Realists' Aversion toward Communicative Action

More than a decade ago, Mearsheimer employed neorealist theory to mount a direct and disparaging attack on the reflective and communicative tenets of constructivist and critical theory. “In contrast to realism,” he wrote, these other theories assume

Mearsheimer then came to a rather obvious conclusion—that realism and critical or constructivist theories have “fundamentally different epistemologies and ontologies…. Realists see a fixed and knowable world,” while critical and constructivist theorists believe that knowledge is discursively contested in “the marketplace of ideas.”¹³

Realist scholars expect political statements about world politics to be purposefully crafted for various domestic or international audiences, with underlying political intentions often hidden. Indeed, realists have long expressed very cynical views about the form and function of political communication and public debate. Seminal realist Hans Morgenthau, for instance, viewed public discourse largely in terms of political propaganda, an instrumental tool of state power employed strategically by national leaders, perhaps to rally domestic support for foreign policies. Morgenthau essentially rejected the idea of “world public opinion” and did not believe it could restrain states from pursuing their own interests. He warned that “the government must realize it is the leader and not the slave of public opinion.” Morgenthau viewed public opinion as “a dynamic, ever changing entity to be continuously created and recreated by informed and responsible leadership.”¹⁴

Numerous contemporary realists have been every bit as skeptical as Morgenthau about the role and meaning of public rhetoric and debate.¹⁵

Today's realists argue that foreign policy elites can simply and cynically manipulate rhetoric to assure wider support for their desired policies. Mearsheimer, for example, argues that “public opinion about national security issues is notoriously fickle and responsive to elite manipulation.”¹⁶ Chaim Kaufman's study of the Bush administration's selling of the most recent Iraq war seems to confirm this thesis. Kaufmann found that the so-called “marketplace of ideas” failed to assure meaningful public scrutiny and debate about the “threat inflation” that preceded the attack on Iraq.¹⁷ He also offers several reasons to believe that the Iraq case is typical, even for democracies like the United States, because of the fragmented power of countervailing institutions and the ability of chief executives to manipulate issues and control information.

Neorealists further argue that leaders of states might strategically and flexibly employ deceptive language, though these same leaders make foreign policy choices that are simply constrained by their state's position in the international system. Essentially, empty rhetoric can be employed to help secure public support for difficult national policy choices. For example, Mearsheimer maintains that national leaders often draw upon America's liberal political tradition to explain and sell international behavior that coincides with realist theorizing. He views this disconnect in American political life as “liberal talk, realist thinking.”¹⁸

“Given that realism is largely alien to American culture,” Mearsheimer claims, “there is a powerful demand in the United States for alternative ways of looking at the world, and especially for theories that square with basic American values.”¹⁹ Thus, Mearsheimer finds that “public discourse about foreign policy in the United States is usually couched in the language of liberalism,” even though “the United States acts in the international system according to the dictates of realist logic. In essence, a discernible gap separates public rhetoric from the actual conduct of American foreign policy.”²⁰ Put differently, according to Mearsheimer, “it should be obvious to intelligent observers that the United States speaks one way and acts another.”²¹ As an example of this behavior, Stephen M. Walt asserts that Bill Clinton cloaked his administration's realpolitik “in the rhetoric of ‘world order’ and general global interests.”²²

From the realist perspective, strategically deceptive communication can justifiably be aimed at other states as well. National officials may craft lies, spin the facts, or conceal their real interests to achieve tactical advantages. Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth argue that a hegemonic state like the U.S. should be able to frame communicative acts so as “to persuade others as to the necessity or sagacity” of particular actions.²³

Mearsheimer's recent scholarship has focused upon “lying in international politics,” which he views as a pervasive form of political discourse.²⁴ Indeed, Mearsheimer argues that “there are sometimes compelling strategic reasons for a state's leaders to lie either to other states or their own people.”²⁵ Misleading adversaries and even allies is simply another tool of effective statecraft—though prudent states are advised to disregard such potentially deceptive practices by rivals.²⁶ In strategic terms, realists view international communication as nonbinding “cheap talk” and generally dismiss its influence over outcomes. Even if some claims are truthful representations of state interests, they would likely not be recognizable apart from communications designed to mislead and confuse. If this view of political communication is accurate, it is virtually impossible to take the statements of public officials at face value. In fact, if the realists are correct, why would anyone take a state's political communication seriously?

