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To Shape the Nation’s Foreign Policy: Struggles for Dominance among American International Relations Scholars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Tom Farer
Tom Farer*
Affiliation:
Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver

Abstract

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Whatever its other effects, the Soviet-American Cold War helped launch and sustain an era of feverish intellectual activity in the linked fields of international relations theory and foreign policy analysis. One sign of the importance of more recent phenomena with all their resonant impacts may be the continuing ferment in theorizing about international relations, foreign policy and public international law years after the war's conclusion, a ferment which the 9/11/01 terrorist attack on the United States and its aftermath have intensified. Comprehending the scholarly inquiries and debates in these fields should be important to intellectuals regardless of their professional interests, not only because those inquiries and debates concern profound epistemological and ontological issues, but primarily because they have influenced and continue to influence the trajectory of United States foreign policy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , August 2004 , pp. 71 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2004

References

Notes

1. Keith B. Richburg, ‘Chirac Seems Intent on Challenging US Foreign Policy’, Washington Post, 31 May 2003, p. A12.

2. Whether to call the results of this theorizing ‘theories’, ‘schools’ or ‘approaches’ seems to me a matter of taste. Those working in the natural sciences in particular may prefer either of the latter two on the basis of a feeling that the approaches I discuss lack the sharp edges and susceptibility to rigorous testing that full-blown ‘theories’ should possess.

3. For an extended treatment of the subject, see Jack Donnelly, Realism in International Relations, New York, CUP, 2000.

4. Hans Morgenthau, Power Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th edn, New York, Knopf, 1973.

5. For an extended treatment intended for the general reader as well as the specialist, see John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York, W. W. Norton, 2001. However, the canonical work is Kenneth N. Waltz’s Theory of International Politics, Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley, 1979.

6. See note 5 above.

7. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Watt, ‘An Unnecessary War’, Foreign Policy (Jan/Feb): 51-60.

8. Henry Kissinger ‘Phase II and Iraq’, Washington Post, 13 January 2002, p. B7; Brent Scowcroft, ‘Don’t Attack Saddam’, Wall Street Journal, 15 August 2002, p. A12.

9. See, for example, Kenneth Waltz, ‘Globalization and Governance’, Political Science and Politics, 32(4): 693-700.

10. John Mearsheimer, ‘The Future of the American Pacifier’, Foreign Affairs, 80(5), Sept-Oct 2001: 46-61.

11. For a fine brief survey of institutionalist thought, see Robert O. Keohane, ‘International Institutions: Two Perspectives’, International Studies Quarterly, 32(4) December 1988: 379-6.

12. For a lucid overview of institutionalist theory, see Robert O. Keohane and Lisa L. Martin, ‘The Promise of Institutionalist theory’, International Security, 20(1) summer 1995: 39-51.

13. Of course the structures themselves can be described as clusters of procedural and substantive rules and principles defining roles, allocating authority, guiding decisions, etc.

14. Or gains from deployment by one might be neutralized by counter-measures. Thus if one great power deploys an anti-ballistic missile system, the other might respond not by deploying a similar system but by increasing the number of its deployed missiles so that it has sufficient to overwhelm the defensive system.

15. John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War’, Atlantic Monthly, August 1990: 35-50.

16. Michael Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12(3): 205-35; ‘Liberalism and World Politics’, American Political Science Review, 80(4): 1151-69.

17. Alexander Wendt, International Organization, 46(2) spring 1992: 391-425.

18. As in the case of realists, there are basically two sub-schools: conventional constructivists and critical theorists. For a crisp summary of their similarities and differences, see Ted Hopf, ‘The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory’, International Security, 23(1) summer 1998: 171-200.

19. I draw the instance from the Ted Hopf article cited above. He in turn was referring to a piece by Thomas Risse-Kappen, ‘Collective Identity in a Democratic Community: The Case of NATO’, in Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, New York, Columbia University Press, 1996, pp. 361-8.

20. Hopf, op. cit. note 18, p. 177.