Power Play

Where are the realists? When Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, it ought to have been their moment. Here was Vladimir Putin, a cold-eyed realist if ever there was one, taking advantage of a favorable opportunity to shift the European balance of power in his favor -- a 21st century Frederick the Great or Bismarck, launching a small but decisive war on a weaker neighbor while a surprised and dumbfounded world looked on helplessly. Here was a man and a nation pursuing "interest defined as power," to use the famous phrase of Hans Morgenthau, acting in obedience to what Mr. Morgenthau called the "objective law" of international power politics. Yet where are Morgenthau's disciples to remind us that Russia's latest military action is neither extraordinary nor unexpected nor aberrant but entirely normal and natural, that it is but a harbinger of what is yet to come because the behavior of nations, like human nature, is unchanging?

Today's "realists," who we're told are locked in some titanic struggle with "neoconservatives" on issues ranging from Iraq, Iran and the Middle East to China and North Korea, would be almost unrecognizable to their forebears. Rather than talk about power, they talk about the UN, world opinion and international law. They propose vast new international conferences, a la Woodrow Wilson, to solve intractable, decades-old problems. They argue that the United States should negotiate with adversaries not because America is strong but because it is weak. Power is no answer to the vast majority of the challenges we face, they insist, and, indeed, is counterproductive because it undermines the possibility of international consensus.

Mr. Acheson, as Harry Truman's Secretary of State, had nothing but disdain for the United Nations and for most international efforts to solve world problems. As his biographer, Robert L. Beisner, has shown,

Given that chief among these "realists" are Anthony Lake and Zbigniew Brzezinski one might accuse Kagan of shooting fish in a barrel - clearly any labeling system that has them as more realistic than the equally misnamed "neocons" has some serious flaws.

They are, as Kagan points out, internationalists to the core, displaying a thoroughly misplaced confidence in institutions that have a lengthy lineage of failure. The "reality" behind this is a very arguable limitation on the U.S. employment of force, an outlook that has achieved both currency and senescence with the developing events in Iraq. That intervention was, incidentally, a perfect example of Kagan's thesis: originally an international coalition with all the bells and bows of UN approval in 1991, it was, in execution, largely American in makeup. And because it was treated as a coalition it turned out that the Syrians, among others, exercised a veto power on continuing the offensive into Baghdad that cost the Iraqis and the world another dozen years of hell. Those are the hazards of a coalition consisting of entities with such dissimilar aims.

Bush the younger's great crime in the eyes of the internationalists was to fail to grant a similar veto power to the institutions he spent 14 dreary months trying to convince to support the finishing of the job. But in fact the institutions he was attempting to sway consist of entities with far more dissimilar aims than the situation in 1991. Given the money to be made under Oil For Food, the very institutions themselves were too corrupt to employ. These are the institutions and processes dear to the internationalist "realists," and one wonders precisely whence the touching faith? It is not, I think, so much a faith in the efficacy of the UN but a despair at the efficacy of U.S. power projection, typified by the "imperial overstretch" argument of yet another "realist" Paul Kennedy.

Either way it is clear that U.S. power projection has never pretended to be able to pluck Georgia from the Soviet sphere, for example, or to protect the Tibetans from the depradations of the Chinese. That isn't the game, and it is a bit disingenuous of the "realists" to pretend that it has become so. And just as clearly internationalist institutions aren't up to the job either. Moral suasion and "soft" power are wonderful public relations but they haven't any divisions, and Putin knows that as well as Stalin before him.

There will indeed be difficult times in the face of intractable autocrats, and nothing in the fall of the Soviet Union has changed that. It is a situation as old as history. Thucydides relates the very essence of realpolitik in his Melian Dialogue, and the only mistake the "realists" have made with respect to it is to misidentify the Athenians with the U.S. The Georgians know full well what it is to be a small state in the way of a larger neighbor's path to power. They have not altogether escaped the fate of Melos; Putin, for his part, would do well to recall the ultimate fate of imperial Athens.

Honest realists recognize both the limitations of finite power and the necessity to employ it judiciously in preventing the instabilities that are the inevitable results of the success of naked aggression. International institutions cannot replace it; they need it to survive, all the while cursing that reality as insufficiently moral, and detrimental to the illusion that soft power can succeed by itself. The wolf may be forced to negotiate with his prey but he certainly won't do so on his own. And because he has done so once does not make him any less a wolf.

"I read that article in the print paper on Saturday,"

So did I. I took note because Kagan is an advisor to McCain.

Also, an interesting discussion on C-SPAN mentioned Kagan.

To another subject on power. A Brit scholar made an interesting point about Obama (forget for a minute that he's a Commie). B. Hussein, (champion of democrat pacifists?) wants to do GWs job better! He says GW was "tactically" wrong on WOT. Hussein wants to take troops out of Iraq and go after terrorists in Afghanistan.

The Brit says, "Can you see Obama coming to Brussels and saying 'I'm going to Afghanistan with more troops. Can I count on you for another 20,000 troops and, by the way, I want to put them on the front line.' "

yitbos

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