In contrast to constructivist and critical theoretical accounts, realists additionally argue that state leaders might strategically employ language about international norms and shared values, even as their actual foreign policy behavior ignores the norms and reflects the realities of the international system. The empirical work of Markus Fischer, for example, examined the “communal discourse” of feudal Europe, 800–1300, and concluded that actual political practice failed “to correspond to discourse for several centuries.”²⁷

Fischer found “overwhelming evidence that feudal actors departed regularly from their discourse of unity, heteronomy, community and justice in order to engage in a struggle for exclusive resource control, functional autarky, power-political advantage and forceful conflict resolution.”²⁸ In his study of state sovereignty, Stephen Krasner uses the phrase “organized hypocrisy” to depict the way “states say one thing but do another; they rhetorically endorse the normative principles or rules associated with sovereignty but their policies and actions violate these rules.”²⁹

Based on the evidence he examines, Fischer concluded that feudal actor behavior “corroborates the general neorealist propositions” about enduring structural constraints of international politics.³⁰

Moreover, “the feudal case suggests that discourse is essentially irrelevant to the field of international relations” and that “critical theory as a whole would appear inherently unsuited to the study of international relations, since its method is precisely to understand social reality through the discourse of its actors.”³¹ Mearsheimer, as would be expected, very strongly agrees:

In sum, when discussing political communication, realists claim that public justifications of policy choices are best understood as “inherently non-credible” and do not send a “reliable signal of actor intentions.”³³

There is little reason for scholars—or anyone else for that matter—to pay serious attention to political discourse or to discursive approaches to studying world politics.³⁴ In a review of Andrew Linklater's The Transformation of Political Community, the neorealist scholar Randall L. Schweller argued that “practitioners of international politics…understand that foreign policy is too serious a business to entertain utopian ideas about dramatically reconstructed social relations.” Schweller emphasized, in accord with the views of other realists, that states have incentives “to misrepresent private information about their capabilities and resolve,” so any communicative approach employed to explain normatively desirable international social relations is simply divorced from political reality. For Schweller, communicatively-oriented critical theorists like Linklater offer “fantasy theory” to explain a “fantasy world.”³⁵

Realist Fantasies?

Though realist and neorealist IR theory does not take political communication very seriously, numerous realists clearly participate quite sincerely in national foreign policy debates within various state settings. On numerous occasions, realists have pursued fairly communicative strategies by attempting to engage a variety of national leaders and to influence public opinion about foreign policy choices. On September 26, 2002, for example, a group including many well-known academic realists and neorealists employed a political strategy owing a great deal to communicative action. As signatory Jack Snyder of Columbia University wrote, “32 prominent international relations scholars, most of them realists, bought an ad in the New York Times to make their case against the Bush strategy” towards Iraq.³⁶

The op-ed page advertisement called for “vigilant containment of Iraq” and claimed that war would not advance U.S. national interests. Many of these scholars ultimately served as major critics of U.S. plans to attack Iraq throughout the period leading up to the war in March 2003. Some appeared as commentators on television, others gave interviews to the print media, and many published their criticisms in high-profile media outlets. These academics, of course, were ultimately frustrated in their role as public advocates as their anti-war efforts failed to stop the U.S. from attacking Iraq. Undaunted by their apparent lack of influence on that instance of foreign policymaking, however, many of the same scholars helped found the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, whose overt and ongoing communicative goals were mentioned in the introduction of this article.³⁷

A great many American realists have contributed regularly and notably to the most significant recent U.S. foreign policy debates. Their editorials and articles about a wide range of topics appear in leading outlets, including the New York Times and other major newspapers, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and additional policy-oriented journals. Indeed, the University of Chicago's Mearsheimer alone has published well-known and widely discussed analytical and opinion pieces about the first and second Persian Gulf Wars, the proliferation of nuclear weapons to an assortment of states, including Germany, Ukraine, and India, the conflicts after the breakup of Yugoslavia, containment of China, and assorted other foreign policy topics.³⁸

In these instances, realists like Mearsheimer both produce political communication and, quite often, respond to the political communication of national leaders.

