Yes! The two strands are definitely an oversimplification, as the analysis of a whole nation's culture is necessarily quite fuzzy. Albion's seed definitely does a better job than I will in the Part 2, but I think it does miss out on some of the post-immigration developments, like the Great Awakenings, colonial expansion West, and massive natural resources accessible to Americans, that has all also had a meaningful effect.
The strongest critique of Strategic Culture theory is that it's arbitrary, which it is. There's also nothing saying that leaders necessarily have to identify the national interest in line with a nation's history (and many don't). I think the most useful aspect of it isn't proscriptive, but as a fallback for understanding what's motivating another nation when it doesn't behave as you'd expect.
Take Putin as an example. Many people in the west think he's insane, or a warmonger, or just evil, when at the very least he identifies the Russian national interest in a coherent way publicly. The meme of Putin speaking with Tucker like "Let's go back to 893 with the founding of Kievan Rus" or whatever he said, is joked about because to the western (and especially American) mind, it seems insane that someone would justify the Russian national interest from ancient history. If you look at it in terms of the Russian culture and history though, it fits quite well with the Russian desire to expand to naturally defensible borders, otherwise facing attacks or threats of attack from every side (whether that be raving bands of nomads, German invasions, or NATO).
Of course none of this serves to justify an action in a moral sense. But it can serve to explain a nation's actions. And that thinking would have been very useful in biasing the West into thinking Russia would invade Ukraine, which a lot of people (including important geo-strategists and diplomats) didn't believe was likely, since obviously the gain from invading Ukraine couldn't possibly be worth the international sanctions, and lives lost. Yet from a cultural and historical perspective, the Russians see their national interest in slightly different terms than the west, which allows for a justification of a war that is unjustifiable to the American or European mind.
I think Putin is crazy because he’s operating under a land warfare-based historical model that doesn’t apply anymore…but your model is useful in that it reminds me to turn that on its head and analyze the ways US policy tends to fail based on our own history (ie, land empire surrounded by oceans).
And the crusading idealism reminds me of Puritanism and Cavalier threads, while protectionism reminds me more of the Quaker and borderer ethos. Those groupings aren’t the usual political combinations.
Yeah. The strategy itself of the War in Ukraine definitely seems like it’s insane. Certainly there has to be a better way to invade a country, but he might be constrained by the old Soviet Military doctrine and equipment. Or he may have overestimated how easy it would be, and changing doctrine mid-war is too time consuming or difficult.
Putin seems afraid of taking risks, and reforming the Russian military to be a lean killing machine would be a risk. The Wagner group was like an experiment in upgrading the military, and the head of that drove his army of tanks back into Russia.
The "realist" system of balance led to WW1. It wasn't stable to begin with. This happened without any American facilitation between idealism and isolationism.
The reason it was unstable was precisely because it tried very hard to ignore, much like Kissinger and other "realists" (and lets be frank here, Kissinger's record wasnt particularly impressive even ignoring ethics) the aspirations of people who were not interested in being subjects of "great powers" or the currents that were present within the great powers themselves. Ignoring crucial social developments in your analysis is the opposite of being "realist". It is reality denying.
What was that reality? At end of WW1, Germany lay ruined, France depopulated, AH falling apart and Russia taken over by Bolsheviks. There was no freakin' way that you could restore "great power balance" in that situation even if you wanted to. American idealism and Woodrow merely recognized the reality on the ground. The outcome would've probably looked very similar if at the end of the war they didn't get involved diplomatically. The "great powers" may have influenced some details (esp wrt to like Hungary) but there was a new reality in Europe whether they liked it or not, and that reality involved a lot of new states.
"Great powers" aren't some immutable god given category. Russia was a great power but before that it wasn't. Then, really, it isnt again. Even England wasnt much till fairly late to the game. Why isnt Spain, for long time the most powerful country in Europe in this powers balance calculation? Or Sweden for that matter? Trying to base your diplomacy on great power balance and their supposed spheres of interests is like trying to balance Athens vs Sparta while the Romans are already beating up on Carthage (maybe Thebes would be a better example)
Even putting aside all of that, this view is still based on a modified but still narrow-minded idea of American exceptionalism. Americans famously dont think much about anything that isnt American. Either positively or negatively, they either try to take credit for all the good in the world, or blame the US for all the bad in the world. But its all about US. The "realists" then think they're being sophisticated by saying "look! We also think about a couple other big countries! We so smart!" But in a way it just makes them worse - at least a boorish person knows they're boorish. Its the half assed half learned intellectual that can do real harm.
