School of War - Ep 54: Jonathan Kirshner on Realism

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

Jonathan Kirshner, Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Boston College and author of An Unwritten Future: Realism, Uncertainty, and World Politics, joins the show to discuss realism and realists. ▪️ Times • 01:40 Introduction • 02:25 What is Realism? • 07:10 The birth of modern Realism • 11:59 To be “scientific” and “predictive”  • 15:10 Not a rejection of social sciences • 19:30 “Purpose matters” • 23:40 Liberalism  • 28:04 The Twenty Years Crisis  • 36:00 Ideology matters • 42:07 The China challenge • 48:04 Sleepwalking into war? • 55:48 Where does classical realism fall short? • 01:02:10 Finding moral counsel

Regular listeners to School of War know that this is a podcast primarily about strategy and military history, but also that we occasionally wander into related fields. This episode is one of those wanders. We're going to talk about foreign policy and specifically about quote unquote realism. For a theory of international relations that on the face of things, seems like everyone ought to sign on to it, what serious politician or diplomat thinks they are behaving unrealistically or idealistically without reference to way the world actually works. Well, in fact, as a lot of you know, debates about realism summon up some pretty fierce passions and bitter disagreement. Let's find out why and find out if we

should be realists or idealists or something in between. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave. situation in Iran. The people who are not these buildings there. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Erin McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm joined today by Jonathan Kirchner, who's Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Boston College, and the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Professor of International Political Economy Emeritus at Cornell University is the author of many books, most recently in an unwritten future, realism, and uncertainty in world politics.

Jonathan, thanks so much for making the time. Thanks for having me. So, first of all, I just want to say how much I not only enjoyed your most recent book, but actually profited from it. I feel like I learned a great deal. And in particular, I learned something that I think I understood superficially, but had not given anything resembling careful thought to, which is the distinction between what people might call academic realism or sort of neorealism,

the kind of realism that seems to be trendy in the academy today, or that you call classical realism. And I thought it might be most useful to start there, start at the highest level. Could you talk a bit about what realism is and what these two subsets of it are? Sure. First of all, thanks for the kind words. I'm glad that the book spoke to you in that way, which, of course, the goal of any author. And this distinction between classical realism and many forms of contemporary realisms,

including in particular branches of structural realism, are a key theme of the book. I mean, my goal with the book was essentially reclaim realism from a number of different perspectives, in particular structural realism, but also some what I call hyper-rationalist perspectives. All realisms flow from the same set of, underlying assumptions. They start with a disposition that the anarchic nature of international relations is influential on the way states behave. That states dwell in anarchy, that is, there is no ultimate, oversee disputes between them, and therefore it's the so-called self-help system. And that's even if, even its behaviors by others may be restrained, we can't be sure

of that. Behaviors of others might be unrestrained. They might behave. endang, horrifying, and barbaric ways, and which the assurance of societies may be in peril. Now, again, this may not be present always, but it is latent and sometimes present, and therefore states have to account for it. And so I think that this driving force of anarchy and the notion that states often come into conflict with each other, and in academics, when we meet states, so we mean countries that are often confusing in an American context where we call our provinces as states, but states often come into conflict with each other because they have conflicts of interest, not misunderstandings. They just see and walk different things. And those clashes can,

at times, become militarized and states need to look out for themselves. So all schools of realism tend to see a potentially dangerous world of conflicting interests between states, which can but not be settled by the resort to force, which may be unrestrained, and therefore, states need to be attentive to that. Now, where classical realism parts company with structural realism. The structural realism, which emerges as a force in international relations theory in 1970s, and comes to dominate realism in the 80s and 90s, so much so that even people who should know better conflate the two.

They think realism is structural realism. Actually, structural realism is a very narrow brand of classical realism that insists that the only way we may understand world politics is to look at states as like units distinguished only by their relative capabilities. And it is that distribution of power that tells you the only thing you're allowed to know and try to understand how states will behave. classical realism, on the other hand, while being very sensitive to the distribution of power, because it can create the constellation of threats and opportunities and dangers for countries, nevertheless places enormous emphasis on purpose on what states want. The argument is that states will not all want the same thing. And the difference is in what states want and how they will behave is influenced enormously by history and by ideas. so that historical experiences of states and the way in which they perceive the lessons of those historical episodes

will inform the way that they engage other states even in this structural setting. So there's a really fundamental difference between classical realism and structural realism because the variables, the classical realism puts at the center of the analysis, like the role of history, are explicitly forbidden from the analysis by structural realism. So can I ask a sort of a historical question or double-barreled historical question about the development of the field? When did realism, you know, come about as a self-understood body of thought or work? I mean, as you point out, the sort of the thinking in some respects goes back, you know, to Thucydides, if not before. But when do people think of themselves as realists and talk about themselves as realists?

