Cold water

From Richard Betts' 'Conflict or Cooperation?' appraisal in Foreign Affairs (2010) of Fukuyama, Mearsheimer and Huntington -

Like most red-blooded Americans, Fukuyama rejected the sour realist theory of international relations, which sees history not as a progression toward enlightenment and peace but as a cycle of conflict. Epochal threats made realism persuasive during much of the century of total war, but at bottom it is alien to American instincts and popular only among some cranky conservatives, Marxists, and academic theorists. (I have been accused of being among them.) Most people happily pronounced it passé once the communist threat imploded. "Treating a disease that no longer exists," Fukuyama claimed, "realists now find themselves proposing costly and dangerous cures to healthy patients."

Mearsheimer, however, is an unregenerate realist, and he threw cold water on the Cold War victory. Bucking the tide of optimism, he argued that international life would continue to be the brutal competition for power it had always been. He characterized the competition as tragic because countries end in conflict not out of malevolence but despite their desire for peace. In the absence of a world government to enforce rights, they find it impossible to trust one another, and simply striving for security drives them to seek control of their environment and thus dominance. If peace is to last, it will have to be fashioned from a stable balance of power, not the spread of nice ideas. In short, there is nothing really new about the new world.

Mearsheimer was a party pooper, defying what seemed to be common sense. Many found it easy to write him off when he claimed the revival of traditional conflicts would soon make everyone nostalgic for the simplicity and stability of the Cold War. But realism can never be written off for long. This school of thought has always agitated, even angered, American liberals and neoconservatives (who are in many ways just liberals in wolves' clothing). The theory falls out of favor whenever peace breaks out, but it keeps coming back because peace never proves permanent. Mearsheimer's vision is especially telling because it is an extreme version of realism that does not see any benign actors in the system and assumes that all great powers seek hegemony: "There are no status quo powers ... save for the occasional hegemon that wants to maintain its dominating position."