And even putting all this aside, we're talking about a theory really based on a N=1 or maybe N=2. Post WW1 and maybe Vietnam (except then Vietnam told the Chinese to fuff off, so much for their sphere of influence). Even Iraq and Afghanistan dont really fit - while US did the idealism then flake-out thing, the outcome had almost nothing to do with big power politics or balance. We didn't withdraw from those places cuz of China or something
I had to spend some time thinking about this, and I think you're right about a lot of what you say.
Realism, and especially Kissinger's focus on balance is by no means the right way of looking at international politics. I do think realism gives one of the best foundations for describing of international political relations absent strong non-state actors though. Just that many realist analysts use a simplistic conception of realism that doesn't include social forces, which are levers of power in themselves, just not determined at the state level.
You can't talk about international politics without talking about the interactions between nations. And you can't have a political theory without reducing complex forces into something much simpler. While pure realism focuses too much on the state-actors, ignoring non-state actors, that doesn't mean the model is useless, just not a perfect model (which none are). Where it fails, in considering internal forces and non-state actors, I haven't yet seen a coherent model for really understanding why this, rather than that, happened, whereas international leverage does serve to explain a lot of international politics.
> There was no freakin' way that you could restore "great power balance" in that situation even if you wanted to. American idealism and Woodrow merely recognized the reality on the ground.
I'd push back on this. Take the league of nations as an example, which was intended to be the tool of collective security. Peace was supposed to have been achieved through the more powerful nations stepping in anytime there was an international conflict. The main promoter of this system, the United States, was never a real participant in the system though, so it lacked a significant portion of its enforcement power, and motivation, to actually be effective. France and Britain could have theoretically made the system functional, but at the time their own national interest was too close to the issue for them to purely prioritize collective security.
And look at the desire for national self-determination from Wilson's 14 Points. Borders were redrawn in ways that left half of central Europe with semi-legitimate irredentist claims to the other due to minorities that were denied their own national self-determination. Many millions of Germanys living outside Germany, many Hungarians as well, and many other smaller examples of nations that were created as a compromise between national self-determination, and the necessities of a country being powerful enough to sustain itself. It's hard to preach the self-determination of ethnic and linguistic groups on one hand, then enforce millions of Germans in Austria, Sudetenland, Holstein and Poland (let alone the nation being split by the Polish corridor) living outside Germany itself. This arrangement seems to have almost guaranteed an irredentist Germany.
I of course don't know if anything could have been done better, but there was certainly internal contradiction between asserting the right of national self-determination, then assigning overwhelmingly german borderlands to neighboring states in an attempt to weaken Germany, and strengthen these other nations. Combine that with the very weak demographics and economics of France vs. Germany, and the state that was supposed to keep a potentially irredentist Germany in check didn't have the force to actually stop them. Let alone the construction of the Maginot line, which might as well have been a large advertisement that says "We have no intention of marching East", making any threats of intervention empty.
> And even putting all this aside, we're talking about a theory really based on a N=1 or maybe N=2. Post WW1 and maybe Vietnam (except then Vietnam told the Chinese to fuff off, so much for their sphere of influence). Even Iraq and Afghanistan dont really fit - while US did the idealism then flake-out thing, the outcome had almost nothing to do with big power politics or balance.
Not to bring this back to my point, but I think this is partially what Strategic Culture Theory is trying to do in modifying political realism. The US acting out in ways that are better explained by idealism, then flaking out, can't easily be explained by pure Realism. It's hard to explain from a machiavellian perspective why the United States could have a national interest in these invasions, and when people try to come up with a justification through a realist lens it usually seems contrived IMO.
But unlike pure realism, realism modified by strategic culture theory still claims that nations pursue their national interest, but the national interest isn't determined in a Machiavellian, mechanical way of power-maximization. It's instead determined through impossible to predict factors that introduce randomness, and predictable factors in line with a nations ethos, culture, and traditions. And through that lens, US crusading can be predicted accurately by Realism, when modifying the American national interest to account for irrational cultural tendencies.
