JAMES WOOD FORSYTH JR.
The perils of weakness are matched by the temptations of power.
—Kenneth N. Waltz
Unlike physics or poetry, strategy does not constitute an academic discipline per se. It is, in every way, an interdisciplinary enterprise. As Everett Carl Dolman has written, strategy is not a thing to be “poked, prodded, or probed. . . . It is an idea, a product of the imagination. It is about the future, and above all it is about change.” In a word, it is “alchemy; a method of transmutation from idea into action.”1 Realists would not agree.2
When it comes to strategy, realists have a tidy set of notions. Most would accept Kenneth Waltz’s formulation of it: strategy is the means to ensure state survival; it is conceived in the minds of statesmen. In the standard Waltzian account, international systems are like economic markets, in that both are ones of self-help. The self-help principle sees to it that states “live, prosper, or die” depending on their own efforts.3 In economic markets, firms devise strategies to maximize gains; in international ones states devise strategies to ensure their survival. In both, survival is the prerequisite to achieving any other goals. Thus, the survival motive is “taken as the ground for action where the security of states is not assured.”4
The privileged position afforded to survival leaves statesmen little room for the consideration of much else: this chapter evaluates the usefulness of that claim. Taking the realist tradition as a whole, I examine it from the perspective of its key theoretical premises: states, anarchy, interests, and power.5 I follow this with discussions of international practices and the mediating role of moral concerns. Laying my cards on the table: realism is a theoretical tradition worth defending, but it is important to stress that a strategy contingent upon the relentless pursuit of survival, with little regard for moral concerns, can be as useless as it would be dangerous.6
THE REALIST TRADITION
From the earliest moments of recorded history, realist thought has dominated the study and practice of international politics. Realists tend to see themselves as heirs to Thucydides and write as if his hand were guiding their pens. Waltz sees the relevance of Thucydides in an age of nuclear weapons.7 Robert Gilpin insists that the “classic history of Thucydides is as meaningful a guide to the behavior of states as when it was written.”8 John Mearsheimer insists that Thucydides’ insights into international politics were pertinent long before the modern state system ever existed.9 Since Thucydides occupies a prominent place within the realist tradition, it is appropriate to begin with his account of human nature, which he captures in his description of events at Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War:
Then, with the ordinary convention of civilized life thrown into confusion, human nature, always ready to offend . . . showed itself proudly in its true colors, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself. . . . [I]n these acts of revenge . . . men take it upon themselves to begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead of leaving those laws in existence, remembering that there may come a time when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection.10
Human nature drives men to repeal those “general laws of humanity” even when those deeds have the potential to hurt not only the guilty but the innocent as well. Why? People are not led by reason; they are led by reason and passion, and it is passion that leads to conflict and war.11 Thus, it is not enough to conclude that reason can temper passion. Rather, the issue is that one can never be certain that reason will temper passion all of the time.12 For statesmen, the lesson is simple, the implications enormous: statesmen must be on guard, not because they “are never honorable and peaceful, but because they might at any moment become dishonorable and belligerent.”13
Philosophically speaking, realism is pessimistic, and modern realists often appeal to “the limitations which the sordid and selfish aspects of human nature place on the conduct of diplomacy.”14 Hans Morgenthau put the problem this way: “Man cannot achieve [justice,] for reasons that are inherent in his nature. The reasons are three: man is too ignorant, man is too selfish, and man is too poor.”15 Reinhold Niebuhr, in Moral Man and Immoral Society, concluded that social groups fail to live up to the moral commitments that individuals typically do.16 Thus, when it comes to refining social or political structures, short-term fixes to society’s ills might be achievable but large-scale attempts to cure society of its larger afflictions are destined to fail.
Contemporary realists do not disagree but spend little time on man’s nature, preferring to focus on the problems of anarchy and the international system. In what is considered the most important work in the neorealist revival, Theory of International Politics, Waltz makes no index entries for ethics, justice, or morality. He is emphatic about how different his realism is from that of Morgenthau and Niebuhr. Man’s nature might be grounds for conflict and war, but the anarchic nature of international life remains an inescapable condition that states must contend with.