So that's question A and then related question B is, how did a version of realism that is so, I mean, I approached your book with a bit of a prejudice in the same direction as you, that neorealism is sort of manifestly, at the very least, unhelpful for anyone actually practicing foreign policy. How did such a subset of the field that seems so obviously not quite right come to dominate the field in academia? Well, your first question is a little easier for me than your second question, so I'll do that one first. Realism as a self-aware academic discipline. As you note, there are figures that we point to throughout history, and we call them realists. But as a self-aware academic discipline, it emerges like the discipline of international politics itself as academic study after World War I, when people experience the abject horrors of that war, the mass slaughter, and they basically say, we don't want to do this again. And so much study of international relations,

as, again, an act motivated by that experience. And so it develops in the interwar years. And then, of course, we have the Great Depression, which was international in its context, and then World War II, of course, and then following that, the nuclear revolution. And so these early and mid-century experiences are really the cauldron with which all

the temporary iron theories are really born from. And for realism, it begins initially, I think, it's fair to say, although all origin stories are mythical, so I don't want to oversaid this, but there's a book written by E.H. Carr called The 20 Years Crisis that he published in 1939, in which he rather overtly contrasts what he calls liberal, excuse me, what he calls realism with what he perceives to be its principal intellectual adversary forms of liberalism. And so the establishment of realism as an academic discipline as a coherent thing, I think traces to Carr. Now, in the book, I talk a lot about how mid-century thinkers Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, Raymond Aron,

and I go all the way to a more contemporary thinker who's most important Robert Gilpin, that those five individuals, but there were dozens of others, who sort of forge the foundations of what contemporary realism is like. So it emerges, I think, from this set of profound problems associated with the first half of the 20th century. And that's why we can date the emergence of modern international relations realism to that period. As for your second question, I think it's a little more complicated. There's a book written by Kenneth Walts that's published in 1979 called Theory of International

politics that makes a flag-waving case for structural realism. Theory of international politics was meant to assert that this was the only approach to international relations that was pure theory, and that this was very appealing at the time because we're also in the Social Science Academy more generally moving towards a disposition that wants to emulate forms of science in the way they're explaining the world. So Waltz's book, for a variety of reasons, some of which remained mysterious to me, was simply wildly influential. It's also a charismatic teacher, had many great students. Many of those students were books in the tradition that Waltz was trying to establish,

although they had to fill in some of the many blanks that he left for them. And why something becomes wildly popular, I think it's hard to determine in retrospect. one older scholar once said to me, and I think this is the best explanation I've ever heard, is you just don't realize what a mess IR theory was in the 50s and 60s. And I don't know if that's true. It's before my time. I've obviously read a lot of that material. But his argument was that Waltz was almost like a life preserver,

that it was something clear that people could grasp and say, yes, this is what we're doing, this is what we can do. And out of that mess, it just became something. that everybody could orient themselves around. By everybody, I mean those want to approach international relations questions paradigmatically from the perspective of something called realism.

So in a minute, I'd like to come back to Carr in the interwar period and also liberalism, but just to stick with Waltz and structural realism for a moment, does its popularity have anything to do with the desire of the practitioners of international relations, scholarship to be scientific, to have a system that is useful in the sense of being predictive? I think both of those things are true. I think we need to be very cautious that Waltz himself

was not in the prediction business. He didn't make two assertions, and each of them were, I don't think, did it, performed well over the course of the following decade, assumptions about bipolarity and assumptions about interdependence. But Walz is very cautious about saying he's not making lots of claims with his theory. And critics like me say, okay, fine, but tell us what you are claiming because I look at structural realism and I'm very puzzled as to what exactly we can do with it. It is so minimalist as to be almost paralyzing as an analytical apparatus. But I do think it was nested in another post-war largely American phenomenon of the emergence of a certain type of social science that saw itself as emulating a certain type of natural science so that we see the

economics in particular try to model itself as a form of social physics and not only physics but you know narrowly Newtonian mechanistic deterministic physics and so i think that that was very appealing for a lot of scholars in the 1960s and the 1970s. That is the antithesis of what most classical realists believe or take as a point of departure because classical realism, another way in which it was distinguished between other approaches to the study of international relations is its absolute redline unbridgeable gap between the social world and the natural world. In the social world, motives matter. And in the social world, the behavior of some actors can affect the behavior of other actors.

Whereas, again, to take the Newtonian analogy, the apple has no opinion and no say in whether it will fall from the tree. And so this red line distinction between reaching for the metaphors of the natural sciences and the metaphors that we would associate with the social world is a core element of what class. classical realism is all about. It's rooted in this notion of uncertainty, which we might want to unpack later in our conversation because it is a misunderstood concept, but it boils down to that phrase, not just that we simply do not know, but that we do not have an underlying, unifying theory of how the world works, that we can simply reach for and put information through and process on the other side and get the answer. And that really leans a little more toward the so-called hyper-referens. rationalist turn in IR theory, which is very mechanistic, very deterministic, requires a world of risk, not uncertainty, and requires that all actors and observers share knowledge of the same underlying model of how the political world works. How is it that the case you just outlined is not simply a rejection of social science as such? I mean, I take it that that's not what you're saying.

What is what is preservable about social science, given the observations you just made? Sure. I think that's a very important point because I would not see classical realism as rejecting social science. I think classical realism is within the family of social sciences. But what do we mean by that? Do we believe in causal claims? Do we believe in looking at evidence? Do we believe in the search for generalizable patterns?

I think all those things are true. It's really that phrase I used before. It's a type of social science that rejects the notion that we can emulate a natural sciences model. Because whatever models we have, they will be constantly changing and updating in relation to things that are going on in the real world. It's not simply a question of complexity, although the social world I think is much more complex than the natural natural world. world, and I think it's because it involves motivations and preferences, which can't be relevant to the natural world. But we also have the problem that we do not, will not, not just do not, but will not know that single underlying model of how the world works. So the practice of

social science continues, but it continues in an environment of uncertainty. And so maybe I should transition briefly to a distinction between risk and uncertainty. In a situation, of risk, we know for fact the underlying probability distribution of all possible outcomes. We can't predict the future. If I roll two dice, I cannot predict for you what the outcome is going to be. But I know for sure the probable outcome of every possible outcome I can assign a probability to it. I'd be correct. And every observer looking at that equation will look at that probability outcome as well. In situations of uncertainty, and I think if you're looking at out the window, you can see that the world is a lot more like a world of uncertainty than a world of risk.