So yeah, overall I'd agree with many of the critiques of realism. It's an oversimplified model, and because it almost completely ignores non-state actors and social trends it's often blindsided by political change that doesn't result from state actors. I disagree with the critics in that I still think it's a useful model for understanding how nations interact, especially absent any unexpected social trends. Where it is useful, I think it can be made more so in conceiving the national interest in more complex terms than power-maximization, but composed of idealist, and other desires, mitigated by each nation's unique history.
Kissinger's desire for a balance of power is less important for me, as that's just what he identified should be the national interest, not some eternal or absolutely correct way of looking at the world. It does seem compelling in a "No True Balance Of Power System Has Ever Been Tried" sort of way, in that the reasons the previous examples failed aren't incoherent, and the reasons it would be desirable seem consistent. But as far as I'm concerned it's purely in the realm of theoretically desirable, not definitely so, and on the same tier as a lot of other theoretically desirable goals.
Edit:
Also, I'm perhaps a lot less of an authoritative source on these things than I may (incorrectly) imply. My undergraduate poli-sci degree and reading of a few books written about and by one of the most infamous political realists doesn't give me a strong enough stance to contrast with other theories (yet). My main desire in writing these are for comments like this that challenge, and to try and write my own understanding in a coherent way to confirm it's actual understanding.
Do you have any recommendations for the sort of in-depth reading on international politics that is on the same level as Kissinger's Diplomacy?
I will read the reply when I have a bit more time and I hope to respond but for now let me just say that im not opposed to "realism" in thinking about IR, in fact I believe its a necessary approach. It's rather that a lot of people who run around calling themselves "realists"... aren't very realistic.
Good post. Looking forward to the next installment.
Glad to hear you liked it! More to come next week.
Is there a connection between the two strands of foreign policy and the four groups outlined in Albion’s seed?
Yes! The two strands are definitely an oversimplification, as the analysis of a whole nation's culture is necessarily quite fuzzy. Albion's seed definitely does a better job than I will in the Part 2, but I think it does miss out on some of the post-immigration developments, like the Great Awakenings, colonial expansion West, and massive natural resources accessible to Americans, that has all also had a meaningful effect.
The strongest critique of Strategic Culture theory is that it's arbitrary, which it is. There's also nothing saying that leaders necessarily have to identify the national interest in line with a nation's history (and many don't). I think the most useful aspect of it isn't proscriptive, but as a fallback for understanding what's motivating another nation when it doesn't behave as you'd expect.
Take Putin as an example. Many people in the west think he's insane, or a warmonger, or just evil, when at the very least he identifies the Russian national interest in a coherent way publicly. The meme of Putin speaking with Tucker like "Let's go back to 893 with the founding of Kievan Rus" or whatever he said, is joked about because to the western (and especially American) mind, it seems insane that someone would justify the Russian national interest from ancient history. If you look at it in terms of the Russian culture and history though, it fits quite well with the Russian desire to expand to naturally defensible borders, otherwise facing attacks or threats of attack from every side (whether that be raving bands of nomads, German invasions, or NATO).
Of course none of this serves to justify an action in a moral sense. But it can serve to explain a nation's actions. And that thinking would have been very useful in biasing the West into thinking Russia would invade Ukraine, which a lot of people (including important geo-strategists and diplomats) didn't believe was likely, since obviously the gain from invading Ukraine couldn't possibly be worth the international sanctions, and lives lost. Yet from a cultural and historical perspective, the Russians see their national interest in slightly different terms than the west, which allows for a justification of a war that is unjustifiable to the American or European mind.
I think Putin is crazy because he’s operating under a land warfare-based historical model that doesn’t apply anymore…but your model is useful in that it reminds me to turn that on its head and analyze the ways US policy tends to fail based on our own history (ie, land empire surrounded by oceans).
And the crusading idealism reminds me of Puritanism and Cavalier threads, while protectionism reminds me more of the Quaker and borderer ethos. Those groupings aren’t the usual political combinations.