Since states and anarchy play cardinal roles in contemporary realist thought, it is important to be clear about their meanings. A state is what one ordinarily calls a “country.” Costa Rica, Russia, and Finland are good examples. States have at least four essential features: territory, population, government, and sovereignty. The first three are self-explanatory; the latter is in need of clarification. Sovereignty is often confused with freedom of action. Those polities unhindered are thought to be sovereign, those restrained not. But that is not what sovereignty means. Sovereignty merely refers to a state’s ability to conduct domestic and foreign policies without undue external interference. No state can do whatever it likes, whenever it chooses. That is to say, while all states enjoy some measure of autonomy, great powers can do more than weak ones, but no state—even one with the greatest of powers—can do all it wants all the time. No matter how powerful, the unequal distribution of power throughout the world constrains what states can do.17
Anarchy does not mean chaos. It refers to the absence of rule or of a hierarchical order based on formal subordination and authority. As Hedley Bull made clear, there is considerable order in an anarchic international system but that order is not the hierarchic one characteristic of domestic politics.18 That being the case, the consequences of anarchy are severe. Because there is no higher authority for states to appeal to, statesmen must think in terms of security first.
In the absence of world government, statesmen must provide for their own protection. To do so means marshaling their power or the power of friends and allies who will support and defend them. However, such self-help actions, even when taken for purely defensive purposes, can appear threatening to others, who will be forced to respond in kind. This security dilemma explains why arms races occur and how some wars begin.19
Because the potential for violence in the international system is so great, statesmen must prioritize their interests. Interests come in many forms. Peace, prosperity, and freedom are good examples, and while each might be an interest of most states, survival is the interest of all states.20 The means to ensure survival is power; yet power is a vexing word. While it might be hard to define, it is not hard to recognize.21 Most would accept Waltz’s conception of it. In the standard Waltzian account, power provides a means to achieve autonomy; permits a wider range of actions; increases margins of safety; and, for the sake of great power, gives its possessors a greater stake in the management of the system.22
Thus power plays an important role in Waltzian international politics: it structures things. It provides a positional picture of the world, with strong states occupying dominant positions and weak ones taking subservient ones.23 Power differentials between states are unambiguous, making differences between states stark. The contrast among them reinforces a harsh, albeit central, reality: the strong can do more than the weak. One of the most important things strong states do is socialize others to the rules of the game.
“Rules of the game” refer to those “imperative principles” that require or authorize states to behave in prescribed ways. Few would deny that states share many beliefs about the “rules of the game, who its players are, what their interests are, what rational behavior is, and so on.”24 In other words, order is maintained in an international system “not merely by a sense of common interests . . . but by rules that spell out the kind of behavior that is orderly.”25
Socialization refers to a relationship between at least two parties where “A influences B. B, affected by A’s influence, then influences A.” As Waltz put it, “Each is not just influencing the other; both are being influenced by the situation their interactions create.” Moreover, the behavior of the pair cannot be “apprehended by taking a unilateral view of either member.”26 Each acts and reacts in accordance with the other. The global teenager provides an example of the socialization process that occurs throughout the world. No one tells all the teenagers in the world to dress alike, but most of them do, most of the time. Likewise, no one tells all the states in the world to behave themselves, but most of them do, most of the time. States are socialized to this idea by interacting with one another. In this regard, socialization is “a process of learning to conform one’s behavior to societal expectations”; it is a “process of identity and interest formation.”27 Socialization draws members of a group into conformity with its norms and encourages similarities in behavior.
One need only think of the Cold War to grasp the idea here. What kept the Cold War “cold” was the socialization effect produced by superpower interaction. Although far from a perfect peace—there were several proxy wars and serious crises during this time—“the long peace,” as John Gaddis has described it, enabled international life to go on without producing a cataclysmic, nuclear war. From the perspective of socialization, power socialized leaders to the dangers of nuclear war and conditioned their behavior.
Regardless of how power might be conceptualized, it is important to stress that it is fungible and relative. “Fungibility” refers to the ease with which capabilities in one issue area can be used to solve problems in other issue areas. From a realist perspective, military power remains the most fungible of all the instruments of power, including economic, diplomatic, and informational. And indeed, when reviewing the case history, one discovers that force and threats of force have been a common choice for states in times of crisis, which is why realists generally assume that force is the final arbiter in international politics.
