What Is A State?

The Case Against The Realists Part I

Canada, Australia, Japanese, and American Sailors during ANNUALEX 2023, U.S. Navy, Joshua Sapien

Seeing that we will never be spared unending appeals from the “realist” crowd about how the world will come unglued unless they are given the reigns of American foreign policy, I want to take some time to say why I think they’re wrong.

In the world of international relations—for those unaware—realism is the broad term assigned to a theoretical school that holds that States are rational actors who act according to their ability to calculate power.

There’s quite a lot more to it than what I’m saying here, but the appeal of realism is that it is a remarkably simple theory of international relations. You have essentially one variable—power—that you need to account for.

Depending on the field of realism, you get a theory that States seek to maximize their power against all other States, or that States seek to protect their power against all other States. These are called “Offensive Realism” and “Defensive Realism” respectively. This is usually explained through the nebulous term “interests,” in which the “interest” of a State is whatever directly advances that State’s power.

Either version of realism leads you to things like “balancing” in which coalitions of States will emerge from the organic intersection of their interests in warding off other States who threaten their power.

If you read Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics for instance, you would come away with an understanding that the Second World War was nothing more than the interaction of various blocs of States engaging in a balancing act of the continental powers (Axis) working against the hegemonic powers (Britain).

There’s essentially no effort to explain just why exactly it was that Germany, Italy, or the other minor Axis powers happened to be on the same side of that conflict. There is merely a glossary of GDP, naval tonnage, and industrial output, and an assumption that the reader is given everything they need to know from these statistics.

Now, it’s probably unfair to single out Mearsheimer for this since he’s a complete crank at this point, but his idea of realism is essentially the same throughout the field. The rest of realism scholarship is basically just arguing about what differences in power should mean.

What I’m getting at here is that realism as a field takes a lot for granted and outright ignores quite a lot else. For a field that secured one of history’s great public relations victories in calling themselves “realists,” they have very little to say about States as they actually are.

I will say right now, that my background isn’t in international relations. I’ve never even once taken an international relations course. The international relations theory I’ve read has been almost entirely against my will, solely for understanding names that other people throw around. So if any of this is wrong or too simplistic, well, sue me.

However, what I do have is a background in political theory. The first part—the political theory—I’ll attempt to tackle here, and I’ll save my comments on the actual hard work of relationship building for the second part of this.

The first thing that you should take away from thinking about States and how they behave is that a State doesn’t make any decisions. While this may seem trivial, there is no corporeal entity called a “State,” there are discrete human beings who make discrete choices.

The thing that we call a “State” is a large bureaucracy in which civil servants are brought up in institutions that have their own very well-defined cultures and rules. Think for instance how pissy Marines get if you call them a Soldier, or how Airmen in the Air Force get treated like actual human beings.

I’m half-joking, but this extends throughout institutions and builds a certain approach to the world that civil servants will take when they’re acting in the world. A diplomat at the State Department will fundamentally see the world differently than a career member of the Treasury Department.

Likewise, at the level of the leaders of States, their own particular experiences shape how they build their administrations. Who they select as their advisors, and how they prioritize issues isn’t some abstracted rational-calculus making, but an outcome of who they are.

George Bush is not the same person as Barack Obama who is not the same as Donald Trump. Each of these Presidents had different advisors with different views of the world, and each President’s idiosyncrasies produced radically different uses of American power on the world stage.

The use of power is important here. While realism tends to stop at “power” as an end in itself, States tend to use power for something. States have ideologies and beliefs that they work to see enacted in the world. They do something with their power. Again, this might seem obvious, but The United States uses power towards different ends than Iran does.

Similarly, George Bush and Barack Obama used American power in the Middle East quite differently. I think you’d be pretty hard-pressed to make a case that Ben Rhodes and Condoleezza Rice used American power in the same ways.

What I’m saying is that what people in a State believe matters. To return to Mearsheimer’s account of the Second World War, Germany wasn’t just attempting to expand their power through rational power-seeking calculus.

Hitler didn’t just randomly seek the Anschluss, annex Czechoslovakia, or declare war on the Soviet Union. These weren’t inevitable outcomes for the German State in a vacuum. There is no coherent case to be made that Otto Wels would have brought the world into conflict over Danzig. Hitler believed that by kicking in the door of the Soviet Union he would collapse Communism—he invaded because he was ideologically compelled to do so.

In a more contemporary example, why the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 cannot be explained unless you understand how a certain culture and mindset developed in the State Department in the 1990s concerning Iraq. It’s an often glossed-over part of history.

The United States had developed a deeply entrenched paranoia over Saddam well before 2003, and 9/11 only accelerated the internal USG dialogue that Saddam was a rogue actor who would cause the region to implode. You can’t understand the war unless you understand the discrete beliefs that caused the war.

The inverse of this is called “Democratic Peace Theory,” or the idea that Liberal Democratic States don’t go to war with one another and tend to be fraternally cooperative on the world stage.

It’s a theory that realists tend to bristle at since the idea that kinship between nations can exist sort of undermines the entire theoretical basis of realism.

The realist case tends to be summed up with two criticisms to the effect that choosing the period after the Second World War skews the evidence, and even if it hasn’t skewed the evidence, just because these wars haven’t happened doesn’t mean they won’t happen.

The first part of this is a poor argument since there wasn’t a unified notion of Liberal Democracy as a hegemonic force in global politics until after the Second World War. That war was kind of a big deal, and sort of caused people to rethink how we ordered the affairs between States.

The starting point for democratic peace theory is necessarily 1945 since this was the beginning of any systematized cooperative international relationship between States. There was of course international relations (in the theoretical sense) for thousands of years before this point, but there wasn’t the ideological and historical circumstances that caused this particular set of affairs.

While Thucydides is still a classic in the field for a reason and I reread History of the Peloponnesian War at least once a year, the affairs of Athens and Sparta weren’t informed through the ideological and cultural developments of the 20th century. It was a different place, in a different time, with different people. To get back to my earlier point, Athens and Sparta were Athens and Sparta, not just abstract States. There’s no mapping historical abstracts onto the present.

The conditions that created the States post-1945 ideologically informed the actual human beings within those States who make decisions. Leaders of Liberal Democracies tend to have an actual sincere belief in their ideological kinship with leaders of other Liberal Democratic States.

Moreover, taking issue with using a 1945 starting point is akin to saying that 60 years after the invention of the television, there’s skewed evidence that people are primarily watching television because it doesn’t include the decades of people using radio before the invention of television. You can’t criticize something as not being true just because the emergence of that thing is new.

The second criticism is one that I’ve seen Elbridge Colby employ on a few occasions and I wanted to stop and dismiss it here.

This is just a nonsense criticism. If the standard by which an idea could be tested was that it could someday be wrong it would invalidate every single empirical idea brought forth. It is just the induction fallacy employed for rhetorical purposes. While it is true that just because something hasn’t happened it doesn’t mean it won’t happen again—it’s a useless observation.

Take mathematics for example—axioms are indeed arbitrary. I can mess around with assumptions all day long and invalidate systems of geometry. But if I want to I can still draw three circles on a chalkboard and make a triangle. Similarly, if Liberal Democracies continue to not go to war with one another, who cares as long as it works?

Which is where I’ll leave this. The part I want to get to next time (eventually) is the interaction of the actual people of Liberal Democracies and how fraternal ties between human beings matter in international relations.