Yeah. The strategy itself of the War in Ukraine definitely seems like it’s insane. Certainly there has to be a better way to invade a country, but he might be constrained by the old Soviet Military doctrine and equipment. Or he may have overestimated how easy it would be, and changing doctrine mid-war is too time consuming or difficult.
Putin seems afraid of taking risks, and reforming the Russian military to be a lean killing machine would be a risk. The Wagner group was like an experiment in upgrading the military, and the head of that drove his army of tanks back into Russia.
Is this mean as a description of a view or also an endorsement? Because frankly, its hokey as hell. Like eye rolling naive, narrow and parochial.
What specifically do you disagree with here?
The "realist" system of balance led to WW1. It wasn't stable to begin with. This happened without any American facilitation between idealism and isolationism.
The reason it was unstable was precisely because it tried very hard to ignore, much like Kissinger and other "realists" (and lets be frank here, Kissinger's record wasnt particularly impressive even ignoring ethics) the aspirations of people who were not interested in being subjects of "great powers" or the currents that were present within the great powers themselves. Ignoring crucial social developments in your analysis is the opposite of being "realist". It is reality denying.
What was that reality? At end of WW1, Germany lay ruined, France depopulated, AH falling apart and Russia taken over by Bolsheviks. There was no freakin' way that you could restore "great power balance" in that situation even if you wanted to. American idealism and Woodrow merely recognized the reality on the ground. The outcome would've probably looked very similar if at the end of the war they didn't get involved diplomatically. The "great powers" may have influenced some details (esp wrt to like Hungary) but there was a new reality in Europe whether they liked it or not, and that reality involved a lot of new states.
"Great powers" aren't some immutable god given category. Russia was a great power but before that it wasn't. Then, really, it isnt again. Even England wasnt much till fairly late to the game. Why isnt Spain, for long time the most powerful country in Europe in this powers balance calculation? Or Sweden for that matter? Trying to base your diplomacy on great power balance and their supposed spheres of interests is like trying to balance Athens vs Sparta while the Romans are already beating up on Carthage (maybe Thebes would be a better example)
Even putting aside all of that, this view is still based on a modified but still narrow-minded idea of American exceptionalism. Americans famously dont think much about anything that isnt American. Either positively or negatively, they either try to take credit for all the good in the world, or blame the US for all the bad in the world. But its all about US. The "realists" then think they're being sophisticated by saying "look! We also think about a couple other big countries! We so smart!" But in a way it just makes them worse - at least a boorish person knows they're boorish. Its the half assed half learned intellectual that can do real harm.
And even putting all this aside, we're talking about a theory really based on a N=1 or maybe N=2. Post WW1 and maybe Vietnam (except then Vietnam told the Chinese to fuff off, so much for their sphere of influence). Even Iraq and Afghanistan dont really fit - while US did the idealism then flake-out thing, the outcome had almost nothing to do with big power politics or balance. We didn't withdraw from those places cuz of China or something
I had to spend some time thinking about this, and I think you're right about a lot of what you say.
Realism, and especially Kissinger's focus on balance is by no means the right way of looking at international politics. I do think realism gives one of the best foundations for describing of international political relations absent strong non-state actors though. Just that many realist analysts use a simplistic conception of realism that doesn't include social forces, which are levers of power in themselves, just not determined at the state level.
You can't talk about international politics without talking about the interactions between nations. And you can't have a political theory without reducing complex forces into something much simpler. While pure realism focuses too much on the state-actors, ignoring non-state actors, that doesn't mean the model is useless, just not a perfect model (which none are). Where it fails, in considering internal forces and non-state actors, I haven't yet seen a coherent model for really understanding why this, rather than that, happened, whereas international leverage does serve to explain a lot of international politics.
> There was no freakin' way that you could restore "great power balance" in that situation even if you wanted to. American idealism and Woodrow merely recognized the reality on the ground.
I'd push back on this. Take the league of nations as an example, which was intended to be the tool of collective security. Peace was supposed to have been achieved through the more powerful nations stepping in anytime there was an international conflict. The main promoter of this system, the United States, was never a real participant in the system though, so it lacked a significant portion of its enforcement power, and motivation, to actually be effective. France and Britain could have theoretically made the system functional, but at the time their own national interest was too close to the issue for them to purely prioritize collective security.
