Jeffrey W. Taliaferro

Security Seeking under Anarchy: Defensive Realism Revisited

I wish to thank Dale Copeland, Bernard Finel, Benjamin Frankel, Benjamin Miller, Jennifer Sterling-Folker, and the anonymous reviewers for International Security for comments on various drafts. I am responsible for any remaining errors or omissions. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 1999 annual meetings of the International Studies Association and the American Political Science Association.

Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy: Introduction: Neoclassical realism, the state, and foreign policy

How do states, or more specifically the decision-makers and institutions that act on their behalf, assess international threats and opportunities? What happens when there is disagreement about the nature of foreign threats? Who ultimately decides the range of acceptable and unacceptable foreign policy alternatives? To what extent, and under what conditions, can domestic actors bargain with state leaders and influence foreign or security policies? How and under what circumstances will domestic factors impede states from pursuing the types of strategies predicted by balance of power theory and balance of threat theory? Finally, how do states go about extracting and mobilizing resources necessary to implement foreign and security policies? These are important questions that cannot be answered by the dominant neorealist or liberal theories of international politics. Consider the following: in 1945, and again in 1990, the United States emerged victorious from a major war or an enduring rivalry. In each postwar period, officials in Washington faced the daunting task of assessing and responding to new and unfamiliar international threats. However, the resulting shifts in grand strategy were not predictable solely based upon an analysis of relative power distributions or the dynamics of American domestic politics at the time. The bipolar distribution of power following the Second World War does not explain why the United States embarked upon a grand strategy of containment, which eventually mixed both realpolitik and liberal internationalist ends and means, over the alternative of competitive cooperation with the Soviet Union through a sphere-of-influence arrangement in Europe.

State Building for Future Wars: Neoclassical Realism and the Resource-Extractive State

Neorealist theory holds that the international system compels states to adopt similar adaptive strategies—namely, balancing and emulation—or risk elimination as independent entities. Yet states do not always emulate the successful practices of the systems leading states in a timely and uniform fashion. Explaining this requires a theory that integrates systemic-level and unit-level variables: a “resource-extraction” model of the state in neoclassical realism. External vulnerability provides incentives for states to emulate the practices of the systems leading states or to counter such practices through innovation. Neoclassical realism, however, suggests that state power—the relative ability of the state to extract and mobilize resources from domestic society—shapes the types of internal balancing strategies that countries are likely to pursue. State power, in turn, is a function of the institutions of the state, as well as of nationalism and ideology. The experiences of six rising or declining great powers over the past three hundred years—China, France, Great Britain, Japan, Prussia (later Germany), and the United States—illustrate the plausibility of these hypotheses.

Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm?: (Or Was Anybody Ever a Realist?)

In “Is Anybody Still a Realist?” Jeffrey Legro and Andrew Moravcsik craft a curiously rigid doctrine for realism and then puzzle over why the aeld is crowded with apostates.1 The answer, I propose, is that the church of realism can be a bit more catholic than Legro and Moravcsik claim. Legro and Moravcsik have written out of the book of realism a crucial insight that informs most realist theories (at least implicitly) and have thereby inadvertently excommunicated too many of the faithful. But they are wrong in a productive way, and correcting their mistake points in the direction of a fruitful research agenda for scholars—realists and antirealists alike.

Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy: Conclusion: The state of neoclassical realism

Despite important differences between the chapters, most of the contributors to this volume have expressed strong preferences for an approach to international politics that stresses the primacy of the international system, but that also acknowledges the importance of domestic political arrangements and the perceptions of leaders in the selection and implementation of foreign policy responses to the international environment. The question remains, however, how important this enterprise of neoclassical realism is as a research agenda and whether, in practical terms, it truly represents an improvement on existing theoretical approaches. In order to place our discussion in a broader context, therefore, our purpose in this chapter is threefold: (1) to map out the scope of neoclassical realism as understood in this volume; (2) to compare its performance in the cases covered in this volume to other popular approaches to international politics and foreign policy (principally neorealism, liberal theory, and other Innenpolitik approaches); and (3) to identify directions for future research. The scope of neoclassical realism A central theme of this volume has been that neoclassical realism is a more coherent approach to foreign policy than has been previously appreciated. In particular, we have articulated a common conception of the state that underlies disparate neoclassical realist theories, uniting them into a single, coherent body of theory. For neoclassical realists, the state exists as a potentially autonomous actor that is distinct from any societal group.