We simply do not have access to the known underlying probability, distribution of the range of possible effects. We are often surprised, and therefore we should be prepared to be surprised, and we should not pretend that we're living in a world of risk when actually we're living in a world of uncertainty. Now, that is not at all about throwing one's hands up and saying, so we don't know anything. Rather, it is trying to, the craft of classical realism is trying to hone a series of analytical tools that can be deployed to better understand, explain, describe, and anticipate events in world politics. I think, for example, that gardeners often engage in scientific enterprises. But they also use various forms of judgment and guesses. This is, this goes

back to George Cannon, who said, in articulating a certain type of realism, he didn't call it classical realism because they didn't have structural realism yet. He just called it realism. But he said, and this is, I think, at the core of the classical realist enterprise, we must be gardeners, not mechanics in our work. So the mechanistic analogy, the natural sciences analogy, to understanding international politics, that's one of the core ways the classical realism parts company with other forms of the enterprise of studying world products. But that doesn't mean that they don't want to be classical realists that is well armed with various what we would call scientific understanding. We want to understand about blights and the effect of rainfall and the

effect of sunlight and all these things that gardeners would need to know about. But nevertheless, the idea that we're, again, building a building using engineering and architecture and mechanics is the wrong turn. Yeah. Well, this is the point you make in the book that was very clarifying for me, which is just to stick with the gardener for a moment, the fact that, you know, to continue your analogy, that a certain exposure to a certain amount of sunshine and a certain amount of rain, on average, affects flowers this way or that way is of some mild interest to the gardener,

but actually on any given day, what he cares about is this flower, this specific flower in front of him and what's going to happen to it. And similarly, with international relations, we are mildly interested in the behavior of nations over time subject to certain general forces. But actually, what we really care about is what this nation, or in some cases, this person is going to do or not do. And that that right there, right, is the limit of the scientific approach. Is that a fair way of putting it? Not only do I think that's a fair way of putting it, I think it's a great way of putting it. and I talk about this at good length in the book,

and it does speak to this question of what vision of science you're trying to practice. So a very, I'm going to use an awkward word, scientific approach to international politics, often is looking at very large aggregations of data, and from those large aggregations of data, what they're really engaging in is trying to understand what the average actor will do in average circumstances. But as you've just said correctly, in international politics, we are almost always more interested, or exclusively interested even, in the particular behavior of a specific actor at a distinct time.

And that will often vary greatly from actor to actor. So knowing how the average actor might behave in a normal time drawn as if a ball, you know, randomly from an urn full of large balls, rarely is helpful for, giving us insights into the real world. This may be a little cute, but I tell a little story about this that I call the ketchup analogy. The model for the supply and demand for ketchup is very well known. We know it will affect the supply curve.

We know it will affect the demand curve. And we can map it out, as Alfred Marshall, the great economist would have us do with those very familiar supply of demand curves. We can see them intersect. And we can see where the equilibrium price will be the equilibrium quantity demanded will be. And then there can be a shock to the system,

like an increase in price due to, say, a blight or a tariff. And we will know in aggregate that the demand for ketchup at a higher price for ketchup will fall. But we don't know whether or not the particular actor we're interested in will consume less ketchup. Because where that actor falls on that demand curve will tell us whether or not they will continue to consume ketchup. This is my little ketchup allegory, so that if they were very high up on the demand curve, even with this exogenous shock, they will continue to consume ketchup. But if they were on the other part of the demand curve, they will no longer be bidding for ketchup at that

price, and they will drop out at the market. But this is international relations. There's a shock or maybe an economic sanction, or maybe even a conflict, and how will the actor respond? Well, really depends on where they fall on this allegorical demand her, how important the behavior is to them. Some will change their behavior. Others will not. And again, this is because purpose matters, preferences matters. The distinct attributes of various states in the system will respond differently even to the same shock. So the shock may be similarly expressed across the entire system, But the reactions to that shock will vary from actor depending on their different purposes and preferences, purposes and preferences that will be rooted in their historical experiences and their own ideas and ideologies about who they are and what they want.

Again, this is all invisible to structural realism, and it's also invisible to a system that says, well, I have 20,000 observations and here's the median outcome. Because as you noted in your question, we almost never are interested in knowing what the median outcome is in an important international situation. Yeah. Earlier, when you brought up Carr, you described this conflict between realism on the one hand and liberalism on the other. What is liberalism in the sense that you meet it in this context? Sure. I want to preface this by saying that one of the first. of the things I want to emphasize in this book is that realism and liberalism, especially in the

