Nicholas Kitchen

Systemic pressures and domestic ideas: a neoclassical realist model of grand strategy formation

Scholars in international relations have long known that ideas matter in matters of international politics, yet theories of the discipline have failed to capture their impact either in the making of foreign policy or the nature of the international system. Recent reengagement with the insights of classical realists has pointed to the possibility of a neoclassical realist approach that can take into account the impact of ideas. This article will suggest that the study of grand strategy can enlighten the intervening ideational variables between the distribution of power in the international system and the foreign policy behaviour of states, and thus constitute the key element in a neoclassical realist research agenda.

Dean Acheson and the creation of an American world order

may not have created US approaches to the post-war world, but they sharpened them and helped make basic antagonism into a Cold War. Maybe to the surprise of some, I also largely agreewithRomero’s approach to theCold War in Europe. There is little doubt that Europe (and to a lesser extent Japan) was the starting point for the conflict – if there had been no clash over positions in Europe after thewar, then theColdWar aswe know itwould not have come into being.Until the early 1960s, it remained the main focus of the conflict, although wars on the periphery were becoming increasingly significant. And Romero recognizes that in the last two decades of the ColdWar it was the ThirdWorld that drove the development of the ColdWar and it was there, through the processes of capitalist globalisation, that the United States ‘wore down and eventually defeated a weaker adversary’ (p. 10). Romero’s argument is first and foremost about causation and chronology, and is hard to contradict as such. After all, the Cold War would not be the first international order that started in one geographical zone and then spread to others, usually with increasingly violent results. Is there tension between these two arguments? Some reviewers have thought so. Could it be argued that there would have been some form of Cold War somewhere anyway, because of US ideology, even if there had not been a set of specific conflicts with the Soviets over Europe? Or was it US ideology that required conflicts over Europe (and by extension almost anywhere else), whatever the Soviets had done? These are issues that are of essence to the continuing debates on the Cold War as a signal part of 20th century international history. Federico Romero has done us a favour by opening these issues up and by producing an excellent text that combines the best in narrative and in historical analysis.