Realism And The International State System Essay Examples

As realists like Kenneth Waltz, Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan always insisted, the international system is dominated by great powers that act on their interests, For most of modern history, as Gordon A. Craig and Alexander L. George asserted, it has been a multi-polar system rather than one controlled by a single hegemon or superpower. Even the United Nations was created as a realist institution since it can raise no funds, create a peacekeeping force or take any other action in the international arena with the approval of the member states. Far from being a one-world government of a super-state, the five permanent members of the Security Council have a permanent veto and unless there is a consensus among them, the UN is powerless. During the Cold War, this often meant that it could not function at all and on the rare occasions when it did operate as originally intended, such as the Security Council resolution to send troops to Korea in 1950, it was only because the Soviets happened to be staging a boycott at that time and were unable to use their veto. Certainly the Security Council had no influence on the Vietnam War or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 because of the great power veto, and even since the end of the Cold War it has been able to delay or water down action against Russian allies like Bosnia and Syria for the same reason.
Even on other important international issues such as poverty, epidemics or the environment, the UN can did nothing without the contributions and support of the member states, and this is not the fault of the organization since it is simply operating the way it was designed in 1945. This is always the case with other ‘global’ or ‘internationalist’ organizations and associations like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), all of which are dominated by the great powers (particularly the U.S., and used to further their political and economic interests. Even for many realists, this is hardly an ideal situation or the best of all possible worlds, but it is simply a fact of international life. In the current international system, Russia, China and Iran are all capable of imposing certain limits on the United States and its allies, for example, and for realists a balance-of-power like this is actually a stable and desirable system that will decrease the likelihood of major wars, particularly when there is a danger that nuclear weapons might be used. Any great power that is motivated by imperial hubris and overreach will also inevitably run up against certain limits, as the U.S. did in the Vietnam and Iraq wars.
In Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, the liberal realist Hans J. Morgenthau did not take the Machiavellian position that morality did not exist in international affairs, although he doubted that one universal ethical system could ever be imposed on the world, given the many differences in culture, politics and ideology. History proved that was impossible, and any country that attempted to impose such a global system out of hubris would eventually face catastrophic consequences. Morgenthau and other realists like George Kennan believed that the U.S. had engaged in this type of imperial overreach in Vietnam, and that a balance-of-power was always preferable to an international system dominated by one hegemonic state. Indeed, for most of history the global system has been multipolar, and the hegemony of superpowers like Britain in the 19th Century or the U.S. after 1945 never turns out to be a stable and enduring system. Nor did Morgenthau think it should be since no state could be trusted with such power, without any checks and balances. Other realists like Kenneth Waltz in “Anarchic Orders and Balances of Power” found that even nuclear weapons had played a positive role in the international system, as long as they were used as deterrents to aggression and adventurism rather than actual weapons in war. Their very existence may even have prevented a Third World War during the Korean conflict in 1950-53 or the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 since the risks of actually escalating to a shooting war between nuclear powers is far greater than any rational gain. This also proved true in the conflicts between India and Pakistan, and would probably also make a war between Iran and Israel less likely if there were both nuclear-armed.
Ruling elites of the great powers may not always be rational actors, of course, especially if their worldviews are based in political or religious ideologies rather than pure calculations of self-interest and gains and losses. Liberal-capitalist elites in Great Britain and the U.S. have certainly has their own ideology which they regarded as universally applicable, as did the fascist regimes in Germany and Japan in the 1930s and 1940s or the Communist governments in China and Russia during the Cold War. History shows that firmly-held worldviews of this type can lead any great power into disastrous miscalculations, and this also holds true for those who imagine that the U.S. is some kind of ‘indispensable’ nation that has a mission to refashion the world in its own image.