1990s, but perhaps throughout the 20th century, spend way too much time sort of at intellectual war with each other. These are competing paradigms. You can't falsify a paradigm. It's a disposition. It's a point of departure. It's a way of looking at the world. And so, and it helps you develop theories derived in that tradition. Carr was trying to articulate a realism by contrasting it with liberalism, and he had some bitterness about liberalism in general, which is neither here nor there. But for the exercise, I guess it's okay that Carr did that. But liberalism really takes as its point of departure of the inverses of what I just described about realism, which is it observes anarchy. I think you'll be very hard pressed to see a scholar

who associates with a liberal school and says, oh, no, there's no antipy out there. Rather, they tend to emphasize that the problems of anarchy are more easily transcended than realistic. Again, it's not that liberals think war is impossible. I don't think you'll be able to find a serious liberal scholar who would say, no, war can't possibly occur. Rather, they would say, actually, in many large parts of the world, the prospect for war is so latent and unlikely that we can best understand relations between states without emphasizing that prospect. I think it's also fair to say that liberals, liberal scholars, place more of an emphasis on problem solving, that disputes between states can be the result of misunderstandings or if not misunderstandings are differences that can be effectively bargained away between each other and the states can come to some settlement. Whereas I think realists are more prone to see the clash of contrasting interests that are not. easily settled. So this kind of problem-solving approach to world politics as opposed to a vision of

world politics as an unending series of conflicts of interests. And even if you resolve one conflict of interest, well, right behind that conflict of interest is going to be another conflict of interest. And so you're going to have to act on that. But again, as I say in the book, I see these paragraphs more as each other's loyal opposition and not even bitter opposition. It's a it's a continuum. And there's a lot of straw manning thinking about a kind of peace-loving, dull-eyed liberal in the far end of this perspective, yeah. And then there's like, you know, monstrous, you know, war, you know, mongering figure at the far end of the realist spectrum. And I don't think either of those are accurate. I think that all thinkers tend to fall along this spectrum from liberalism to realism, some closer to the extreme ends than other.

but the competition between these theories, I think, for my discipline, for international relations, has not been a productive one. One more comment about liberalism and realism that is contested, but I share the view that, on average, a liberal perspective tends to be a bit more optimistic about the world, about humans, and about the prospect for progress in world politics. And that on average, a realist perspective tends to be a little more pessimistic, tends to have a little darker view of humanity and tends not to anticipate that things will necessarily get better. I know a lot of realists and a lot of liberals who disagree with that,

but my own view is this distinction on this optimistic pessimistic spectrum. It captures some aspects of the differences between realist and liberal political analysis. So to keep with Carr for the time being, you spent a fair amount of time in the book, discussing the interwar period, discussing the policy of appeasement with respect to Germany, discussing U.S. policy with respect to Japan. In the European case, I mean, this is what Carr's book is about, right, the 20-year's crisis, about the lead-up to the Second World War published in 1939. And there's a bit of a problem with the book, which is that it's a robust endorsement of a policy,

a policy of appeasement that ultimately fails. So how do you disentangle that from your obvious admiration? for and respect for Carr's analysis. And, well, I'll just leave it at that, and then I have some more questions on the subject. Sure, that's a great question, and we always have to reckon with that. I mean, it's a central part of Carr,

and it's a tremendous blunder. And I want to preface this by saying that when I walk through that I discuss in the book, it is not to celebrate them. Some of them are admirable figures. Some of them are not admirable figures. They're just people, people who have strengths and weaknesses,

who have attractive qualities and unattractive qualities, and who have been right about some things and who have made mistakes about other things. So it is in no way a celebration or a deification of these figures, nor does it mean that they walk in lock step. What I was trying to do with the discussion of those thinkers who sort of distill commonalities across them that we could then describe as being at the heart

of what classical realism looks like. But even they could disagree amongst themselves. Okay, that was a lot of throat clearing. on call. Yes, I mean, the tragedy of the book, the 20 years crisis, which has a lot of value in it, is that it's pretty much written as a defense of appeasement. Why? Why? And not only a defense of appeasement, but a late defense of appeasement. Even most appeasers, not all, certainly not Neville Chamberlain, hopped off the appeasement train after the German absorption of the balance of Czechoslovakia. So the appeasers go from Munich. They're wrong, right, but they go for it.

But then when Hitler violates the Munich Accords and observes those of Czechoslovakia, even most appeasers say, geez, you know, this guy, maybe we can't really appease him. Carr's book is written after that and is still an endorsement of people. So Carr is not just appeasing, but Carr is all in. And we can, I think it's fair to say we can tar Kennan with this brush as well, another, monumentally important classical realism. So the question is, why did these guys get this so incredibly wrong? I think to focus on Carr, it's because he was following, with some logic, two core aspect, one of which is to see the world as it is,

not as how we would wish it to be. And so that for him was a core part of realism. He thought liberals were idealistic and wanted to impose a vision on the world that reflected their values without an adequate respect for power. Power in two ways. The power of others that might resist what you want to do, but also the limits to your own power, what you can accomplish. And so Carr, thinking about seeing the world as it is,

looked at Central Europe, looked at German power, and said, well, we have to respect the fact that Germany is extraordinarily powerful, has emerged as a more powerful state. And even if we don't like it, we need to understand the world in a way that recognizes German power, and this would be an example of that. And it's also important because it goes back to this World War I question. I don't know if contemporary scholars or practitioners, and I don't know why they should, keep at the front of their brains just how traumatic the First World War was for Europe and the

world. This was a mass slaughter, and for unobvious purposes. for most people who fought it. And it was literally the decimation of generation of men on the continent, many of whom, hundreds of thousands of whom, sprinted into machine gun fire across bloody fields. And so we come out of World War I, and the one thing everybody shares is,

we never, ever, ever want to do this again. So part of Carr's agenda, and it's at the core of the book, is if we're not going to have change by war, we need to have a mechanism of peaceful change. And so he thought, erroneously, that the Munich Agreement would be an example of this peaceful change. Instead of having a World War I thing, we just have to be cold-blooded about this, look out the window, see the balance of power, and make peaceful adjustments to the balance of power. And this required the satisfied and the powerful be more likely the ones to make the concessions. And so that's why he thought the Western powers had to accommodate the right and make concessions to it, because it was either that or another go at World War I, which again, nobody wanted to do. Okay, so that's the way of Carr is coming from in the idea of the acknowledgement of power and the need for peaceful change. Why did he get it wrong? Because even though I consider Carr a classical realist, in some ways he was a closet structure.

