Abstract
Realism is dying a slow death in its current motherland, the United States. It has not been popular in Europe or other parts of the world for quite some time, and America seems set to follow the same trend. Poisoned by Kenneth Waltz’s expectation of the inevitable recurrence of balances of power, prominent Realists (including, while he was alive, Waltz himself) have spent the better part of the last three decades looking for an elusive counter to America’s unipolar power. More radical proponents of the ‘defensive’ Realism that Waltz spawned have gone so far as to suggest that the security dilemma – one of the central tenets of Realism – can be overcome through reassurance. It has become increasingly difficult to distinguish Realism from Liberalism in American international relations scholarship. While there are honourable exceptions to this trend, it is difficult not to despair at the state of Realism as a theory.
If Realism is dying in America, it seems to be prospering in China, as others have also noted. Yan Xuetong’s latest book, Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers, is a good example. Understandably, given China’s rise, Yan’s focus is on how a rising power can catch up and displace the established dominant power. Much of the literature on power transitions, and indeed much of Realist theory, take for granted that uneven growth of wealth in different states over time leads to the rise of new powers. Because Realist theory largely refuses to look inside states, preferring only to examine how states interact with others given this uneven growth, they ignore the question of why states grow at this uneven pace to begin with. Even the latest variant within Realism, Neoclassical Realism, which explicitly focuses on domestic variables to understand how states cope with international pressures, do not examine this question. Of course, uneven growth of states is a larger question that has motivated much work in the social sciences for a considerable period of time, including foundational works from Max Weber, though we still do not have adequate answers.
Yan’s answer is the quality of political leadership. It is a complicated set of propositions that he provides, but it appears to go something like this: He argues that ‘when the rising state’s leadership is more capable and efficient than that of the dominant state and that of other contemporary major states, international influence is redistributed in a way that allows the rising state to eclipse the dominant state’ (p. 2; note that pages numbers in this review refer to a draft pdf of the book and may be different in the final published version). This leadership capability is based on the leadership’s capacity for reform. As Yan puts it, ‘The capability of a state whose national leadership has continuously carried out prompt reforms will improve more rapidly than that of a state that has implemented few or no reforms’ (p. 192). Yan argues that international leadership itself is a function not just of the power that an established power or a rising power can muster, but of the authority that it wields, which is dependent on its strategic credibility, which in turn depends on the moral quality of its leadership: ‘the success of a rising state (is attributed) to its political leadership that adopts foreign policy according to universal moral codes’ (p. 24). But moral power alone is insufficient; material capacity is needed too: As Yan says, ‘Without superior capability, no leading state would be able to maintain international order through moral actions alone’ (p. 75).
International leadership is thus based on national capability and strategic credibility, with greater importance being given to the latter. This is different from most forms of Realism, which puts greater stock in capability than any other variable. Strategic credibility gives states authority, which Yan claims is more important than power. Strategic credibility, in turn, is dependent on both legitimacy of international leadership and the political capability of that leadership.
High credibility allows a rising state to improve a state’s comprehensive capability. This allows states with even weaker resource components of capability to reduce disparity in comprehensive capability with established powers. This happens by allowing states with higher strategic credibility to attract more allies and wider international support. The number of allies is used by Yan as a key index of international strategic credibility and political popularity (p. 41). This is an unusual index: Yan argues than Clinton enhanced US power by expanding NATO, but Trump’s devaluing of alliances is reducing US power.
Of course, much of this has as its backdrop China’s rise and US-China competition: strategic credibility presents an easier path for a rising power to catch up with the established power because strategic credibility is not determined by material capacity alone. Yan argues that US behaviour has reduced its strategic credibility and allows China to close the gap because of China’s higher strategic credibility, even though China is not yet a match for the US in purely material terms. And as the leading state loses its strategic credibility, the norms it establishes also falters. Why does the US not engage in reforms to compete better? Yan has an interesting and innovative answer: because the US decline is relative rather than absolute, it is difficult for US leadership to muster the ‘fervour’ for reforms as China can. Yan expects the US–China competition to become bipolarised, but also that it will be different from the bipolar competition that the US and the SU during the Cold War. US–China competition will not be a cold war, he argues, because there is no ideological competition between the two and because of globalisation and economic and social interaction between the two. But the shift in power from Europe to East Asia (clearly, he is reluctant to use the Indo-Pacific formulation!), and the competition between the US and China over the region, also makes for bipolarisation of the competition. This is a reality that Indian analysts and scholars have not fully considered.
Thus, what Yan proposes is what he calls ‘a dualist theory that stresses the importance of both political leadership and a state’s capability in decision making’ (p. 61). This differs from standard Realist theory which largely emphasises (relative) power as the key variable in both state behaviour and international outcomes. Realists are not unaware of the significance of leadership, obviously. But leadership is not an easy variable to employ, and Yan’s work demonstrates the dangers of wading into these murky waters.
Yan suggests 4 types of international leadership: humane leadership, hegemony, anemocracy, and tyranny. Humane leadership is consistently moral. Hegemonic leadership uses double-standards, supportive of allies but ruthless towards enemies. Anemocratic states bully weaker states but kowtow to stronger ones; they are untrustworthy. Trump America is seen as a good example of this. Tyrannical leadership is crudely Realist, consistent but untrustworthy; its leadership is based on fear, not trust.
