismisses internal national politics as a relevant factor in how states conduct international relations. Levy touches briefly on this issue, but more forcefully questions the way Mearsheimer’s opposition to the Iraq War undermines his standard view that states always act in their own security interests:
M&W are committed to the neorealist view that powerful states act in their security interest. They're also, independently, committed to opposition to the Iraq War and to what they see as U.S. overreach in the Middle East; they think that the U.S. does not effectively pursue its security interests in the region. So there's a puzzle, an anomaly-- of their own making. If you are both committed to a predictive theory and committed to an interpretation of a particular case by which it falsifies your theory, then there's a puzzle for your views, but not yet a puzzle about the world.
I know more than a few readers here have studied Mearsheimer, and possibly one or two have been actual students of his as Mr. Bell Jar has. I’m wondering: Is the forgoing a fair characterization of Mearsheimer’s theories about states other than the U.S. with reference to Israel, and conflicts other than the Iraq War? I’m wondering because, if so, then the entire argument about the Israel lobby would seem more like an attempt to explain away holes in his previous arguments than anything else. (Mearsheimer also published a widely-read article on why the U.S. should continue to pursue a containment strategy towards Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion). Or as commenter Kevin Donoghue puts it in the comment thread on Levy’s post over at Crooked Timber:
their theory (or at least the version Mearsheimer expounded in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics) is contradicted by the facts and that’s what they are wrestling with. Putting it another way, it is their anxiety to rescue their theory which is pushing them. Actually I think M/W are snookered: either states are not rational in pursuit of their interests, or it was in America’s interest to invade Iraq.
Is that fair to say? I don’t know Mearsheimer’s work well enough to judge.
P. said: I would argue that is an unfair characterization. In the introduction to Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, he outlines the limits of offensive realism, his theory. He would probably place the Iraq War situation in the anomalies that offensive realism simply does not explain.
Offensive realism does not explain these situations because it is parsimonious theory - it simplifies reality. It tries to treat states as black boxes or billiard balls, and does not really look to the internal characteristics of states. It discards factors, and the main one it discards are attention to individuals or domestic political considerations. When these factors dominate a state's decision making process, realist theories will just not predict as well. T
here are also situations where offensive realism does not tell you what the proper answer is. There are situations where several different outcomes are consistent with the theory. In these cases, offensive realism will be indeterminate as to the outcome. Other theories have to be brought in to try and figure out what is going on.
Lastly, there will be situations where great powers act contrary to what the theory predicts (the anomalous cases). Inevitably, such behavior causes negative consequences, according to Mearsheimer, and that's what he would probably say is happening with Iraq. All of this can be inferred, I believe, from pages 9-12 of Tragedy.
Mr. Bell Jar said: Three general points -- first, Walt was always much, much squishier on Realism than Mearsheimer was. (We used to joke that you lost rigor as you dropped letters off of "Waltz". See, there was a neoliberal scholar named Alt... Okay, it wasn't much of a joke. We were grad students.)
Second, I haven't read Tragedy of International Relations, because I haven't found a cheap copy yet. All my exposure to Mearsheimer was in 1988-1990, when the 'near enemy' was still risible exponents of soft power like Keohane and Nye. However, I think the notion of a Great Power (indeed, pretty much the only Great Power left) expanding into areas of direct national-security importance like the Persian Gulf can be considered easily explicable by the Realist doctrine we all learned from Prof. Mearsheimer. The question is, are there enough other Powers who will attempt to balance against us, or aren't there? (Which is to say -- morality aside, have we fatally overstretched in Iraq and roused the other Powers, or not?) Given our continued closeness to Britain and the burgeoning new alliance with India, I think the case of fatal overstretch must remain unproven as yet.
Third, at least back in my day, we all knew that Realism wasn't necessarily predictive of state behavior, but of the consequences -- a state that departed from Realist principles (which we all knew they did; the arguments were about boundary cases like Chamberlain in 1938) would get its comeuppance sooner rather than later. (For example, biology doesn't say people will never try to breathe water. It only says that they will drown if they do.) Some of us did use Newtonian arguments -- "Left to itself, a state with opportunity to expand its power will do so," but we always knew there was a big blur over "left to itself."
But yes, I do find it odd that Mearsheimer is now paying attention to questions of internally-driven motives for state behavior -- that was never his bailiwick, or even particularly interesting to him, at least not back in the Day. My theory is that as far as their paper goes, he was mostly concerned with the strategic question of supporting Israel (does it make Realpolitikal sense to ally with one state rather than eleven?) and that Walt was the guy with the rest of the baggage.
G. said: When I took his class in 2002 he seemed a contradiction. I lost count of the number of times he said, "States are basically strategic calculators." If this was supposed to be an "ideal gas" model without any perfect example in the real world, he didn't stress the point. And yet he said almost as many times that the invasion would be a mistake. I never got around to asking what it would mean if our strategic calculator chose invasion anyway. I think it's this contradiction that pushed Mearsheimer into domestic politics. So I agree with Levy.
H. said: Oh. I thought that Realism was supposed to be prescriptive, not descriptive. Learn something new every day!
P. replied: It is both a descriptive theory and a prescriptive theory. It is a descriptive theory inasmuch as it says this is how the world (unfortunately) works. It is a prescriptive theory inasmuch as it says, if this how the world really works, then this is how you should behave so that you can survive.
I replied: Which pretty much guarantees that the world will go on working that way, no? This is why people who don't really know much about the details of Realist theory intuitively think it is evil anyway, I suspect.
P. replied: That's why it's the "tragedy" of great power politics. Even if a great power wanted to be benevolent, or even just be left alone, they would be forced by circumstances (generally the aggressive behaviors of other states) to behave in a realist manner. That's the tragedy - the inescapable spiral down to behavior of the lowest common denominator.
Part of it, also, is the American liberal tradition that's reflected in our foreign policy rhetoric. Americans don't like realists - Americans want to be better than that, and there's a section in the introduction to Tragedy that talks about that as well.
And part of it, I think, is that there are some versions of realism that are evil, and some proponents of it who are evil, e.g. Henry Kissinger.