He was looking at the balance of power, but he wasn't looking at the agency of the actors. He just saw Nazi Germany and just saw another country. But if we go back to what I think a good classical realist should do and be able to understand that different actors behave differently, that they have different purpose, that they have different ideology, and that dude at different tastes and different preferences. Because of that, they'll behave differently. he should have been able to have seen that Germany was different. And so even if his theory was right in the abstract,

it did not well apply to this case because a simple adjudication of a disequilibrium on the balance of power by minor adjustments on the continent would not solve the problem. Now, interestingly, Morcau and Aron saw this clearly. because they put great stock in the meaning of this very distinct actor. Carr did not. And Kenan was a little comfortable with authoritarianism.

And I think he missed the true powers of the Nazi menace because of that. But his instincts were similar to Carr. I think he said something like Czechoslovakia is a central European nation and its destiny must lie in that fact. It has the same kind of recognition of the realities of power. But again, even if you think that's true, and I do think all classical realists are very sensitive to those two Kaurian notions. One, seeing the world as it is, not as how you would wish it to be.

And two, respect for power, the power of others and the limits to your own power. I think a classical realist, because they put content so much on the taste, as an important understanding explainer of what's going on, that they would not make that same, they would have those tools, but they would not misapply them because they would be able to recognize that different actors may behave differently. And it's crucial to have an assessment of those actors and their preferences. So how would you account for the policy, basically, I'll ask you to sort of talk through what you, what you discussed in the book, which is give an account for the policy of appeasement using the paradigm of classical realism

as opposed to more structuralist approaches. You've already talked a bit about the weight of history in the decision making of someone like Chamberlain that World War I just weighs on him in a way that it is easy to fail to appreciate if you didn't live through the same things that Chamberlain and his generation and those younger them did. But what is the role of ideology? I suppose that's the part we haven't addressed yet here. And it's something that, you know, for example, a reason why someone like me would have, until reading your book, have habitually dismissed realism as a useful way of looking at the world, it's because it seemed to me that realists in here I was thinking of academic realists think that ideology doesn't matter. You think that it does. How does it matter in this context?

Again, I talk about appeasement, Britain's appeasement in particular. French case is fascinating, but Britain's appeasement of Nazi Germany is an important case for me. First of all, because it's puzzling. And, you know, we all do puzzle-driven work in international relations. And all realists think that states crave survival. And yet Britain, one of the most powerful nations in the world, managed to come within a hair's breath of being conquered by, you know, the ultimate evil entity of the world. So they're not doing a really great job of, you know, survival 101, which is taking care of oneself.

So how did they blunder so badly? And the point of the book or the point of the illustration in the book is to show the classical realism can tell us things that structural realism can't. Not only the structural realism can't, but that structural realism forbids. So again, you've asked about ideology, but I do want to double down on the role of history. A classical realist does not think you can understand the behavior of states in the 1930s without knowing where they came from. And where they came from, in this particular instance, was the experience of the First World War. For structural realism, that is, irrelevant. You cannot appeal to the influence of the First World War on the way in which states

will behave in the future. All you have is their relative balance of power between them. So classical realism in trying to understand the puzzle of British appeasement reaches for two variables forbidden by structural realism. One is the role of history in shaping what they think they want and what they think they don't want. But the other is ideal. And it is an ugly fact, I believe, that many elites that were governing Britain, especially in the Conservative Party, were not fascists, were not evil, but they were comfortable with the idea that an authoritarian Germany would come to dominate the European continent. And there were many reasons for that. But one of them is that while they were kind of okay with fascism, they really, really, really hated communism. And so the Soviet Union is a new and emerging entity at this time.

And they're all staring at that. And that's the thing they're more afraid of. So even though the Soviet Union is distant and less threatening in the moment and especially militarily to the West, it represents to them the thing they're more scared of. And as I talk about in the book, Chamberlain goes on and on and on about how he can't trust the Russians. And I'm not saying you should trust the Russians, but you know who he did trust? Hitler and Mussolini. These are people he thought he could trust. You know, why do you, you know, so it's one thing to be wary of trusting the Russians.

I think there's very good reasons for that. But why do you be trustful of Hitler and Mussolini over and over again, especially after they've lied to you over and over again? And again, this had to do with Chamberlain and his larger calls. cohorts, relative comfort with authoritarianism as compared to communism. And the thought experiment and challenge, I think, the structural realism is this. And this could have easily happened because the German upheaval in the 1920s was going to produce likely a radical government. But that could have been a radical government of the left. So let's say the communists emerged in Germany. And let's say the Russian civil war ended in a different way and the communist lost.

and a new authoritarian state emerges in Russia. Now, you haven't changed anything else. Germany is exactly as powerful in this scenario as it was in the real scenario, and Russia as well. So you haven't changed the variable that structural realism lets you look at, the balance of power, like units differentiated only by their capabilities. But if in a situation, that counterfactual world, if you think that, then you've got a big problem on your hands if you're a structural realist, because all you've changed is the ideologies of the actor.

