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Power Play
By Robert Kagan
The nature of nations, like people, never changes. Today's political realists
say economics rather than military might has become the guiding principle of
countries, but the conflict in Georgia shows otherwise, argues Robert Kagan.
Where are the realists? When Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, it ought to have
been their moment. Here was Vladimir Putin, a cold-eyed realist if ever there
was one, taking advantage of a favorable opportunity to shift the European
balance of power in his favor -- a 21st century Frederick the Great or Bismarck,
launching a small but decisive war on a weaker neighbor while a surprised and
dumbfounded world looked on helplessly. Here was a man and a nation pursuing
interest defined as power, to use the famous phrase of Hans Morgenthau, acting
in obedience to what Mr. Morgenthau called the objective law of international
power politics. Yet where are Mr. Morgenthau's disciples to remind us that
Russia's latest military action is neither extraordinary nor unexpected nor
aberrant but entirely normal and natural, that it is but a harbinger of what is
yet to come because the behavior of nations, like human nature, is unchanging?
Today's realists, who we're told are locked in some titanic struggle with
neoconservatives on issues ranging from Iraq, Iran and the Middle East to China
and North Korea, would be almost unrecognizable to their forebears. Rather than
talk about power, they talk about the United Nations, world opinion and
international law. They propose vast new international conferences, a la Woodrow
Wilson, to solve intractable, decades-old problems. They argue that the United
States should negotiate with adversaries not because America is strong but
because it is weak. Power is no answer to the vast majority of the challenges we
face, they insist, and, indeed, is counterproductive because it undermines the
possibility of international consensus.
Readers, what is the role of determined democratic communities in international
politics today1? What role do you think the U.S. should be playing in Georgia
and other emerging geopolitical conflicts? Share your thoughts.2
They are fond of citing Dean Acheson, Reinhold Niebuhr and George Kennan as
their intellectual forebears, but those gentlemen would have found most of their
prescriptions naive. Mr. Acheson, as Harry Truman's Secretary of State, had
nothing but disdain for the United Nations and for most international efforts to
solve world problems. As his biographer, Robert L. Beisner, has shown, he
considered such efforts evidence of the naive hopefulness of people who could
not face the truth about human nature and preferred to preserve their illusions
intact. He strongly supported the NATO alliance but ultimately put his faith not
in international institutions but in the continued moral, military and economic
power of the United States. He aimed to build a preponderance of power and to
create situations of strength around the world. Until the United States acquired
this predominant power, he believed, negotiations and international conferences
with adversaries such as the Soviet Union were worthless. He opposed talks with
Moscow throughout his entire time in office.
Those early realists had little faith in the persuasive influence of the
community of nations or world opinion. The prestige of the international
community, Mr. Niebuhr argued, was not great enough...to achieve a communal
spirit sufficiently unified, to discipline recalcitrant nations. The great
mid-century theologian warned against a too uncritical glorification of
co-operation and mutuality between powerful nations with opposing interests.
Yet it is precisely the prospect of cooperation and mutuality that present-day
realists glorify. They revere President George H. W. Bush, who spoke of a new
world order in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South,
can prosper and live in harmony, where the rule of law supplants the rule of the
jungle, where nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and
justice. Today the elder Bush is hailed by realists because he went to the
United Nations Security Council, while the younger George W. Bush is condemned
because he treated the U.N. as the delusion Dean Acheson said it was. Realism
has pulled itself inside out.
Leading realists today see the world not as Mr. Morgenthau did, as an anarchic
system in which nations consistently pursue interest defined as power, but as a
world of converging interests, in which economics, not power, is the primary
driving force. Thus Russia and China are not interested in expanding their power
so much as in enhancing their economic well-being and security. If they use
force against their neighbors, or engage in arms buildups, it is not because
this is in the nature of great powers. It is because the United States or the
West has provoked them. The natural state of the world is harmonious; only
aggressive behavior by the United States disturbs the harmony.
In such a world, the task of the United States is not to check the rising powers
but to steer them gently along the path that the realists insist they are
already on, toward the embrace of an international community with laws and rules
to govern their behavior in ways that benefit all. As the self-described realist
Fareed Zakaria explains, The single largest strategic challenge facing the
United States in the decades ahead is to draw in the world's new rising powers
and make them stakeholders in the global economic and political order. China and
Russia, along with India and Brazil, are embracing markets, democratic
government...and greater openness and transparency. America's job is to push
these progressive forces forward, using soft power more than hard, and to try to
get the world's major powers to solve the world's major problems. The world,
after all, is going the United States' way.
The original realists had no patience for such Candide-like optimism about the
inevitable upward progress of mankind. Whoever thinks the future is going to be
easier than the past is certainly mad, wrote Mr. Kennan in 1951, six years after
the most destructive war in history, five years into the Cold War, and one year
into what was widely seen at the time as disastrous and seemingly hopeless
American intervention in Korea. Mr. Kennan's provocative assertion aimed to jolt
Americans out of their yearning to believe that the future would be different.
