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BS SS-Lecture 2

It's a ppt about strategic studies

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5 views

BS SS-Lecture 2

It's a ppt about strategic studies

Uploaded by

Ali Sherbaz
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Realism: Traditional Approach to Security

• The Classical Realist Tradition in IR


• The Cold War and the emergence of National Security State
• Class discussion
What is Realism?
• The classical Realist tradition in IR is grounded in an emphasis on
power politics and the pursuit of what is called the national interest.
• War/conflict is the norm, peace is the aberration
• States are the principal actors; rational, power capabilities and self-
interested
• International anarchy
– No overarching central authority
• Struggle for survival (Power Maximization)
– Military power: Zero-sum games (security dilemma)
– Balance of power
Realism and International Security
• State, international anarchy and power are essential for understanding
international security.
• The realist tradition has exercised an enormous influence over security
studies by providing important explanations for armed conflict and war.
• Selfish human appetites for power, or the need to accumulate the means to
be secure in a self-help world, explain the seemingly endless succession of
wars and conquest.
• Therefore, most realists take a pessimistic and prudential view of IR.
The Classical Realist Tradition in IR
• Historically, scholars such as Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes who's
central argument was based on the Realist tradition as they emphasized the
self-interested, conflictual nature of world politics.
• To these, one may add the writings of military strategists such as Sun Tzu
and Von Clausewitz, who presented war as an inevitable continuation of state
politics, establishing a clear military dimension to the politics of Realism.
• Such ideas were also fundamental to the foreign policies of Europe’s dynastic
states between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries.
• With emergence of IR as an academic field of study in the aftermath of the
First World War, Classical Realists – the likes of E.H. Carr, Reinhold Niebuhr,
and Nicholas Spykman – articulate a largely pessimistic interpretation of the
international system during the inter-war period.
The Classical Realist Tradition in IR
• These realist authors criticized what they perceived to be a naive and
‘utopian’ analysis of world politics by Liberal scholars of IR, arguing that the
flawed – or even evil – nature of the human individual would inevitably
manifest itself in the aggressive behaviour of states.
• Within this ‘First Image’ interpretation of inter-state conflict, Realists were
particularly critical of the League of Nations, arguing that it would ultimately
fall victim to the self-interest of its member states.
• The failure of the League and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939
seemed to validate much of the classical Realist pessimism with respect to
world politics, particularly concerning the inevitable occurrence of inter-state
conflict in an international system based on self-help.
The Cold War and International Security

• At the onset of the Cold War, the primacy of Realist thinking was established
in the newly recognized academic discipline of Strategic Studies:
– Foundation to ISS,
– allowing a generation of Realist thinkers to dictate the contours of ‘security’ for the next
four decades.
• The key Realist literature of this era emerged in 1948 with the publication of
Hans Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations: the Struggle for Power and Peace
– emphasis on a national interest defined in terms of maximizing power.
• Morgenthau reemphasized his central arguments in 1951 with the release of In
Defense of National Interest,
– again highlighting the importance of national interest as the sole foundation of US foreign
policy in the post-Second World War era.
The Cold War and the primacy of Realism in Strategic
Studies
• Morgenthau argument resonated within the work of several other key scholars
of Strategic Studies – the likes of Robert Osgood, Arnold Wolfers, and Henry
Kissinger – all of whom contributed to defining security in fundamentally Realist
terms, as a state-centric concept in which the key currency for addressing
threats remained the maximisation of military power.
• Although Morgenthau’s work provided an important articulation of the Realist
world view, it was the simultaneous emergence of a bipolar international system
and the development of nuclear weapons which allowed Realism to establish
itself as the dominant theoretical approach to defining the concept of security.
The Cold War and the primacy of Realism in Strategic
Studies
• Indeed, the nuclear standoff between the superpower rivals served to explicitly
link ideas of national security [state], geopolitics, territorial sovereignty and
military power into a new concept of security that was espoused by the likes of
George Kennan and Paul Nitze.
• This was soon institutionalized within the Truman administration with the
assistance of the National Security Act (1947) which established the
Department of Defense, the NSC, and the CIA.
• This was followed three years later by Nitze’s infamous NSC-68 document that
became the blueprint for US foreign policy throughout the remainder of the
Cold War, framing US security interests solely in the context of combating the
threat of the Soviet Union through a containment strategy.
The Cold War and the primacy of Realism in Strategic
Studies
• Kennan advocated the idea of firm containment in his famous article ‘The
Sources of Soviet Conduct’ in 1947. Kennan wrote that “the main element
of any US policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term,
patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”
• Subsequently, the Truman administration adopted a containment strategy to
counter the Soviets’ expansion and intervene when it was necessary to
safeguard Western interests.
• To implement the containment strategy, the US came up with a national
security strategy to integrate “foreign, economic and military policies
relating to the national security so as to enable the military services and the
other departments and agencies of the government to cooperate more
closely and effectively in matters involving national security."
The Cold War and the primacy of Realism in Strategic
Studies
• This led to national security state that was an institutional expression of
America’s new determination to maintain a position of permanent war
preparedness in its Cold War with the Soviet Union.
• NSS was an arrangement in which certain institutions and ideas
combine together in a way in which the state organizes itself for
permanent military preparedness.
• However, it has militarized the American state and society (US
President Eisenhour)
The Cold War and the primacy of Realism in Strategic
Studies
• The dual emergent pressures of systemic bipolarity and advanced nuclear
delivery systems shaped the international system in a manner that could be
easily accommodated within the classical Realist tradition,
• Realism dominated the field of Strategic Studies by the close of the 1950s
since other aspects of security had become firmly marginalized within this
state-centric, military focused paradigm (Buzan and Hansen, 2009).
• This process served to merge the concepts of ‘security’ and ‘strategy’ within
Strategic Studies, a fusion that would ultimately remain intact until the critical
revolution within ISS during the 1990s.
Class Discussion
• Would you agree that the onset of the Cold War was inevitable as per
the realist tradition?
• With Realist lenses, how you will see militarization in China and Iran
becoming a nuclear power just in case?

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