You haven't changed their relative capabilities. And again, structural realism says all you're allowed to look at is relative capabilities because states are like units. They are not differentiated by their ideologies or by their purpose or by their historical experiences and how that informs their behavior and so on. So I do think the British appeasement of Germany provides a very productive illustration of why I think the classical realist approach is more helpful in understanding

how the world works than the structural realism. Yeah, the great literary treatment of British right-wing attitudes towards the Nazis, at least that I'm familiar with, is a wonderful Ishiguru novel, The Remains of the Day, which it's easy. I mean, I expect a bit like the French,

thinking about French behavior during the war, it is very much in the English interest to sort of downplaying, dismiss English conservative politics in the lead up to the war. And that novel is an interesting reminder of what a lot of people felt and believed at the time. I think that's true. And I also think, you know, French domestic political society also informed tremendously the ways in the very poor way and the very puzzling way and which trans approached the Second World War as well. Yeah. If you will, let's chat about China for a minute. You have some pretty

strongly worded critiques in the book. I would say the critique of Mearsheimer is strongly worded. The critique of Alison, Graham Allison and his notion of the Thucydides trap is also critical and I would say also somewhat devastating. What is the, maybe we'll start with Allison, because I think people might be more familiar in general with the notion of the Thucydides trap, because it got a lot of attention impressed just in the last few years. What is the Allison account of the challenge that China poses to the United States. And what is your criticism of it? My criticism of Allison,

and this is not just Allison's advice, is that it is based on a very thin reading of a very small part of Thucydides' great work the Peloponnesian Court. It is certainly true that Thucydides, early on, places emphasis on the role of the change in balance of power in bringing about the great conflict between Athens and Sparta.

But Allison and others embrace a sort of sleepwalker analogy, like a World War I analogy, that these two entities stumbled into a war that neither won. And what I've done in the book, both early on in the book, but also in this chapter that focuses on China, is take a much closer look at Thucydides' rather magistrate's rather magistrate real work, which has so much to tell us about international politics today. And that's kind of wild because he was writing about city states from 2,500 years ago. And yet I think it's rich with political lessons for contemporary international politics. And I think two important rebuttals of Allison emerge. I mean, I think there are many, but because, you know,

our time is limited. I want to focus on two. One is that these entities did not sleepwalk into this war. Each side could have easily took measures that they knew they could take to diffuse the conflict between them, but they each purposefully chose not to. And I think it's very important to note that Thucydides' hero in the first part of the Peloponnesian War is Pericles. And Pericles was kind of a warmonger. Pericles was very pro-war. And Thucydides implicitly endorses Pericles by giving his voice singular platform to make the case for war on two or three separate occasions in the book, whereas the case against the war is never properly articulated. So the actual war itself, the lesson of the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides' grand book was not that we never should

have had this war in the first place. That's not where he situates the tragedy. That's not the Thucydides' trap. Athens and Sparta did not fall into a trap. Rather, and the this is point two, the Peloponnesian War, the core story of the Peloponnesian War, and the true trap that Thucydides was trying to give us as a lesson for the ages was the trap of hubris. So what went wrong in the Peloponnesian War for his beloved Athens was this extremely misguided Sicilian adventure, this wildly ambitious, distant overseas operations, and it was that which led to Athenian ruins. And in fact, in the early part of the book, I mean, the war is 27 years long.

You know, it's chapter one that tells us about the start of the war. Cydides has Pericles saying, look, you'll win this war with the Spartans, which you should fight if you just keep your powder dry and don't go on and take wild new adventures. Just, you know, focus on this war and it's winnable and here's how to do it. Pericles leaves the scene in the year three of the war. And after 17 years of the war, Athens, who had done well in the first phase of the war, it's really a three-phase war, 10 years of fighting, seven years of interregnum and 10 more years of fighting. And that first 10 years went pretty well for the Athenians. Again, it wasn't a dastardly

trapped that they'd fallen into and bemoaned falling into. Rather, it was a war that they more or less won. It was this hubris, and this is a key concern of classical realism. that states get full of themselves and go on big adventures, and those adventures are ruinous. And that's the Thucydides, the real Thucydides trap, the trap of hubris, that great powers can be arrogant and make mistakes based on that arrogance. And so I think that the Allison tale of the confrontation between the U.S. and China is based on a thin misreading of what the Peloponnesian War had to tell. So that's my, that's a shorter version of my Allison story.

Isn't the, the other problem with the sleepwalker analogy or way of, way of thinking about things, and I realize I'm waiting into deep waters here, but it's not just that Athens and Sparta didn't sleepwalk into war. It's that the great powers in 1914 didn't sleepwalk into war. Indeed, I mean, if they had foreseen the future between 1914 and 1918 and seeing the costs, None of them, I think, would have elected for a, you know, a conflict that charged the costs that it did to include on the victors. But in general, there was a sense that, you know, you could fight a war and win it. Germany thought it was going to win the war. That's why it launches the war.