Realists participating in foreign policy debate apparently believe quite strongly in their arguments and in the importance of the issues at hand. Thus, they actively engage in public debate for the purpose of influencing foreign policy. By partaking earnestly in the policy dialogue, neorealists like Mearsheimer and Walt at least implicitly accept the social and transformative functions of public debate. In fact, constructivists and critical theorists could readily view this scholarly input into foreign policy debate as behavior fully consistent with the development of communicative rationality. Realist rebuttals of national lies, spin, and other distortions promote public accountability and serve to challenge the legitimacy of dubious political choices. By engaging their foes in political discourse, realists contribute to something very much like deliberation in the public sphere—making serious communicative contributions to the “marketplace of ideas.”

Interestingly, some influential and well-known realists also explicitly acknowledge the social function of communicative behavior and thus offer a strikingly social and communicative perspective of foreign policy decision-making. To begin, realists such as Walt often emphasize that even America's hegemonic material power depends upon its legitimacy, which is a “social fact” rather than a material reality. “American power is most effective when it is seen as legitimate, and when other societies believe it is being used to serve their interests as well as America's.”³⁹

To foster legitimacy, Walt argues that the U.S. needs to devote more attention to public justification of its foreign policy:

Furthermore, as already noted, realists concede that national political leaders attempt to “sell” favored policies—often by communicating deceptively—in order to foster public and international support for policy.⁴¹

However, realists who participate in foreign policy debates often explicitly criticize the deceptions and challenge the legitimacy of political decisions built upon them. Consider what Mearsheimer had to say about the blurring of international law in the debate about Iraq and the potential application of the so-called Bush Doctrine:

Mearsheimer later forcefully criticiczed the Bush administration's linguistic trick. “The reason the Bush administration used preemptive war rhetoric is because both just war theory and international law allow for preemptive wars. But a preventive war is not okay; it is illegitimate.”⁴³

As a constructivist or critical theorist would expect from these examples of public dissent, Mearsheimer contested the Bush administration's dishonesty contemporaneously and argued that the authority of U.S. policy was at stake.

According to Mearsheimer, the more general fear-mongering (or threat inflation) employed by the Bush administration to build a case for attacking Iraq was a particularly dangerous kind of deception because it could ultimately undercut public support for policy once the deceit is revealed.⁴⁴

Or, as more socially-minded theorists like Habermas might say, open discussion can promote public accountability by fomenting a legitimacy crisis. Mearsheimer references polling data revealing that the war in Iraq is already unpopular, so accountability is a realistic potential consequence. “I think that the public is likely to say at some point in the next few years that enough is enough and force the Administration to exit Iraq.”⁴⁵ Conceivably, the future of the Bush Doctrine could also be in doubt because of this same need for policy actors to be responsive.

In various recent interviews and papers, Mearsheimer and other neorealists have gone even further toward aligning with the critical or constructivist positions about the importance of political communication and public debate. Most notably, Mearsheimer frequently now argues, as do critical theorists, that the veracity of public debate is central to assuring the well-being of democratic life.⁴⁶

In his paper on “Lying in International Politics,” Mearsheimer wrote that “Democracies work best when they include a reasonably efficient marketplace of ideas, which can only work when citizens are given reliable information and there are high levels of transparency and honesty.”⁴⁷ Stephen Van Evera made a similar argument concerning the need for public debate about biological and technological research on potential weapons of mass destruction. “If the progress of science risks bringing the democratization of the power to destroy, the public has a right to know this and form a reasoned response. We should acknowledge a duty to put the matter before the world so that all of society can together consider what response would be most appropriate.”⁴⁸ Perhaps even more importantly, some neorealists argue that open debate fosters selection of the best policy choices. In their widely-discussed March 2006 article on the influence of the Israeli lobby, Mearsheimer and Walt condemned “the Lobby's” apparent ability to limit public deliberation in the American democracy. Truly open debate would expose the limits of current policy and “could move the U.S. to a position more consistent with its own national interest.”⁴⁹ In his 2004 Graduation Address at the University of Chicago, Mearsheimer claimed that “the best way to maximize the prospects of producing a sound foreign policy is to expose it early on to the marketplace of ideas.”⁵⁰

