Higher Realism: a new foreign policy for the United States.

• Author: Handley, John M.
• Position: Brief article - Book review

Seyom Brown, Higher Realism: A New Foreign Policy for the United States, Boulder: Paradigm, 2009, (187 pages of text plus endnotes and index), ISBN 978-1-59451-398-5; hardback.

Seyom Brown currently holds the John Goodwin Tower Distinguished Chair in International Politics and National Security in Southern Methodist University's Department of Political Science. Additionally, Dr. Brown remains a Senior Advisor to MIT's Security Studies Program. Prior to accepting the SMU position, Dr. Brown taught political science at Brandeis University as the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of International Cooperation, and he taught international relations at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In addition to teaching and writing, Dr. Brown provides research and policy analysis to entities such as RAND Cooperation, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Brookings Institution. He has served in both the Department of Defense and the Department of State, in the former as Special Assistant in the Office of International Security Affairs, and in the latter as Special Assistant to the Director of Policy Planning.

Seyom Brown's stated reasons for writing Higher Realism are twofold. First, in order to ensure the security and well-being of the United States, as well as the survival of the human species, he believes it is essential for the United States to develop and adopt policies that address global concerns. Second, he provides anyone interested in this subject with a list of instruments and programs to implement such policies.

Dr. Brown begins the book with a explanation of how the current world order has changed from the unipolar world of Pax Americana to a world he describes as "Polyarchy," which comes from combining the many (poly) powers--states and non-states--that play an essential role in the current world order, with anarchy, the lack of recognized and enforceable international structure or world governance. In the second chapter, Dr. Brown compares and contrasts Conventional Realism with what he terms Higher Realism.

Although the two "isms" share many similarities, they differ largely on the definition of a national interest. The former sees national interest from a rather narrow, state-centric, viewpoint, while the latter believes that global interests, global problems, and global concerns constitute a global commons in which all states share a national...