What am I missing here about the start of the First World War? Because this analogy, of course, is frequently invoked, not just by Allison, but by many, when we're talking. about China to emphasize the need. And I think you push a bit in this direction in your book, too, the need for accommodation. But of course, there are risks to accommodation. And the big difference, it seems to me, between us in 2022 and the European powers in 1914, is that in the European powers in 1914, in general thought you could win a war. And I don't think anybody today seriously thinks that you can win a general war, which is to say

a war that escalates and you start using nuclear weapons and things like that. We all know that you lose that war, which imposes a bit of a break on escalation. So what am I missing about sleepwalking in 1914? Well, you've asked a bundle of questions there, and I want to pick one from the middle and then go back to World War I because the U.S.-China case is such an important one, and I think we're late in our conversation that it's crucial that we at least touch on it, because you raise such an important point. That classical realist instinct would be to say, well, China.

China is much more powerful now than it used to be. And therefore, good realism requires that we have some acknowledgement of that power. Right. And so you said that the instinct for the accommodation of power reflected in the recognition of greater power of others and reflected in the limitations of one's own power. But then you called attention to why this is one of the hardest puzzles in the history of international politics. that is dealing with changes to the balance of power. And that is because one person's accommodation can be the other person's encouragement.

So it's almost like you're walking a tightrope between the need to be realistic. That is to acknowledge the fact that this is a more powerful entity than it was before and will want more things and will be able to get more things. But on the other hand, the practice of accommodation can backfire and even wet the appetite of that power or give a perception of weakness. So where do you draw that line? How do you do that properly? I think classical realism recognizes this dilemma and focuses much more on the political side than the military side.

This was Kennan during the Cold War, and I think this is classical realists today, which are focused much more on the need to establish good political relations with the defense, about the specific military bout between the U.S. and China, and rather a type of U.S. engagement that gives regional powers the confidence to resist some of the encroachments or demands that China might be making. I just wanted to get that in because I do think it's just a monumentally problematic question for international relations theory in general and in the present day in particular. How do you deal with a rising power? Because it is not, there is not one simple and easy answer that will avoid all your problems. It's a real hornet's nest, and there's no kind of magic solution to it. To go back to your earlier question, I think you're right to say that all the powers going into World War I anticipated that the war would be short, brief, glorious, and victorious.

And so in that sense, they did not mistakenly enter the war. But if you look at the period leading up to the war, the three years before, maybe the 10 years before, I think political leadership throughout the continent was not our best. And that the problems that contributed to the disequilibria and the conflicts that led to the First World War might have been handled better by a more gifted cohort of leaders and diplomats. And even if they did not sleepwalk into the first world, and this is an open and arguable question that we're not going to get into here, a key classical realist phrase applies here extremely well. They did not get the war they expected. And I think that is always what, and classical realists will think that will almost always be the case. Now, I should say that, again, this contrast with the Peloponnesian War. The first few years of the Peloponnesian War, everybody pretty much got the war they thought

they were going to get. And again, cultural context matters. The resort to arms at that time to have fights like this was not viewed with the same kind of horrors that we view it today because the costs and opportunity costs of war for those societies and those cultural settings was a little different than it is today, certainly than it would be in a war between the U.S. and China would be catastrophic. So maybe the analogy, another sleepwalker analogy that makes more sense is the Cuban Missile Crisis analogy, in which both sides understood that they were in a confrontation that could spiral

out of control, and if it did, everybody would lose. But they didn't want to appear weak. They thought they had very strong feelings about how the outcome of the conflict would take place. And so they were in a confrontation in which they were on the brink of catastrophe for all sides. And so there you get the maybe sleepwalk there isn't the right word, but you can have a confrontation between great powers in which each side understands that the actual resort to war would be catastrophic for both sides. And yet they're still dancing on the knife edge of falling into this abyss of the war. And I think that's closer to the analogy. You're

reaching forward with the current U.S.-China confrontation, I don't think, although I could be wrong, that most actors in the U.S. or China would think a large war between the two countries would be anything but ruinous. Nevertheless, it's easy to imagine confrontations that aspire control, which each side takes a series of incremental steps that convinces them that they have to take these steps that then elicits responses from the other, and therefore they do not only get the war they don't expect, but maybe they do get the war they expect, but the war they really don't want, but nevertheless sort of stumble into it. And again, that's not a Peloponnesian war story, in which each side went into it very clear-headed, and in which the tragedy, in which the trap

was the trap late in the war of Athenian hubris. And it was Athenian hubris that led to Athenian ruin. I can't emphasize that enough because classical realists emphasize hubris, whereas we haven't talked about the hyper-rationalist school, then we're probably not going to, and that's fine. But hubris is not a hyper-rationalist state. It's almost an emotional state. It's about passions and beliefs and, you know, getting your chest all puffed up. And that's not really a hyper-rationalist story. But it is an important part of how states actually have behaved, how great power. How great powers have behaved in world politics. They say, we're incredible. We can do this. We, there are no limits to our power. We can take on this adventure. A lot of people look at the limits of the

behaviors of great powers as because they had not enough power. But in fact, most of the blunders that many great powers have made have been because they've had a security surplus. They've had too much power. And this allowed them to embark upon foolhardy missions that countries with real pressing security problems wouldn't even dream of trying to do. Final question. It's a bit of a doozy, but you're the man to ask it, too. So you've said numerous points in our conversation that classical realism is a paradigm. It's a kind of guide.