But now it is leading realists who embrace The End of History, with an
unshakable faith in the inevitable convergence of humanity around shared values
and common interests. These were exactly the hopes and dreams Mr. Morgenthau set
out to vanquish decades ago.
The original realists were not without their flaws, some of them fatal. Mr.
Morgenthau's insistence that ideology and regime type are irrelevant to a
nation's behavior was a terrible blind spot for realism, then and now. Mr.
Putin's turn toward autocratic rule at home and his revival of old imperial
pretensions abroad are intimately related. Mr. Putin himself argues that
strength and control at home allow Russia to be strong abroad. He and his ruling
clique clearly believe that avenging the demise of the Soviet Union will help
keep them in power. And who but a Russian autocrat would have regarded the color
revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine as intolerable provocations? Alexander I took
quite the same view of liberal rumblings in Poland and Spain in the early 19th
century. To ignore ideology and regime today is to misunderstand gravely the
motives of autocratic leaders, whether in Moscow or in Beijing.
Nor is the realists' own hostility to democracy, including American democracy,
particularly edifying. Mr. Kennan and the columnist Walter Lippmann flaunted
their disgust at what they regarded as the stupidity and ignorance of the
American public -- Mr. Kennan likened American democracy to one of those
prehistoric monsters with a body as long as [a] room and a brain the size of a
pin. Mr. Acheson was the great exception because he harbored no antidemocratic
prejudices and actually believed the messy American democracy would nevertheless
prove stronger in the long run. But most realists throughout the decades,
including today, have complained bitterly about the influence of domestic
political constituencies and the various ethnic groups that allegedly distort
America's understanding of its true interests.
Even so we could use a little dose of the old realism now, at least the part
that would recognize a great grab for power like Mr. Putin's and understand that
it will take more than offers of cooperation and benevolent tutelage to address
Russia's revived appetites. Perhaps a bit of realism can challenge the
widespread belief that a liberal international order rests on the triumph of
ideas alone or on the natural unfolding of human progress. This deterministic
conviction that Francis Fukuyama popularized is an immensely attractive notion,
deeply rooted in the enlightenment worldview of which all of us in the liberal
world are the product. Many in Europe still believe the Cold War ended the way
it did simply because the better worldview triumphed, as it had to, and that the
international order that exists today is but the next stage in humanity's march
from strife and aggression toward a peaceful and prosperous coexistence.
It is a testament to the vitality of this enlightenment vision that hopes for a
brand-new era in human history took hold with such force after the fall of
Soviet communism. But a little more skepticism, and realism, was in order. After
all, had mankind truly progressed so far? The most destructive century in all
the millennia of human history was only just concluding. Our modern, supposedly
enlightened era produced the greatest of horrors -- the massive aggressions, the
total wars, the famines and the genocides -- and the perpetrators of these
horrors were among the world's most advanced and enlightened nations.
Recognition of this terrible reality -- that modernity had produced not greater
good but only worse forms of evil -- was a staple of philosophical discussion in
the 20th century. It was the great problem that Mr. Niebuhr wrestled with and
which led him to conclude that for moral men to do good, they would sometimes
have to play by the same rules as immoral men -- and yes, he believed he could
tell the difference. What reason was there to imagine that after 1989 humankind
was suddenly on the cusp of a brand-new order?
The focus on the dazzling pageant of progress at the end of the Cold War ignored
the wires and the beams and the scaffolding that had made such progress
possible. The global shift toward liberal democracy coincided with the
historical shift in the balance of power toward those nations and peoples who
favored the liberal democratic idea, a shift that began with the triumph of the
democratic powers over fascism in World War II and that was followed by a second
triumph of the democracies over communism in the Cold War. The liberal
international order that emerged after these two victories reflected the new
overwhelming global balance in favor of liberal forces. But those victories were
not inevitable, and they need not be lasting.
After the Second World War, another moment in history when hopes for a new kind
of international order were rampant, Mr. Morgenthau warned idealists against
imagining that at some point the final curtain would fall and the game of power
politics would no longer be played. Moscow's invasion of Georgia has opened a
new act in the endless drama. The only question now is whether the United States
will play its part, and with the appropriate blend of realism about the world as
it exists and idealism about what a strong and determined democratic community
can do to shape it. As Mr. Niebuhr put it six decades ago, the world problem
cannot be solved if America does not accept its full share of responsibility in
solving it.
Robert Kagan is Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace and an informal adviser to the McCain campaign. His most recent book is
The Return of History and the End of Dreams.
The Wall Street Journal
August 30, 2008; Page W1
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