Realists hate liberal wars of intervention.

Thanks to Steve Walt for inviting me to contribute to his blog while he is away on vacation. I have been a regular reader of Steve’s blog since it launched, and for my first post, I wanted to pick up on a motif that I have seen running through Steve’s posts: Will realists ever again support the use of military force by the United States?

Followers of this blog will by now have little doubt about how Walt felt about the Iraq War or how he views the prospects for U.S. success in Afghanistan. In fact, throughout the history of his blog, I can only recall one case in which Walt advocated the use of U.S. military force (and I think the realist credentials in that case are rather dubious).

There is a common perception in the field of political science that realists are war-mongering Neanderthals anxious to use military force at the drop of a hat. Attend any meeting (if you must) of the American Political Science Association or the International Studies Association, and one will find realists derided as the "bombs and bullets guys" as if we were all direct descendants of Curtis LeMay. What is notable about this — and what has been notable about Steve’s blog — is just how infrequently realists have supported the use of American military force. Take the U.S. interventions of the post-Cold War period: Panama, the Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Of those interventions, Afghanistan was the only one that received anything close to strong support from most realists. Others, most notably the Iraq War, received vehement opposition from the vast majority of realists. Even in the case of Afghanistan, realists expressed trepidation about the prospects for ultimate success despite early victories.

Go back to the Cold War, and realists like Kenneth Waltz and Hans Morgenthau were famously opposed to the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Lest one think this is an academic phenomenon, realist policymakers like Brent Scowcroft were equally critical of the Bush administration’s actions in Iraq, and George F. Kennan was skeptical of the U.S. interventions in both Korea and Vietnam. Today, should anyone dare to suggest the use of military force in new contexts such as Iran, they are summarily dismissed by prominent realists. Not a single (self-proclaimed or attributed) realist I know of has advocated the use of military force against Iran in response to its apparent development of nuclear weapons, and most are adamantly opposed to it.

From one perspective, this opposition is surprising. It is realists, after all, who so value material power, in particular military capabilities. It is not difficult to understand why so many would assume that realists are anxious to use military force because realists are anxious to focus on military capabilities as a primary explanatory variable for international politics.

But it is precisely because realists have spent so much time studying military force that they are also so reluctant to use military force. Though realists themselves are divided on the question, many have concluded that the use of military force is often counterproductive, inviting balancing coalitions that simply make life more difficult. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, using military force to reorder societies is very difficult and unlikely to succeed except in uncommon circumstances.