Response to Yan Xuetong

I appreciate Professor Yan Xuetong’s response to my review, and for engaging in this dialogue. Realism continues to remain the central theory in international politics, at least because all others need to position themselves primarily in terms of how they disagree with it. But Realism’s centrality is only relative to other efforts at theorising about international politics; its own drawbacks are many and telling. Yet, I am convinced that it is the most useful of the theories we have to work with and the most fertile field on which to grow better theories. Moreover, it is time that Realism is taken seriously by non-American IR scholars because Realism’s roots are global, and the inheritors of Sun Tzu’s and Chanakya’s legacies in particular have no good reason for leaving the Realist field to be tilled by others. All of these are good reasons to welcome Yan’s effort in modifying and expanding Realism and to endorse his call for greater theoretical discussion between Indian and Chinese scholars.

There is a more fundamental academic reason why Realism could do with some fresh thinking outside of parochial American concerns, which has unfortunately become Realism’s staple concentrate. This parochialism has skewed Realism to focus largely on great powers politics, severely limiting Realism’s potential power in helping understand and explain the rest of international politics, where indeed much of the warp and woof of international politics takes place. To give just a small example, because Realism is so obsessed with great power politics, and because great powers are roughly comparable in power, Realism has entirely missed the dynamics and consequences of politics between unequal powers. It took a historian like Paul Schroeder to demonstrate this by identifying various strategies beyond just balancing and bandwagoning which weaker players can adopt.

I am also convinced, along with Yan and other scholars, that the capacity of states for administrative innovation which helps enhance their power is a critical and often overlooked variable. Kaufman, Little, and Wohlforth (2007) and their collaborators identified this as critical; Yan bores down on this variable as key, identifying the capacity of individual leaders to drive such changes. I am certainly sympathetic; if I am still doubtful, that has to do less with the generalisability of this variable than problems that we will likely encounter in operationalising it. Looking at past preferences and behaviour to predict future choices is an interesting idea for resolving problems of tautology, but I do still see some difficulties. While voters and even analysts may depend on such conclusions, they are also often wrong. To give just one example, US presidents since the end of the Cold War have repeatedly promised to reduce America’s footprint in global affairs, or even withdraw. None have been successful; few, other than Trump, have even tried hard. Would looking at the past perspectives of an Obama or a Trump have helped? There are other problems too: are we to trust what leaders say, especially about their motives for action? How do we compensate for instrumental behaviour, or even hypocrisy?

On polarity, the question really is why complicate matters by bringing in alliances, instead of sticking with the simpler equation of the relative power of states? To flip the question that Yan asks, would we even consider the issue of bipolarity—and I agree with him that the world is more likely moving towards bipolarity than New Delhi’s fantasy about multipolarity—if China’s power had not grown in the spectacular manner that it has, and more importantly, if in doing so, it had not closed the gap with the USA as much as it has, and more than any other state in the last 70 years? Moreover, the question of including alliances in measuring polarity becomes particularly problematic if we have to consider alliances beyond formal ones, as Yan appears to do when he talks about an alliance between China, Russia, India and Japan, which would unlikely to have been a formal one.

The question of how much theorising is possible remains the fundamental one. Kenneth Waltz (1996) once made a distinction between analysis and theory, suggesting that while analysis was possible about foreign policy, theory may not be. He was only objecting to expanding his structural neorealist theory to explain foreign policy but the point itself is valid: is generalisation possible at all about foreign policy behaviour? Waltz, to his credit, left the question open, but three decades of effort in adapting Realism to make determinate predictions about foreign policy behaviour which have not really panned out, despite many interesting insights, suggest that we should be a bit cautious. Without discounting the importance of leadership, I would propose that defining and generalising this variable still remain quiet challenging, despite Yan’s valiant effort.