And so we speak in shorthand of, you know, classical realism holds this or doesn't hold this or advise this or not advise that. But, you know, classical realism will never. actually make a decision. You know, Jonathan Kirshner will make a decision. Aaron McLean will make a decision. Individual actors and leaders will make decisions. Where does classical realism leave us coming up short?

Where will it not help us? I think that's a great question. And it's important to me that chapter four of the book, not chapter seven of the book, not the last chapter of the book, but the middle chapter of the book takes a hard look at the limits of realism and classical realism itself. Carr did this in his book as well with a chapter on the limits of realism. And that's because, you know, realism should be relentless in its self-criticism.

That should be part of the story. It shouldn't be an after-saint. And I would call attention to two problems with realism and with classical realism in particular. One, I think, is somewhat inescapable. And one, I think, can be remedied. but is nevertheless ubiquitous among realists. So the one that I think we're stuck with in a way is that it's fair to criticize classical realism, and realism more generally, in that it does a great job of telling you what not to do.

Don't screw, don't make bad choices. Don't screw up. Don't go on this ridiculous adventure. Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. And that has to do with the fact that realism has a small C, conservative component to it, with his attentiveness to the fragility of civilized order and the dangers of the world, the need to keep your powder dry, the fact that there is no end zone, and therefore if you solve one conflict, another conflict will be right behind it. And so what does

that mean? It means that classical realist and realist watch right off prudence, always be prudent, always be cautious. But that can be paralyzing. That doesn't really give you, you know, that could mean you're leaving opportunities on the table. That can mean you're not advancing the national interest in consequential ways. And I think Kenan is the poster child for this in that the U.S. embarked on a very ambitious series of foreign policy efforts after the Second World War to sort of forge what we saw as the post-war American order. Now, you can dispute the benefits of that order, but I would argue a lot of good things came from that, even though it had many flaws. But Kennan would have been very cautious about that.

He opposed NATO. He opposed a security treaty with Japan. Anything that was going on in the world that the U.S. might have gotten involved in, he opposed it. And again, that meant that he smartly understood that the Vietnam War was a terrible idea in the mid-1960s, way ahead of the curve. But that same instinct would mean that he would lead us to fail to take advantage of opportunities that were out there in the world that would benefit us and our vision for the kind of world we want to

live in. So classical realism's caution and prudence, I think too easily slips into over caution and over prudence. And there's no simple solution to that. We just need to be alert to the fact that it's easy to say, oh, do the prudent thing. Be cautious, be prudent, don't make mistakes. But as a positive agenda for actually accomplishing anything or advancing high highly valued goals in the world, it offers less of a guide. So I think that's a big demerit on realism and classical realism. And I think it's important to acknowledge the limits of your own paradigm. But there's another one I want to discuss that I think is more important, not more important.

I think is something that we can do something about, which is that realists see the world as a dangerous place in which behaves to be unrestricted. and in which because of that, we must be attentive to our own national security. And because realists often conceptualize the outer world as a dark and amoral place, for many that is used as a get-out-a-jail-free card to allow one's own country to engage on the world's stage in amoral and even dastardly behaviors in the name of the national interest. But my point is, and I think this is an important one, the latter does not flow from the former, just because the world can be a dangerous and any moral place in which behaviors will be unconstrained

and in which there are lots of dangers and in which you have a responsibility to be attentive to your natural security, that does not give you carte blanche to behave in any kind of nefarious behavior for that purpose, or to be utterly indifferent and dismissive to things that are going on. And I think there's a really cute analogy about this in terms of microeconomic theory, in that there have been good studies that have shown that students who take introduction to microeconomic theory in which they're told that actors behave as selfish rational egoists, that at the end of taking introduction to microeconomic theory, those undergraduate students are actually more selfish as people than they were when they started to take in the class.

the class is almost teaching students to behave in an unattractive way that was basically a function of a model of the actor. And I think that there are too many people who've been trained as realists who fall to that same trap, who say, well, I'm a realist, and therefore I don't think morality ever applies anywhere, and I can do anything, and the national interest is sacrosanct, and if that means you have to do this series of horrible things, well, that's okay because it's realism and it's anarchy, and we can just do that. And I think that that's not inherent to realism, but I think it is a weakness of some realist analysis that I did want to call attention to in walking through these problems of realism in Chapter 4 of the book.

I suppose we'll need to get our theory of justice from somewhere else. Isn't that one way of describing the limitation of classical realism? I mean, which is to say, you know, I have no reason to reject anything you just asserted, but it doesn't seem to me that realism as realism is going to provide the moral counsel. And that's a big problem. We've got to go find it somewhere else. I think that's right. But what I think, I guess my more optimistic response would be is that you can be a realist or a classical realist and still have space for your foreign policy to be infused with a value system. Now, that will be contested. Now, I can't tell you in advance what that value system will be because people have different values and states can have different values. But it is not a renunciation

of the idea that states can have value systems and that those value systems can be worth trying to encourage and support in the world. Again, that will be fraught, contested, and there will be very different visions of that. And realism will not point you in a singular direction about that. But it's just this difference between understanding that the world is a dark, dangerous, amoral place in which actors can behave barbarically and without limit is different from saying, and here's how I'm going to behave on the world state. Jonathan Kirchner, author of an unwritten future, realism and uncertainty in world politics. I learned a lot from your book, and I learned a lot from this conversation. Thank you.

Thanks for having me. It's been a real pleasure. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.