REVIEWING A NEO-REALIST
Marc Shulman of The American Future has an excellent review up of Taming American Power by the eminent political scientist of the Neo-Realist school. Dr. Stephen M. Walt . Marc’s review has more range and depth than I am discussing here because I want to focus on one particular point of Marc’s critique:
“In my view, Walt has considerable difficulty fitting al Qaeda and other Islamic terror organizations into his conceptual framework. This is probably true for most or all neo-realists. A school of thought that has the balance of power as its foundational principle is ill-equipped to understand a world in which the primary security threat is from transnational, religiously-inspired terrorist groups. For the U.S. or any other country to base a foreign policy on the assumption that al Qaeda will respond to carrots and sticks in the same manner as states would be the height of folly. “
Very well put. The dominant schools of thought in IR are Liberalism and Realism with Realism having more of an edge among practitioners in the diplomatic corps, intelligence services and staffers on the Hill ( among whom you also find idealists of various stripes). Neither Liberalism nor Realism/Neo- Realism have come to grips with Islamist terrorism or the broader phenomenona of the deterioration of the Westphalian state system, the rise of non-state actors or even, in my view, the implications of globalization. Both schools are simply too state-centric in their analytical orientation and are intellectually very, very, insular. They are not yet getting the context of everything else, nor do I think they will any time soon.
Abu Aardvark had a very interesting discussion recently on IR theory and al Qaida.
“Many more states are threatened by al Qaeda and/or al Qaeda-inspired terrorism than by aggression from another state. Given the nature of the threat and the unmatched strength of the U.S. military, balance of power theory, if it is to have any validity in the current era, would have to say that other states would have moved into ever-closer relationships with America in the years since 9/11. Except for heightened behind-the-scenes cooperation within the intelligence community, quite the reverse has happened. The counter-argument is that, as has been shown in several public opinion polls, many populations fear U.S. power more than terrorism — even if their governments do not. It would be absurd for America to assign a greater priority to appeasing foreign publics than to eliminating terrorists.”
To generalize and simplify Marc’s point, globalization has made it far easier for non-state and subnational actors to destabilize nation-states by striking at systemic ” choke points” and causing an enormous amount of economic and moral damage via ripple effects at a very low cost in terms of investing resources. Bin Laden spent pennies to cause millions of dollars of damage. On the flip side, state vs. state war between major powers has grown increasingly unlikely.
Hence the increasing popularity and traction in government circles of explanations by defense intellectuals like Dr. Barnett’s PNM theory, William Lind’s 4GW and John Robb’s Global Guerillaism, all of which begin with a strategic and systemic orientation.
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