“Relative” refers to relative gains, as the term is used in economics. Realists believe that relative gains matter more to states than absolute gains. Why? As Waltz made clear, one can never be sure how a state will use any gain from any transaction. States might spend gains—in the form of money—on services to improve life at home for their citizens; they might spend those gains on a large military force capable of threatening others. This is why in games of strategy the question is not “Who gains?” The question is always, “Who gains more?”28
Recall the fierce debate in the U.S. Congress on the North American Free Trade Agreement. The debate was not over the issue of “What will America gain?” Rather, the debate—at least on the part of some dissenters—centered on the fear that Canada and Mexico might gain more. Was the United States afraid that Canada or Mexico might build a large army to threaten it? Of course not, but the mere fact that tensions existed among such close neighbors highlights how difficult international cooperation is to achieve, even on something as relatively benign as free trade among liberal states. In the end, one can think of international politics as a struggle for power and peace, but that struggle is tempered by the notion that state security must never be impaired.
Summing up, realists insist that the international system shapes what statesmen must do by presenting them with overwhelming incentives to pursue self-interest relentlessly. It is further assumed that those states that follow realist maxims grow, while those that ignore the consequences of anarchy decline or lose all influence. In either case, to the extent that survival pressures tightly constrain state behavior, one should not expect moral concerns to affect state conduct seriously. In such a world, strategy can serve no higher purpose than the preservation of the state itself.
INTERNATIONAL PRACTICES
When considering the preservation of the state, realists fall back on arguments about war and intervention. Because the world is anarchic, war is always a possibility, which is why realists present it as a standard, albeit destructive, instrument of statecraft. This can be attributed to Clausewitz, who insisted that war was “not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on by other means.”29 As satisfying as Clausewitz might be, war can require moral justification. Yet realists consistently downplay such concerns, insisting that most wars can be justified in terms of interests or the balance of power. The central premise of the balance of power is stability, not justice. In fact, realists argue that the very idea of a just war is incoherent. If one adopts Robert Tucker’s stance on the role of the statesman, a view that presupposes the protection and preservation of the state, there seems to be no escaping the demands of the national interest.30 It is important to stress that though considerations about justice might be real and important, they are not as important as the demands of stability.31
Moral concerns aside, realists believe stability is present in an international system when the system remains anarchic—without a strong central authority—and the principal parties within the system remain unchanged.32 If one state threatens to achieve a position from which it might be able to dominate the rest, a military coalition of the other great powers will form against it, and a general war will follow. Thus balance of power arguments are not strong arguments for war any more than they are strong arguments for peace. They are antihegemonic, in that a balance of power seeks to prevent, through war if necessary, the rise of any one dominant power.
A related and appropriate concern for this volume is airpower. What is airpower? There are many answers to that question. Philosophically speaking, its theorists can be clumped into two groups: those who think of airpower as something “independently decisive” and those who think of it in terms of “support fires.” Generally, both appreciate the usefulness of airpower yet disagree over its presumed strengths and limitations. Realists hold the prudential view that airpower is power projected through the air; they put the emphasis on power. For them, it is an empirical question, not a philosophical one. If we accept the idea that power “gives its possessors a greater stake in the management of the system,” one can deduce that “airpowers” are states with considerable material capabilities. An air-going nation requires sound governmental structures, a skilled labor force, the ability for technological innovation, the infrastructure to support such a broad endeavor, and the ability to pay for it. Thus material capabilities are central to airpower, which is why realists are, in the language of air strategy, denial strategists. Since military contests are essentially “power games,” reducing the enemy’s material capabilities is a vital concern when considering threats or use of military force.
Although many states have intervened in the affairs of other states, contemporary realist authors have surprisingly little to say about intervention. When they do address it, it is usually under the heading of nonintervention. Again, this is because realists tend to think of intervention as an empirical question. That being the case, those who do tackle it fall back on ideas regarding self-determination and sovereignty.
