The perils of realist advocacy and the promise of securitization theory: Revisiting the tragedy of the Iraq War debate

Introduction

Kenneth Waltz may have been correct in that states are security maximizers, but today, this may be occurring in a profoundly different way than he originally envisioned. His famous dictum argues that states look to maximize security though a balance of power that discourages both predation and counterbalancing (Waltz, 1979: 126). However, since the end of the Cold War, we have seen a distinctively different sense of security maximization: an ever-expanding domain of security issues. Despite appeals to the contrary (e.g. Walt, 1991), the broadening of security has risen to the status of international institutions, globalization and great power rivalry in terms of being a central, if ambiguous, feature of contemporary world politics.

Evidence of this broadening is pervasive. The executive summary of the Pentagon’s recent ‘Quadrennial defense review’ begins with the clichéd claim that the US ‘faces a rapidly changing security environment’, defined not only by interstate war, but also by ‘sectarian conflict’ and cyber-threats (DoD, 2014: iii). While intended to limit great power conflict, the United Nations (UN) Security Council now increasingly deliberates over the dangers of infectious diseases including HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS, 2011), Polio (UN News Centre, 2013) and, more recently, Ebola (UNSC, 2014). The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe offers an even starker example. Its ‘comprehensive and co-operative’ approach to security holds arms control, the rule of law and minority rights as all equally viable ‘security’ concerns (OSCE, 2009: ii). This broadening includes the wholesale addition of new sectoral concerns (e.g. cyber-security), as well as an intensifying of traditional dangers. Once materially insignificant and geographically distant ‘rogue’ states, terrorists groups and local militias are now understood by policymakers and publics alike as ‘genuine’ threats to international security. Debates over what is and is not a security issue are now akin to a rowdy dinner table where several — often uninvited — guests rub elbows with more traditional military concerns.

In the midst of this broadening, there is a serious political and practical concern for realist scholars of security. If a state is encumbered by an ever-expanding security agenda that consumes more and more resources and promotes reckless adventurism abroad, what then will be left when the genuine problem of great power conflict emerges again? As a corrective, realists have repeatedly, and often admirably, engaged in sustained advocacy campaigns to convince publics and policymakers alike of the need to constrain the national security agenda. Lost in the extensive literature on the realist tradition is a rich history of political practice embodied by E.H. Carr’s interwar polemic against liberal idealism (Cox, 2001), Hans Morgenthau’s and Kenneth Waltz’s resistance to the Vietnam war (Oren, 2009), and even contemporary neorealism’s criticism of the US’s role in Iraq (Payne, 2007; Schmidt and Williams, 2008). While realist advocacy is diverse, speaking out against expansive conceptions of national security, or ‘threat inflation’ as it is more commonly known, is a recurrent theme. ¹

While previous works by Payne (2007) and Oren (2009) highlight the key tensions between neorealist theory and practice, this article joins Schmidt and Williams (2008) in questioning why such advocacy fails. Like Schmidt and Williams, I see the 2003 Iraq War as a crucial example of realism’s failure to influence public debate and to curb an expansive vision of national security. ² Also, in line with Schmidt and Williams, I am broadly sympathetic to explanations rooted in how a variety of ‘symbolic and political resources’ (Schmidt and Williams, 2008: 194) were employed rhetorically by neoconservatives against realists. My concern, however, is that this explanation elides how realists sceptical of the Iraqi threat were committed to a very specific model of advocacy anchored in the metaphorical marketplace of ideas. In this ironically liberal model of public discourse, the market valuation of the Iraqi threat was grossly inflated, something to be corrected through the provision of superior information and reasoning. Even if realists had been sensitive to the value of the rhetorical resources outlined by Schmidt and Williams — and I believe at some level that they were — the marketplace of ideas model is predicated on objective rational actors debating over facts and logic, not values.

It is against this backdrop of a tacitly liberal model of discourse that I argue for the value of securitization theory in explaining the failure of realist political advocacy. Contra the marketplace of ideas, securitization theory envisions debates over security as explicitly power-laden, where ‘some actors are placed in positions of power by virtue of being generally accepted voices of security’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 31). Focusing specifically on the 2003 Iraq War debate, I examine how rhetorical resources in the form of identity and emotion were employed by neoconservatives against realists.