The main question that is raised by Yan’s interesting work is whether it is useful to treat leadership as a variable, as relative power is in Realist theory? There is little doubt that political leadership is not just important, but indeed may be the key in determining the fate of nations and even the state of the international system. This is not a new revelation. But if international relations scholars have not previously employed this as a theoretical variable, the reason is not hard to find: political leadership is not easy to use as a theoretical variable. Realists characterise polarity, for example, on the basis of a given distribution of power. Is it possible to say similarly, for example, that given a particular type of state leadership, we should expect a particular type of behaviour or even a particular type of outcome? This is definitely a possibility. But this requires that, as with power, we can define leadership types accurately and without reference to the dependent variable, either state behaviour or international outcomes. This critical problem is one reason why leadership is not generally favoured as a variable, and it is a problem that Yan’s brave work cannot be said to resolve.
The key problem is that while it is easy to recognise the importance of this variable post facto, it has so far been difficult to find a way to define leadership in a theoretically usable manner, especially because of the problem of tautology: we are likely to characterise leadership as positive, based on the results it achieves. This reverses cause and effect, in effect becoming a tautology. If we define a leadership as ‘humane leadership’ based on its behaviour, how then can we use this characterisation to predict its behaviour? Yan not only does not acknowledge the problem of tautology, he actually explicitly embraces the tautology, arguing, for example, that ‘the capacity of reforms is evaluated based on the results of implementation’ (p. 192). If the capacity for reforms is based on the results of the reforms, then how do we usefully create typologies of regimes to predict their behaviour?
Yan characterises various regimes (admittedly, in an anecdotal manner rather than as the result of a deep case study) but these characterisations – say of the Trump presidency and its consequences for US leadership – would have been impossible to do without knowing the consequences of the Trump presidency. Further, it also appears to depend on individual judgements rather than on some empirical measure. Thus, if we disagree in our judgement about the Xi’s or Trump’s leadership, there is no serious empirical basis for that disagreement other than how we feel about the quality of these regimes or how to characterise them in the typologies that Yan proposes. Using global public opinion polls, which appears to be the only empirical basis for leadership, is less than satisfactory. But even if use that empirical basis, China under the Xi regime would appear to suffer much more, especially in the Indo-Pacific region, where its image has suffered such a pounding that China in 2018 changed the leadership of its propaganda department. Moreover, such approval ratings differ from region to region: European approval ratings tend to be very different from approval ratings in the Indo-Pacific region, reflecting somewhat different relative views of the US and China. Approval ratings for China in countries such as India, Vietnam and Japan are very low, reflecting their traditional competition. This is one reason why public approval ratings mean little in overall leadership rankings.
One puzzle, for a Realist, is why any of this extension and amendment is necessary in Realist theory in the first place. The growth of China’s material power and the closing of the material gap between the US and China, at least for a Realist, should adequately explain China’s growing influence and Washington’s international difficulties. Though the US still leads, the gap between the US and China is today far smaller than it ever was between the US and the Soviet Union. If that was a bipolar system, despite the wider material gap, surely the US-China competition is also one, or definitely heading in that direction.
Beyond these large problems, there are a number of smaller issues too. Yan’s definition of polarity is unusual and possibly a step back. He uses alliances to partly define polarity, suggesting that bipolarity changed to unipolarity not just because of Soviet collapse but also because the Warsaw Pact collapsed. There was a time when polarity was indeed measured by alliance structures but ever since Kenneth Waltz illustrated the weakness of such formulation in the early 1960s, polarity has been measured by the distribution of state power rather than of alliances. He also repeatedly argues that the rise of Trump signifies the decline of Liberalism in the West. This sounds more like hope than analysis: the values of Liberalism were simultaneously never as comprehensive as its proponents hoped but also never as fragile as its adversaries fantasised. Grand arguments such as the decline of Liberalism requires somewhat more sophisticated argument and stronger empirical support than the odd opinion survey and the views of a few journalist critics.
On the other hand, Yan also suggests that combination of Chinese traditional values and Liberalism may prove attractive in the coming decades for other countries too. This, of course, begs the question of how such diametrically opposed ideologies can find common ground. Indeed, it is difficult to see what, if any, common ground exists between liberal individualism and Chinese traditional authoritarianism (which in today’s China is veering towards totalitarianism).
But there are lessons here for American Realists in Yan’s occasionally stark view of the pursuit of power. For instance, about military force, he says that the ‘indiscriminate refusal to use military force is a policy of national suicide, as well as an immoral principle, and antithetical to the behavior of a humane authority leadership’ (p. 66). This is something that American Realists should definitely learn from, a principle that is truer to Realism than ideas such as ‘reassurance’ that American Realists have become enamoured of late. He also argues that competition between the leading power and the rising challenger is inevitable and that it will be zero-sum (p. 72), another lesson for American Realists, who are busy using Realism to find ways in which competition can be avoided.
This is in many ways illustrative of the worldviews of Chinese international relations scholars. It may or may not be representative but the fact that the leading Chinese IR scholars has such an unabashed view of how international politics operates surely tells us something about China’s likely international behaviour. And, maybe it is also worth pondering if there is a parallel between the rise and decline of Realism and that of nations. If so, China is definitely on the ascent.