Like critical theorists, these neorealists worry that public discussion of foreign policy is too often marred by secrecy and dishonesty of public officials—and in the cited examples normatively urge improved deliberative practices to promote democracy and superior outcomes. In fact, their own contributions to these debates promote the kind of transparency and public accountability they purport to seek. Contra their theoretical critique, which emphasizes fixed and enduring raison d'étre, these neorealists embrace reflective processes as a means by which to construct ideal outcomes. “I think that scholars can go a long way towards making that debate richer and healthier,” Mearsheimer claims⁵¹

Indeed, presaging the advice of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, he asserts that scholars should actively try to intervene in foreign policy discussions. In an April 2002 interview conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, Mearsheimer noted that academics “should study problems that are of great public importance, and when we come to our conclusions regarding those problems, we should go to considerable lengths to communicate our findings to the broader population, so that we can help influence the debate in positive ways.” He noted that professors in private institutions in the U.S., as well as those with tenure at public institutions, have the freedom to speak openly on matters of great interest and to make significant contributions to public deliberation. “I think we have a very important responsibility to talk about important issues, and to challenge conventional wisdoms that other people might be unwilling to challenge. We have a real social responsibility here.”⁵² In a newspaper interview about the provocative article on the Israeli lobby, Mearsheimer acknowledged that he and Walt aimed to promote debate and take their concerns out of the closet.⁵³

This is a remarkably deliberative perspective, going a long way towards embracing what constructivist scholar Thomas Risse calls “argumentative rationality.”⁵⁴

This conception of social responsibility certainly takes ideas and persuasion seriously, if not the pursuit of collective truth. After all, the realists acting alone or together in the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy ultimately intervene in public debates to help steer the American ship of state in the most appropriate direction. Scholars like Mearsheimer want others to recognize “that they're part of the body politic and that the ideas that they are developing should be articulated to the body politic for the purposes of influencing the public debate and particular policies in important ways.”⁵⁵

Quite apparently, realist skepticism about the value of political communication in international relations theory does not deter many of these same scholars from engaging in political debate about foreign policy with national leaders, who may well employ cheap talk, lies, or other distortions to carry a point. In these instances, realists value at least their own discursive attempts to shape foreign policy choices and correct the different falsehoods. A number of important realists seem to believe, and often declare outright, that public argument not only influences the search for the best policy choice, but it can also promote deliberative ideals and public accountability. At minimum, public debate about policy establishes the groundwork for negative feedback and promotes the search for truth and legitimate decisions in the marketplace of ideas.

Neorealist theory and foreign policy

The neorealist view of political communication and public debate about foreign policy sketched in the previous section is broadly consistent with the constructivist and critical theoretical understanding of international politics—despite the fact that realists have very strongly disparaged such accounts. What should scholars (and policy audiences) make of this apparent disconnect in realist theorizing and political practice?

One relatively benign and simple explanation would be to note that neorealist theory merely attempts to explicate international politics on a systemic level. It does not attempt to explain (or guide, for that matter) a particular state's foreign policy and has little to say about national foreign policymaking processes.⁵⁶

The neorealist scholar Kenneth Waltz, in his seminal book Theory of International Politics, disparages “reductionist” theories of international politics that focus on units (states) and acknowledges that his own structural version of realism cannot be employed to explain or predict the foreign policy behavior of individual states.⁵⁷ According to widely accepted neorealist logic, international relations theory focuses on the system of states and not on the characteristics of the units. Schweller says frankly that neorealism “is a theory of international politics and not one of foreign policy” and therefore “says nothing about the causal effects of national- or unit-level processes and attributes.”⁵⁸ Bluntly then, neorealist theoretical arguments about IR would appear to have very little to do with any individual realist's understandings about national foreign policy choices or decision-making processes.

