Their evidence essentializes Realism- Academic realists focus on equilibrium theories while ignoring interdependence and primacist realism. Actual policy makers, operational realists, ignore them

(Daniel, PoliSci@JohnsHopkins, and G. John, InternationalAffairs@Princeton,Realism, Liberalism and the Iraq War, Survival, 59:4, 7-26, DOI: 10.1080/00396338.2017.1349757 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2017.1349757)

The chief architects of the Iraq War were clearly not liberal international- ists. They did rely, however, on arguments drawn from both hegemonic realism and interdependence realism. Like realists, liberals were conflicted and divided about the war. 29 In blaming liberal internationalism, realist critics not only neglect the powerful realist logics behind the invasion of Iraq, but also fundamentally misunderstand why it was that some liberal internationalists came to support it. As such critics see it, liberal interna- tionalists supported the war as part of democracy promotion, and they understand liberalism more generally as essentially an idealistic agenda for the improvement and elevation of international life. 30 In fact, liberal support for the war, however reluctant, was based on a set of concerns that had more in common with interdependence realism than with the idealist version of Wilsonianism. Firstly and most importantly, liberal internationalists hold a diagnosis of security vulnerability that emphasises violence interdependence. They, like the realist-interdependence school, see the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction in the hands of revisionist states and terrorist organisations as a dangerous new form of interdepend- ence. This is not an idealist rationale, but rather the recognition of a severe security threat posed by novel developments generated by technological advance. Secondly, in their remedy to rising violence interdependence, liberal internationalists sharply depart from the realist-interdependence approach, advancing international arms control and security-regime build- ing rather than preventive war and hegemonic rule. Iraq’s repeated violation of international law, arms-control treaties and UN Security Council resolu- tions posed a dangerous challenge, not to American hegemony as such, but to an international order of mutual restraint and cooperative problem-solv- ing. Thirdly, liberal internationalists see the establishment and maintenance of broad international coalitions as vital responses to new security vulnera- bilities, and hold that unilateral measures, such as the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, undermine the international cooperation necessary for a real and enduring new international security regime. 31 The academic-realist critics of the Iraq War were speaking for the equi- librium version of realism. The war’s primary instigators were hegemonic realists who also drew on diagnoses of new security vulnerabilities empha- sised by interdependence realists. While the academic realists had largely abandoned such arguments, the operational realists tasked with actually conducting foreign and military policy were nevertheless confronted with new acute manifestations of violence interdependence for which the aca- demic speakers of truth to power had little purchase. Neglected by academic realists, the threats posed by violence interdependence came to be a central focus for liberal internationalists, too. Faced with responding to the new violence interdependences, however – dramatically revealed by 9/11 and the anthrax letters – the hegemonic operational realists in the Bush administration seized upon the Burnhamite agenda of pre-emption and preventive war. For this programme, and in contrast to the thinking of liberal internationalists, the international system of arms-control and security governance stood as impediments to their uni- lateral efforts, and their actions had the effect of damaging the regime as ongoing and internationally legitimate responses to these vulnerabilities. The re-emergence and growth of academic realism across the latter part of the twentieth century promised to provide better guidance to statecraft in dealing with the timeless problems of security and international order – in other words, speaking truth to power. Yet ironically, academic realism, while becoming more sophisticated, became narrower, by dropping the insights and arguments of the violence-interdependence school of realism that flourished in the middle years of the twentieth century. And the aca- demic realists, while claiming to be acutely attentive to the real world of power politics, became remarkably blind to the logics of hegemonic realism and their importance for the foreign policy of the American hegemonic state. Most consequently, by abandoning the insights of the interdepend- ence school, academic realists have limited the ability of realism to grapple with urgent and severe new vulnerabilities arising from cascading techno- logical interdependence. If academic realists seek to return to engaging the pressing security issues of this time, they will find themselves necessarily building from the abandoned starting points of the interdependence school. As they do, they will find themselves in the seasoned company of liberal internationalists and other globalists who have, in the meantime, been grap- pling with these realities.