Michael Walzer, in Just and Unjust Wars, examines the argument put forth by John Stuart Mill.33 To paraphrase, we are to treat states as self-determining communities, whether or not they are free, because self-determination and freedom are not the same. Citizens have the right to fight for their freedom, and even when they struggle and fail, they are self-determining.34 This view of self-determination sets people up for the right to become free by their own efforts, and it cuts against the grain of intervention in general. Sovereignty, which legally defines a state’s ability to conduct domestic and foreign policies without undue external interference, is the arena in which self-determining communities fight and sometimes win their freedom.35 It goes without saying that there are things the international community cannot do for states, even for their own good. By this measure, the intervening state must make the case that its interference in someone else’s liberty is best served by something other than moral support.36
During the 1990s the United States was involved in numerous interventions, some of which challenged traditional views of sovereignty. In the face of the ethnic killings and displacement in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Kosovo, the idea of saving strangers came to the fore. Coupled with the attacks of 11th September, 2001, the question of intervention posed new problems for realists as strategies of preemption took hold of American policy. In some measure, there has always been a tension between those who wish to see the United States play an active interventionist role and others who seek to back away from such a role. In framing the future of intervention strategy, realism has something to offer statesmen. Waltz put it this way: “One may notice that intervention, even for worthy ends, often brings more harm than good. The vice to which great powers easily succumb in a multipolar world is inattention; in a bipolar world, overreaction; in a unipolar world, overextension.”37
THE MEDIATING ROLE OF MORAL CONCERNS
Up to now, I have focused on description and analysis, in an attempt to clarify the realist tradition. In this section I want to evaluate the usefulness of realism or, more specifically, ascertain the utility of the survival motive as it pertains to strategy. In the standard realist account, strategy is the means to ensure state survival; it is conceived in the minds of statesmen. Moreover, because the international system is one of self-help, the survival motive is (in a phrase I have already quoted and cited) “taken as the ground for action where the security of states is not assured.” In some measure, this line of reasoning stems from an interpretation of Thucydides, but while Thucydides does stress the importance of survival, it is not the only motive states have, nor is it their most pressing concern all of the time. Let us return to Corcyra.
Once civilized life had thrown itself into confusion, “human nature [as we have also seen], always ready to offend . . . showed itself proudly in its true colors, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself.” Since human nature always stands “ready to offend,” the prudent strategist cannot place faith in reason alone. Statesmen must be on guard, not because, again, they are never “honorable and peaceful but because they might, at any moment, become dishonorable and belligerent.” This prudential logic was to be reinforced at Melos.
The debate at Melos is about rights: Do communities have a right to neutrality? The stakes are high. Facing certain destruction from a larger Athenian force, the Melians make their case for neutrality by claiming that one should not “destroy a principle that is to the general good of all men,” with the general good being “such a thing as fair play and just dealing.” The Athenians respond by claiming that one should “not be led astray by a false sense of honor—a thing which often brings men to ruin when they are faced with an obvious danger that somehow affects their pride.” It is not the hostility of the Melian request for neutrality that affects the Athenians’ calculations but what that neutrality might mean for others. If the Athenians were on friendlier terms with Melos, “our subjects would regard that as a sign of weakness . . . whereas your hatred is evidence of our power.” So it is with power politics: the standard of justice “depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak suffer what they have to accept.”38
Ever since Melos, realists have insisted that statesmen must assume the worst about each other, even if they prefer not to. Given the inequalities of power and the dangers of misplaced trust, there seems to be no logical way to escape the necessity. Hans Morgenthau took it one step farther by asserting that statesmen set moral considerations aside. “I stick to the fundamental principle that lying is immoral. But I realize that when you are dealing in the context of foreign policy, lying is inevitable.” He concluded, “The moral dilemma of foreign policy is but a special and—it is true—particularly flagrant case of the moral dilemma which faces man on all levels of social action.”39 Philosophers have long acknowledged the tensions between justice and necessity, but what makes realism so distinctive is its solution: “When the demands of statecraft and demands for justice cannot be reconciled, statesmen must choose injustice, even if it means war.”40
Yet, to claim that statesmen must “choose injustice” is not the same as concluding that moral concerns have no place in strategy at all. Presumably, a strategy based solely on survival would be as absurd as one based exclusively on moral concerns. Realists insist that such absurdities can be avoided by stressing the importance of self-interest. George Kennan made it plain when he wrote, “Our own national interest is all that we are really capable of knowing and understanding.”41 But what happens to states that pursue self-interest relentlessly? Do they thrive and prosper, as realists might have it? To the extent survival pressures constrain state behavior, one should not expect moral considerations to affect state conduct seriously. Yet throughout Thucydides’ history they do—profoundly at times.
