Fighting Alongside Friends

The Case Against The Realists Part II

Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé

This is my follow-up to this piece about why I think realist IR theory largely fails to account for actual behavior in the real world.

I wanted to take a moment to highlight how the daily interactions and institutional relationships between states create a durable sense of fraternity that cannot be reduced to mere “national interests.”

Much of the conservative “realist” case is built around a sort of public relations claim about the supposed erosion of American power vis-à-vis China. In their telling, the United States needs to urgently reorient itself with all of our tools of national power to prevent a catastrophic outcome in the Pacific.

In their minds, the United States ought to be acting like an Imperial Power of the 19th century wherein we dictate to nations like South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan what their defense priorities ought to be.

This includes ideas from Elbridge Colby like telling South Korea that we would be using their country as a staging point for a war with China, or that Taiwan is unserious about China because they believe Russia should be defeated in Ukraine.

For Elbridge and those associated with his circle, the world is reducible to a game of Hearts of Iron wherein other countries act as nothing more than vassals who do our bidding. In their telling, if these countries don’t adopt the policies they want, the PLAN will be rolling through the INDOPAC like they were the IJN in 1941.

Now, putting aside that I think a lot of this discourse has become rather millenarian in tone, and I don’t see any reason that a war between China and the United States is any more likely now than it was 5 years ago—this also isn’t a particularly productive way to fix the problem.

First off, I don’t think their case in the abstract is particularly strong for why other countries ought to align themselves with the United States regarding Taiwan.

I obviously disagree with the idea that State relations are just a function of abstract power calculations. Even if I didn’t, it’s not exactly clear cut that Taiwan’s continued independence is really that meaningfully tied to Japanese or South Korean “interests” in a way that would compel them to join a conflict.

If Chinese ambitions stopped at Taipei, and Xi had no real intent on disrupting regional economic and political arrangements—what would change in Tokyo?

If anything, Japan and South Korea have far more to materially risk in terms of their trade with China than they have anything to gain—not to mention the economic impacts of sending their declining populations off to war.

Moreover, I don’t think people generally fight for these reasons. It’s exceedingly rare to see people embark upon a generational conflict over trade imbalances or the interference of shipping lanes. People fight for their friends, and they fight for the ideological causes they believe in.

It’s unrealistic to think that domestic audiences would be willing to launch themselves into the uncertainty and destruction of war when there’s no real case to be made outside of a vague possibility that your country would be marginally worse off economically.

Current limited American operations in the Red Sea countering the Houthis are more in line with the level of commitment you would expect from this sort of argument. It’s not something that moves you to mobilize your nation.

The other part of this that I wanted to get to is how unrealistic these arguments are with how relations between States are fostered.

The reason you can’t just roll into Seoul and tell them “Hey you’re our base now, deal with North Korea yourselves” is that it completely ignores the fact that long-term alliances and partnerships are built on mutual respect, trust, and shared values.

The U.S.-South Korea alliance is not just security-based, it’s a relationship built over decades of cooperation, joint military exercises, and cultural exchanges. Effective alliances like this are not forged through unilateral dictates but through ongoing dialogue, cooperation, and consensus-building.

Coming in and changing everything overnight is the international relations equivalent of coming home one day and telling your spouse that after 40 years of marriage, you will no longer have electricity in the house because you don’t think showers are necessary anymore. It’s one of those things you talk to your partner about first.

Furthermore, the everyday interactions between citizens, diplomats, and soldiers of allied nations are the sinew that cements these bonds and allows our partnerships to function. You cannot just snap your fingers and expect trust to emerge from nowhere—it has to be created.

It’s not trivial in the sense that institutional partnerships are an essential part of even being able to work with partners. We need to know how our partners think, how they operate, and how they communicate so that we can work with them productively.

The sort of slap-dash policy-making that rapidly pivots entire relationships forgets that it would undermine our basic ability to even fight the war that “realist” proponents are so fixated on.

I mean good luck trying to sequence an Air-Sea campaign in the Pacific when you don’t know who your liaison in the Japanese Navy is, and you can’t figure out how you’re supposed to send information to your Taiwanese colleagues. Even worse, if you treat our friends like they’re your pawns—you’re going to have a hard time convincing them to do things like share their defense planning with us.

This sort of belligerent approach to alliances would almost certainly cause a cascading breakdown in our ability to stand up even rudimentary sharing between militaries and governments. Who would trust us?

Ignoring all of this also risks turning this whole thing into a complete case of paralysis in the event of a real crisis. Japan is more likely to come to America’s aid after all if they know who they’re supposed to be talking to in a conflict.

The only problem is that this is all a slow and often boring process of endless rounds of low-level diplomatic engagements and joint military exercises. It also consists of often overlooked tools of diplomacy like exchanges between students, or shared cultural tastes.

This is sort of the hidden secret to the whole act of putting together a coalition that works. It takes a lot of time and consensus building as we build trust and friendship with one another.

It doesn’t matter if you tell Seoul, Taipei, or Tokyo that they have to do this because some chart with munitions stockpiles says so if they don’t trust us and don’t want to work cooperatively with one another.

In much the same way that NATO works through shared values, consensus building, and long-term interoperability—any prospective coalition in the Pacific needs these considerations.

We’ll be much better off if we take the time to have the 20-year-olds who will fight the next war spend time running around on training exercises and singing songs from Cowboy Carter together first. Real life isn’t a game of Risk where you can move pieces of plastic around a board because you feel like it.