Realism is right

Last year, in delivering a lecture on the centenary of Hans Morgenthau's birth at the BMW Stiftung Herbert Quandt, I addressed the question of what position Morgenthau would have taken on the Iraq War. (The full text is available at www.opendemocracy.net)

I think that Hans Morgenthau, who some four decades ago made the realist case against escalation in Vietnam using arguments similar to those realists employed in the run-up to the Iraq War, would have opposed that war as well if he had been alive.

More important would be his observations on where we are now in Iraq. Realists tend to believe that the most powerful political ideology on the face of the earth is nationalism, not democracy. President Bush and his neoconservative allies largely ignore nationalism. It is simply not part of their discourse.

Realists, by contrast, think that nationalism usually makes it terribly costly to invade and occupy countries in areas like the Middle East. People in the developing world believe fervently in self-determination, which is the essence of nationalism, and they do not like Americans or Europeans running their lives.

Nationalism can quickly turn liberators into occupiers, who then face a major insurrection. The Israelis, for example, invaded Lebanon in 1982 and were at first greeted as liberators. But they overstayed their welcome and generated an insurgency that drove them out of Lebanon 18 years later.

Morgenthau understood that if the United States committed large-scale military forces to Vietnam, it would face a major-league insurgency that would be extremely difficult to beat. It is natural to conclude that he would have understood that this same basic logic applied to Iraq and thus would have opposed the Iraq War as fiercely as he opposed the war in Vietnam.

Hans Morgenthau was an ardent critic of the American effort to democratize Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Morgenthau was not opposed to making Vietnam democratic. He just thought that Vietnam was not ready for democracy and that American efforts to impose it on that country would ultimately fail, regardless of U.S. intentions.

Realists are often accused of disliking democracy and even of being anti-democratic. This is a bogus charge. Every realist I know would be thrilled to see Iraq turned into a thriving democracy. Realists, however, are well aware of the difficulty of spreading democracy, especially by military means. They also understand that even if the enterprise is successful, that is no guarantee that peace will break out. Democracies as well as non-democracies like having nuclear deterrents, and both kinds of states support terrorism when it suits their interests.

Neoconservatives and realists have two very different theories of international politics, which were reflected in their opposing views on the wisdom of invading and occupying Iraq. Actually, the war itself has been a strong test of the two theories. We have been able to see which side's predictions were correct. It seems clear that Iraq has turned into a debacle for the United States, which is powerful evidence--at least for me--that the realists were right and the neoconservatives were wrong.

JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER

R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, Co-Director, Program on International Security Policy, University of Chicago

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