A decade ago, Colin Elman chastised neorealists for claiming on the one hand to lack a theory of foreign policy and on the other for participating quite prominently in policy debates about foreign relations within the U.S. and other states.⁵⁹

Elman argued that neorealist theory could be employed to draw foreign policy implications and called on theorists to make necessary adjustments to their scholarship. It would appear as if some realists have internalized Elman's critique, though they have apparently traveled well beyond the bounds of realist theory. Thus, to explain national foreign policy choices, some neorealists now supplement their international systemic theory by adding domestic or ideational variables to their research programs.⁶⁰ Individual scholars, in other words, have offered theories and models of politics that specifically attempt to account for national foreign policy choices that neorealist theory cannot necessary explain. Often, supplemental (some prefer to say complementary) theories might help realists explain why states cooperated with one another or otherwise behaved in a manner apart from how realists would ordinarily expect. They might explain suboptimal decisions and misperception, for instance.⁶¹ Because the theoretical supplements add diverse categories of analysis to the much narrower neorealist domain, they can also produce conflicting policy prescriptions. Even on the centrally important question of national security, realists might disagree about specific foreign policy recommendations.⁶²

At least some realists who employ supplemental theories or models of foreign policy overtly suggest that political communication and debate should be taken quite seriously. Scholars, in fact, have already advanced theoretical propositions and conducted empirical research that demonstrate the importance of political communication. In his work Myths of Empire, realist scholar Jack Snyder creates a model of domestic politics that explains how public accountability can help assure the veracity of political communication. Specifically, Snyder develops and tests a coalition politics theory that explains why “politicians may be constrained to act in accordance with their rhetoric.” In Snyder's analysis, “public statements are no less important than private ones in assessing the prevalence of particular strategic concepts.”⁶³

While this is an interesting hypothesis and finding, it is not directly grounded in realist theorizing.

Based upon his historical research about the influence of British military strategist Liddell Hart, Mearsheimer too offers a conclusion about policy communication that seems to stand apart from his IR theorizing. “What I learned from that case, and also from a handful of other cases that I've studied and thought about over time, is that in a democracy it's very important to have individuals who have the freedom to say whatever they want.”⁶⁴

More specifically, in a paper lambasting critics of realism, Mearsheimer concluded that it is “difficult to repress or exclude compelling arguments, especially in the United States.”⁶⁵ Clearly, based on these views and others quoted in the previous section, Mearsheimer thinks that scholars should attempt to play a meaningful role in public debate about foreign policy—and that well-founded arguments cannot simply be dismissed in the marketplace of ideas. Of course, a number of other realists who take communication seriously were referenced in the previous section, including the members of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.

The views advanced by these realists are compatible with the theoretical ideas about communicative action embraced by critical and constructivist scholars. Compare the findings about public statements, debate, and democracy summarized by Snyder and Mearsheimer to some highlighted in the scholarship of Marc Lynch, a constructivist very strongly influenced by Habermas and public sphere theory. Lynch explains a view of political discourse that is remarkably consistent with the account offered by these realists:

Ironically, in contrasting his own work to theirs, Lynch argues that realists usually disapprove of any significant role for the public in the making of foreign policy since it “makes strategic misrepresentation more difficult.”

Conclusion

This article has identified an apparent contradiction in realist political theory and practice. Neorealists argue that political communication and debate are virtually meaningless factors in shaping outcomes in international relations. Yet, many prominent realists participate actively in national foreign policy debates and in that context both implicitly and explicitly embrace views about political communication that are remarkably consistent with those held by critical theorists and various constructivists interested in communicative action, argumentative rationality, and Habermasian public sphere theory. For instance, the political statements of the Coalition for a Realist Foreign Policy overtly value public deliberation in the “marketplace of ideas” even though realist theorists commonly conclude that this market fails to fulfill its alleged function—“to weed out unfounded, mendacious, or self-serving foreign policy arguments.”⁶⁷

