Less is more.

• Author: Layne, Christopher
• Position: Realistic foreign policies for East Asia

Historically, in both practical and theoretical debates about American foreign policy, the great divide has been between proponents of liberal internationalism -- sometimes called Wilsonianism -- and realism. But today, although more or less pristine strands of neo-Wilsonian liberal internationalism survive in the foreign policy discourse, the more important intellectual debate is taking place within the realist camp itself. Today's realists are split into "maximalists" and "minimalists," with the latter often caricatured as neo-isolationists. While both camps share fundamental assumptions about the forces that shape world politics, once it comes to specifics the two generate very different views as to what U.S. grand strategy ought to be. One can therefore no longer speak meaningfully about a realist critique of liberal internationalism, for realism today does not offer a unified alternative to liberal internationalist policies.

To complicate things further, while their basic assumptions differ, maximal realists sometimes find themselves in accord with liberal internationalists. To take one important current example, both have tended to favor American military intervention in the Balkans. On the other hand, minimal realists sometimes do find themselves more in accord with isolationists than with maximal realists -- and again the Bosnia debate illustrates the point. Hence, the schism between maximal and minimal realists merits close attention.

The basic difference between the two camps, understood as ideal types, is not hard to state: It is between those who would trust in hegemonism and those who would trust in the balance of power, these being the only two pure models of international stability that scholars have ever gleaned from the study of history. Maximal realists put their money on hegemony -- or as much of it as they can get under specific circumstances -- and assume that, as it will be American, it will be a benign hegemony. They seek U.S. security through the preservation of maximum feasible American military and geopolitical dominance over the international system. Minimalists, on the contrary, advise that the United States should seek security by capitalizing on the dynamics of the balance of power in an emerging multipolar world. They do so because they believe that the United States lacks the resources to sustain its present predominance, and, more fundamentally, because they see hegemony as inherently unstable.

Both maximal and minimal approaches are realist strategies because they embrace the core assumptions of the realist paradigm: anarchy among states requires and justifies self-help; reasons of state predominate over conventional interpersonal standards of moral behavior; and power relationships predominate over internal political characteristics in determining state behavior. But maximal and minimal versions of realism today do not generate equally realistic strategies. The operational differences between them may be demonstrated by considering their respective implications for future U.S. strategy in East Asia, and after first considering the two positions -- maximal and minimal realism -- in general theoretical terms, I shall do this. It will be my contention that minimal realist approaches offer by far the more realistic options for the United States.

Maximal Realism: The Strategy of

Preponderance

Realism can best be understood by contrasting it with the liberal internationalism that represents the prevailing popular approach to world politics among the elites of Western democracies. In its unadulterated form, liberal internationalism boils down to the assumption that a virtuous cycle binds together democracy, economic interdependence, and peace. Its enemies are authoritarianism, narrow nationalism, and excessive reliance on the use of force as a policy instrument. It aspires to apply the rule of law to state interactions, and, while not necessarily utopian, is quick to spot and to advocate potential systemic change, presumably for the better.

Realists see things differently; in particular, they are skeptical of any easy prospect for benign systemic change. If history is "just one damned thing after another", then for realists international politics is the same damned things over and over again. War, great power security and economic competitions, the rise and fall of empires and great states, and the formation and dissolution of alliances are, in this view, ceaseless and changeless at the same time. The number of permutations is virtually infinite, but the rules by which they are generated are fixed by human nature and the hard realities of political life.

The realist paradigm explains why this is so. International politics is an anarchic, self-help realm because there is no central authority to make and enforce rules of behavior on states. The absence of such an authority means that each state is responsible for ensuring its own survival, free to define its own interests and to employ means of its own choosing in pursuit of those interests. International politics is therefore fundamentally competitive. While this competition is not necessarily chaotic or disorderly, states cannot escape the security dilemma, in which the fear and distrust of other states is normal and usually reciprocal. The imperative of survival thus forces states to adopt strategies that maximize their military and economic power relative to their rivals.

Unlike liberal internationalism, realism is not an uplifting approach to international politics. Owen Harries has nicely captured its flavor:

Realism is a dour and pessimistic doctrine, one that stresses the inevitability of conflict, the intractability of interests, the dangers of life in a world of sovereign states. The virtues it most strongly recommends are prudence and vigilance.

On this all realists agree, and therefore conclude that, international politics being the way it is, security must be the overarching goal of American strategy. But that is where agreement ends.

It is a commonplace, but nonetheless true, observation that the Soviet Union's collapse transformed the bipolar post-1945 international system into a unipolar one, with the United States as the sole great power. Maximal realists believe that U.S. post-cold War strategy should aim at perpetuating unipolarity by preventing the rise of new great powers. This is because, they further assume, American hegemony will guarantee a stable international order based on America's power and its liberal values. Maximalists usually combine realist concerns about power with liberal internationalism's core policy agenda. In other words, the stabilizing qualities of the hegemon aside, maximalists assume that other states will accept the leadership of a more or less benign, liberal hegemon such as the United States because of the collective goods -- general security reassurance, predictable "rules of the game", and an open international economic system -- they would receive in exchange. Unlike true liberal internationalists, who believe that liberalism inevitably will triumph of its own accord, maximalists believe that only American power can ensure that liberal principles will prevail. And they view liberal internationalist principles instrumentally rather than ideologically: democracy and free trade are good because they are means to a desirable end -- a high degree of security for the United States in the international system -- not the other way around.

Maximalism's contemporary intellectual framework can be parsed from both the writings of its leading proponents and from official policy statements penned during the Bush and Clinton administrations. Perhaps the strongest statement of the key premise -- that American strategy should aim to preserve the United States as the sole great power -- comes from the leaked and subsequently notorious draft of the FY 1994-9 Defense Planning Guidance, prepared in 1992. That document stated that the United States "must account sufficiently for the interests of the large industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political or economic order," and that the United States must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."(1) Maximalists believe that, having emerged from the Cold War in a pre-eminent geopolitical position, America's security requires maintenance of that position. As Samuel P. Huntington puts it: "States pursue primacy in order to be able to insure their security, promote their interests, and shape the international environment in ways that will reflect their interests and values."(2)

Maximalists generally prescribe a two-pronged strategy to maintain American dominance: Geopolitically, the United States should maintain, and if necessary extend, security guarantees to Europe and East Asia in order to negate the incentives that might push eligible states to become great powers; and ideologically, it should encourage the spread of democracy and the preservation (and expansion) of an open international economy because democracy and interdependence conduce to peace.

As to the first part of this strategy, maximalists favor U.S. geostrategic predominance because they believe that the rise of new great powers would destabilize the international order. "U.S. leadership," former Pentagon official Zalmay Khalilzad typically argues, "would be more conducive to global stability than a bipolar or a multipolar balance of power system."(3) Maximalists appear to believe that the alternative to U.S. predominance is a return to a mechanistic eighteenth/nineteenth century balance of power system, a system which they see as flawed because it requires subtle diplomatic calculations and compromises to function effectively. The current debilities of operating such a balance, as maximalists see it, are many. The main fear is that any...