Realism is the best explanation of IR-ignoring power dooms the left

(Daniel, interviewed by BRANKO MARCETIC, , 7-6)

BRANKO MARCETIC What are the aspects of realism we on the Left can learn from or adopt, to navigate this anarchic world order? DANIEL BESSNER It’s a simple insight, which is that power is the fundamental currency of international relations. At its base, in a Marxist sense, international relations is about power. Take the UN. Why doesn’t the UN work? Because of the Security Council. What does the Security Council reflect? The actual power distribution, or at least as it was in 1945 — now it’s essentially the United States, its two little buddies Britain and France, and Russia and China. And the reason those states have veto power over most of the things that the UN could do is because it reflects power relationships. I think that sometimes on the Left, we tend to overemphasize ideology or we tend to overemphasize other factors, when really power is the fundamental feature of international exchange. It interacts, I would say, with the capitalist political economy in interesting ways. One lacuna that we have on the Left is that we don’t have a great understanding about how these two spheres interact. Oftentimes we reduce things to the political economy when we’re talking at the international level, and we don’t take power — and by this term, I really just mean military power, the power to kill — into account. To fully understand the system, I think they have to go together, and realism provides probably the best mainstream place to start when one is trying to think in large macro terms about international relations.