And look at the desire for national self-determination from Wilson's 14 Points. Borders were redrawn in ways that left half of central Europe with semi-legitimate irredentist claims to the other due to minorities that were denied their own national self-determination. Many millions of Germanys living outside Germany, many Hungarians as well, and many other smaller examples of nations that were created as a compromise between national self-determination, and the necessities of a country being powerful enough to sustain itself. It's hard to preach the self-determination of ethnic and linguistic groups on one hand, then enforce millions of Germans in Austria, Sudetenland, Holstein and Poland (let alone the nation being split by the Polish corridor) living outside Germany itself. This arrangement seems to have almost guaranteed an irredentist Germany.
I of course don't know if anything could have been done better, but there was certainly internal contradiction between asserting the right of national self-determination, then assigning overwhelmingly german borderlands to neighboring states in an attempt to weaken Germany, and strengthen these other nations. Combine that with the very weak demographics and economics of France vs. Germany, and the state that was supposed to keep a potentially irredentist Germany in check didn't have the force to actually stop them. Let alone the construction of the Maginot line, which might as well have been a large advertisement that says "We have no intention of marching East", making any threats of intervention empty.
> And even putting all this aside, we're talking about a theory really based on a N=1 or maybe N=2. Post WW1 and maybe Vietnam (except then Vietnam told the Chinese to fuff off, so much for their sphere of influence). Even Iraq and Afghanistan dont really fit - while US did the idealism then flake-out thing, the outcome had almost nothing to do with big power politics or balance.
Not to bring this back to my point, but I think this is partially what Strategic Culture Theory is trying to do in modifying political realism. The US acting out in ways that are better explained by idealism, then flaking out, can't easily be explained by pure Realism. It's hard to explain from a machiavellian perspective why the United States could have a national interest in these invasions, and when people try to come up with a justification through a realist lens it usually seems contrived IMO.
But unlike pure realism, realism modified by strategic culture theory still claims that nations pursue their national interest, but the national interest isn't determined in a Machiavellian, mechanical way of power-maximization. It's instead determined through impossible to predict factors that introduce randomness, and predictable factors in line with a nations ethos, culture, and traditions. And through that lens, US crusading can be predicted accurately by Realism, when modifying the American national interest to account for irrational cultural tendencies.
So yeah, overall I'd agree with many of the critiques of realism. It's an oversimplified model, and because it almost completely ignores non-state actors and social trends it's often blindsided by political change that doesn't result from state actors. I disagree with the critics in that I still think it's a useful model for understanding how nations interact, especially absent any unexpected social trends. Where it is useful, I think it can be made more so in conceiving the national interest in more complex terms than power-maximization, but composed of idealist, and other desires, mitigated by each nation's unique history.
Kissinger's desire for a balance of power is less important for me, as that's just what he identified should be the national interest, not some eternal or absolutely correct way of looking at the world. It does seem compelling in a "No True Balance Of Power System Has Ever Been Tried" sort of way, in that the reasons the previous examples failed aren't incoherent, and the reasons it would be desirable seem consistent. But as far as I'm concerned it's purely in the realm of theoretically desirable, not definitely so, and on the same tier as a lot of other theoretically desirable goals.
Edit:
Also, I'm perhaps a lot less of an authoritative source on these things than I may (incorrectly) imply. My undergraduate poli-sci degree and reading of a few books written about and by one of the most infamous political realists doesn't give me a strong enough stance to contrast with other theories (yet). My main desire in writing these are for comments like this that challenge, and to try and write my own understanding in a coherent way to confirm it's actual understanding.
Do you have any recommendations for the sort of in-depth reading on international politics that is on the same level as Kissinger's Diplomacy?
I will read the reply when I have a bit more time and I hope to respond but for now let me just say that im not opposed to "realism" in thinking about IR, in fact I believe its a necessary approach. It's rather that a lot of people who run around calling themselves "realists"... aren't very realistic.
Great post, Sol Hando. Reads like an introduction to an interesting piece. I'm interested to see where this goes
Thanks! Part 2 is scheduled for next Friday.