Of course, the term ‘advocacy’ has a wide array of meanings and can be studied in a number of different ways. These include Kingdon’s (1995) classic framework centred on problem, policy and politics streams, studies of transnational advocacy networks (Keck and Sikkink, 1998), accounts rooted in Habermasian forms of deliberative argument (Risse, 2000), and Weberian interventions focused on objective analyses (Jackson and Kaufman, 2007). Yet, the use of the term ‘advocacy’ here is less concerned with its deliberative, persuasive or educational dimensions, important as they may be. An advocate, as is so often represented in US legal dramas, can be engaged in a forceful and competitive struggle. Rather than being an exercise in ‘soft power’, practices of advocacy can entail ‘representational force’ (Bially Mattern, 2005) and even ‘rhetorical coercion’ (Krebs and Jackson, 2007). The unique value of securitization theory, then, is how it envisions security discourse as a competitive field structured by an uneven distribution of power. This offers a distinct path into realist advocacy that exists apart from conventionally liberal approaches focused on peaceful Habermasian dialogue under cooperative ideal-speech conditions (Krebs and Jackson, 2007: 39–40). The added value of this strategy, then, is that by presenting the securitization framework as the ‘study [of] the power politics’ of the concept of security (Buzan et al., 1998: 32), the analysis is parsed in fundamentally realist terms. The resulting encounter between realism and securitization theory is then ripe for dialogue as it presents a critique that speaks the ‘language’ of realism and is less defined by outsider challenge than by familial resemblance.

In making this argument, I begin by tracing contemporary neorealism’s anaemic interventions to a critique of threat inflation rooted in the liberal model of the marketplace of ideas. Despite downplaying questions of (discursive) power, this model persists, a persistence I trace to a tragic misuse of Kuhnian incommensurability. The bulk of the article then draws on the tools of securitization theory to explain the failure of realist advocacy in the 2003 Iraq War debate. While I begin with the Copenhagen School’s ‘facilitating conditions’, I ultimately stress how processes involving social identity and collective emotion came to be turned against realists by their neoconservative interlocutors. Finally, sensitive to concerns over one-way dialogue, the third section sketches the beginnings of what may be a common research agenda for realism and securitization theory organized around a common lingua franca of statecraft drawn from classical realism.

Ultimately, understanding this failure is essential for the discipline of International Relations (IR) for two reasons. First, regardless of empirical and theoretical differences with realist thinkers, there are a number of scholars within IR who hold sympathetic policy views. On this point, academia’s broadly shared opposition to the 2003 Iraq War looms large (Peterson et al., 2005: 39). Second, realism is typically held as the dominant paradigm within IR, particularly within security studies (Freyberg-Inan, 2004; Krause and Williams, 1996; Miller, 2010). If the so-called dominant tradition remains politically impotent, what does that mean for more marginal approaches in influencing public debate? Understanding this failure then becomes a pressing question, with broader implications for understanding the theory–practice divide that characterizes the field as a whole.

Threat inflation, the marketplace of ideas and the false problem of incommensurability

Realist advocacy is diverse, both in form and substance. It can range from producing op-eds, magazine articles, blogs and long-form essays directed at public audiences, to participating in elite forums such as debates hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR, 2003), to the publication of policy manifestos (Rosato and Schuessler, 2011), to directly entering the policy bureaucracy (Drezner, 2007), to televised debates with administration officials (Oren, 2009: 285), as well as participating within broader advocacy networks (Jackson and Kaufman, 2007). One recurrent theme here is concern over ‘threat inflation’. While this concern is shared by a number of realist scholars, the analysis here primarily focuses on the public commentary of two particular figures: Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. Not only are these two among the highest profile realist scholars within the discipline (Maliniak et al., 2012: 49), but they were also at the forefront of realist opposition to the 2003 Iraq War. ³ This section explores the logic, limitations and origins of these figures’ critique and sets up the article to understand their role in the 2003 Iraq War debate.