Thucydides tells his readers that three things motivate states: fear, honor, and interest. Fear and interest fit neatly within the realist arsenal of ideas; honor does not. This begs the question: What role does honor play in the formulation of Athenian strategy? Pericles appeals to it as he begins his funeral oration, “I shall begin speaking about our ancestors, since it is only right and proper . . . to pay them the honor of recalling what they did.” In this way, the Athenian “government does not copy the institutions of our neighbors. It is more the case of our being a model to others . . . this is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say he has no business here at all.” During the plague, honor is on the defensive. For “what is called honor, no one showed himself willing to abide by its laws. . . . [I]t was generally agreed that what was both honorable and valuable was the pleasure of the moment and everything that might conceivably contribute to that pleasure.” Finally, honor is hard pressed at Mytilene, where Cleon reminds the Athenians that “to feel pity, to be carried away by the pleasures of hearing a clever argument, to listen to the claims of decency are three things that are entirely against the interest of an imperial power.” Yet that is precisely what the Athenians choose to do by siding with Diodotus, who reminds them that the “good citizen” does not deprive others of “honor they already enjoy.”42
In fact, in all three instances, Athenian policy is an amalgam of interests and honor, with honor holding its own under severe pressure.43 It is not until Melos that matters of policy are guided singularly by concerns over survival. And what comes of it? In a dramatic turn of events, the men of Melos reject Athenian demands to form an alliance and go to their deaths believing that it is more honorable to live a life of one’s own than to live under the flag of another. Contrary to realist assertions, survival can be trumped by other concerns—honor being one.44
As this brief examination illustrates, the honor motive poses challenges to the ordinary realist narrative. Certainly survival, while an interest of states, is not the only one states have, nor is it their most pressing concern all of the time. If it was, states would never fight wars at all, because they are “such risky endeavors!”45 Moreover, the survival motive does not clarify state interests, as realists might have it. Instead, as Athenian power grew, obsessive concerns regarding state interest gave way to desire.46 This is most evident in events running up to the invasion of Sicily.
On the eve of the Sicilian expedition, Nicias attempts to ward it off, arguing that “to deal with a power [Sicily] of this kind we shall need something more than a fleet with an inconsiderable army. . . . We must have in addition a large army of infantry to sail with us . . . and are not to be restricted in our movements by the numbers of their cavalry.” What interests were to be served by this enormous undertaking? The best Alcibiades can offer is that the city “will wear out of its own accord if it remains at rest.” The sheer size of the undertaking was not lost on the citizens of Athens, but instead of tempering their desires, it inflamed them. Thucydides writes: “And what made this expedition so famous was not only the brilliant show that it made, but also its great preponderance of strength over those against whom it set out, and the fact that this voyage, the longest ever made by an expedition from Athens, was being undertaken with hopes for the future, when compared with the present position, of the most far-reaching kind.”47
In the end, the fall of Athens can be described in terms of realism, but not as realists might wish. As Jack Donnelly makes clear, “The statesmen, rather than abdicate to desire, must temper fear and interest with a sense of public purpose and a certain respect for justice and honor.”48 It was, in fact, the growing realism of Athenian strategy that led to its downfall, not the other way around. Thus, contrary to the dictates of realism, statesmen who pursue survival relentlessly, without regard for moral concerns, can wind up destroying themselves as well as others. That is another way of saying that there is a moral purpose to strategy, and we lose sight of that at our peril.
CONCLUSIONS
Suppose that as the result of a cataclysm all of our scientific knowledge about international politics were lost except for one sentence that could be written down and passed on to the next generation. What would you write? If you were a realist you might write: States, regardless of their internal composition, goals, or desires, pursue interests in ways they deem best. There is wisdom in those words, and with a little imagination one could teach an undergraduate course around its central themes. Thus realism, in spite of its wrinkles, has much to offer the budding strategist. But as I have attempted to argue here, the dogged pursuit of survival can lead to a bad end, and therein lies the rub: it is not enough to claim that “states act with interests in mind.” Rather, what strategists need to ascertain is, “What kind of interests do statesmen have in mind when they act?” Survival is but one, honor another. No doubt there are more. In the spirit of this volume and in the name of good strategy, let us work to uncover them all.