What are the implications of this disconnect between theory and practice? Policy makers, the general public, and other potential audiences targeted by realist participants in foreign policy debate might want to recognize that neorealist policy expertise is, by their own account, not directly informed by their international relations theory. If neorealists are willing to reject some of their theoretical presuppositions by joining these debates, it is at least possible that they will overlook other key parts of their theory as well. This does not automatically make the advice suspect, of course, but it does mean that the opinions should not automatically be viewed as more credible or analytically superior to the counsel offered by other participants in these discussions. Recently, the public sphere has featured some lively discussion about the proper role of academic analysts and other public intellectuals. The evidence offered in this paper serves as an additional data point for those already provoked to view expertise more skeptically by the publication of Philip Tetlock's book on Expert Political Judgment.⁶⁸

What are the implications for IR theorizing? By the rationalist and positivist research standards ordinarily adopted by realist scholars, the hypocrisy about political communication would not appear to mean very much. After all, the often-vigorous realist participation in the debate leading up to the March 2003 attack on Iraq failed to prevent the George W. Bush administration from launching a war arguably in accord with American national security interests. The outcome of the case, in fact, seems quite consistent with the standard realist view of both political communication and international politics. Even if the administration's arguments about Iraqi proliferation, links to terrorism, and democratization were intentionally (and even transparently) deceptive, they were crafted to mold public support for war. To the extent political communication and debate matters (which is not a lot), realists think that elites can readily employ lies and spin facts to manipulate public opinion. Moreover, many realists could make a case that the war itself was sought for international reasons within the bounds of ordinary politics—perhaps to pressure Iran, to spread American hegemonic influence in the Middle East, to acquire long-term military base sites, or to assure firm access to regional oil resources. In sum, the pre-war uproar arguably had no appreciable effect on the course of international politics, which is precisely what neorealists would predict.

From a critical and constructivist perspective, on the other hand, the realist hypocrisy matters a great deal. As neorealists acknowledge, critical and constructivist theorists embrace an altogether dissimilar epistemology and ontology, employing reflexive and interpretive, rather than rationalist and positivist, research choices.⁶⁹

Critical theorists identify the assumptions and practices that undergird power relations and through immanent critique attempt to identify the unsustainable aspects of power relations, which might suggest plausible alternative outcomes. Public criticism of the Iraq war and so-called Bush Doctrine, for instance, may not have stopped war in 2003, but it has created mounting pressure for early withdrawal from Iraq and has clearly influenced the tenor of the public policy debate about Iran. Conceivably, neorealist and other anti-war critics have fomented an “Iraq Syndrome” that will significantly constrain American use of force for the foreseeable future.

Moreover, the realist hypocrisy matters because critical theorists argue reflexively that IR theory helps make the world what it is—and that IR theorizing itself is vulnerable to the same sort of critical evaluation. Indeed, this article serves essentially as an analytical exercise in critical theory, applying its methods to neorealist arguments about theory and public policy. The fissures identified here could provoke scholars to rethink longstanding assumptions about IR theory and policy. After all, it appears as if there is much wider agreement than previously thought that discussion about world politics matters for determining how a state like the U.S. can and should act in the international system.

Twenty-five years ago, the critical IR theorist Robert Cox famously argued that “theory is always for someone and for some purpose.” Ironically, however, Cox viewed Waltz's neorealism as a theory “ideologically to be a science at the service of big-power management of the international system.”⁷⁰

Neorealist theory is not a critical theory, but many of the scholars who have helped develop this theory in the field of international relations behave very much as critical theorists when they partake in foreign policy debates. The neorealists implicitly and explicitly embrace presuppositions about the importance of public debate and political communication that are almost entirely consistent with the premises of critical theory. In the Iraq debate and in other examples, the neorealists are revealing lies, political spin, and other distortions of the debate promulgated by government elites and their allies. They challenge the legitimacy of established policies and critique what they see as excessive secrecy. Most importantly, these neorealists seek to transform public and elite consciousness so as to produce social pressures for alternative outcomes. For critical theorists, this contradiction between realist theorizing and policy action is logically unsustainable and suggests an opening for alternative outcomes. It would strongly imply the significant need for an understanding of foreign policy, and likely a theory of international relations, that accounts for communicative action.