NOTES
1. Everett Carl Dolman, Pure Strategy: Power and Principle in the Space and Information Age (New York: Frank Cass, 2005), 1.
2. Portions of this article previously appeared in Strategic Studies Quarterly. See “The Past as Prologue: Realist Thought and the Future of American Security Policy” (Fall 2011).
3. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 91.
4. Ibid., 92.
5. There are many realist authors and many forms of realism. The classical argument begins with Thucydides, Thomas Hobbes, and Niccolò Machiavelli. The theological argument is found in the works of Reinhold Niebuhr and Herbert Butterfield. Nicholas Spykman and A. T. Mahan represent the geopolitics school. The modern account begins with Hans Morgenthau, E. H. Carr, and George Kennan. The English school is best represented in the work of Martin Wight, Hedley Bull, and Adam Watson. The contemporary argument is found in Kenneth Waltz, John Herz, Robert Tucker, Robert Osgood, and John Mearsheimer. Although they differ, the contemporary realist argument orbits around states, anarchy, interests, and power.
6. I was fortunate to study international politics with Jack Donnelly at the University of Denver. While there, I was educated in and attracted to his line of reasoning and critique. Thus, I make no claims of originality and rely on Donnelly throughout. For a full account of how Donnelly approaches the realist tradition and its relation to moral and ethical concerns see Jack Donnelly, Realism and International Relations (London: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
7. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 66.
8. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 7.
9. John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 365.
10. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 245.
11. Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 24.
12. Ibid., chap. 2.
13. Ibid., 25.
14. Kenneth W. Thompson, Moralism and Morality in Politics and Diplomacy (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985), 20. Also in Donnelly, Realism and International Relations, 161.
15. Hans J. Morgenthau, Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade, 1960–1970 (New York: Praeger, 1970), 63.
16. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932).
17. This is an essential Waltzian claim, one that has produced a cottage industry of scholarship. The recent debate among defensive and offensive realists turns, in part, on this notion. Waltz represents defensive realism, John Mearsheimer offensive realism.
18. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
19. The idea is sketched out in Waltz’s Man, the State, and War. His work outlines the basic argument around which studies of war and peace still take place.
20. Waltz makes this point time and again, and it reverberates throughout his writings. In Theory of International Politics, he writes, “I built structural theory on the assumption that survival is the goal of states”; “The survival motive is taken as the ground of action”; “By assumption, economic actors seek to maximize expected returns, and states strive to secure their survival”; and, “I assume that states seek to ensure their survival” (respectively 91, 92, 134, 91).
21. Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Future of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 5.
22. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 194–95.
23. Ibid., chap. 7.
24. Although wildly different in their approaches, some variants of constructivism and realism share several assumptions; see Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 190.
25. Bull, Anarchical Society, 52.
26. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 74–75.
27. Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, 170.
28. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, chap. 7.
29. Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 87.
30. Robert Osgood and Robert Tucker, Force, Order, and Justice (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 304n171.
31. Jack Donnelly “Twentieth Century Realism,” in Traditions of International Ethics, ed. Terry Nardin and David Mapel (London: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
32. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 65–73.
33. Though hardly a realist, Walzer does provide a strong, realist-like defense of nonintervention. See Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), chap. 6.
34. Ibid., 87.
35. Ibid., 89.
36. Ibid., 90–91.
37. Kenneth N. Waltz, “Structural Realism after the Cold War,” International Security 25, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 13.
38. See the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 400–408.
39. Hans Morgenthau, Human Rights and Foreign Policy (New York: Council on Religion and International Affairs, 1979), 10–11.
40. Donnelly, “Twentieth Century Realism,” in Nardin and Mapel, Traditions of International Ethics, 101.
41. George F. Kennan, Realities of American Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), 103.
42. See Pericles’ funeral oration in Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 143–51.
43. Donnelly, Realism and International Relations, 184–85.
44. This is a central theme of Donnelly’s account. See Donnelly, Realism and International Relations, chap. 6.
45. Indeed, this would be the world Randall Schweller describes as “all cops and no robbers.” See Randall Schweller, “Neorealism’s Status-quo Bias: What Security Dilemma,” Security Studies 5 (Spring 1996): 90–121.
46. Donnelly, Realism and International Relations, 184.
47. See the launching of the Sicilian expedition in Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 414–43.
48. Donnelly, Realism and International Relations, 184.