Threat inflation, in the eyes of these commentators, reflects a pathological exaggeration of a danger in comparison to the objective (systemic) distribution of power. In this view, domestic political elites take issues that represent marginal dangers, at least in comparison to interstate conflict, and portray them as ‘existential threats’ (Mearsheimer, 2011a: 21). Thus, John Mearsheimer (2011a: 22) argues that the ‘assessment of America’s terrorism problem … was threat inflation of the highest order’ as it took a marginal danger and portrayed it as ‘existential’. In this context, threat inflation is synonymous with elite ‘fear mongering’ in order to build support for policy (Mearsheimer, 2011b: 90–92). ⁴ Concern over threat inflation is equally evident in Stephen Walt’s writing, particularly as the central theme in a number of his pieces in Foreign Policy magazine including ‘The threat monger’s handbook’ (Walt, 2009b), ‘Is the cyber threat overblown?’ (Walt, 2010) and ‘Threat inflation 6.0: Does al-Shabab really threaten the U.S.?’ (Walt, 2013c). In his 2012 endorsement of former Senator Chuck Hagel for the position of secretary of defense, Walt (2012) suggested that ‘[Hagel is] also not prone to threat-inflation, which makes him almost unique’ within the US foreign policy establishment. Finally, in his obituary for Kenneth Waltz, Stephen Walt frames his former supervisor’s scepticism of threat inflation as a significant virtue. He notes that ‘[Waltz] was an early opponent of the Vietnam War and deeply skeptical of the paranoid threat-inflation that has informed so much of U.S. foreign and defense policy’ (Walt, 2013b). For these realists, inflated images of danger drain resources, draw states into unnecessary conflicts and distract attention from the ‘real’ national security issue of great power competition. ⁵

At first glance, the concept of threat inflation has great appeal for realist thought. At its core is a baseline understanding of foreign policy deliberation as a ‘marketplace of ideas’, an economic metaphor for politics where public institutions such as the media help ‘to weed out unfounded, mendacious, or self-serving foreign policy arguments’ as open debate ensures that ‘reasoning and evidence are subject to public scrutiny’ (Kaufman, 2004: 5). ⁶ In a normally functioning marketplace, rational actors with adequate information will agree on the ideas with the most value and, thus, which threats are most significant and deserving of public attention. Whether one is concerned with the broader public or more narrowly on political elites, both of these groups are envisioned as investors and exaggerated threats are akin to an overvalued share price that would plummet if investors just had the right information. This microeconomic explanation fits perfectly with neorealism’s enduring preference for social theory based on models of utility-maximizing actors (Wendt, 1999: 15–16). Furthermore, by portraying inflated threats as anomalies from the otherwise timeless cycles of great power politics, it preserves the centrality of neorealism’s system-level theorizing. ⁷

Closer scrutiny, however, reveals deep problems with this formulation. For one, the concept of threat inflation is deeply utopian. By presupposing a marketplace of ideas characterized by an orderly and rational public dialogue, the concept of threat inflation relies on premises historically chastised as idealistically naive by realists. Carr offers the classic critique of the marketplace of ideas, where liberal utopians presume ‘human reason’ (rational actors) can discover the underlying ‘harmony of interests’ (Pareto efficiency) within a community if they are just given enough time and information (Carr, 2001 [1981]: 43). The contradiction is even sharper for contemporary realists, who are critical of democratic peace theory precisely because it holds that robust public information and deliberation can accurately gauge threats to a community (e.g. Rosato, 2003: 598–599). One might argue that, here, realists are simply using the language of threat inflation heuristically while being agnostic with respect to any underlying domestic marketplace of ideas. Yet, the link between the two cannot be severed as the former relies on the latter to be intelligible. What determines the proper valuation of a threat if not for the underlying marketplace of ideas? Such a valuation may be determined by elites rather than mass society, but this simply envisions a more circumscribed market. In the end, the concept of threat inflation is meaningless in the absence of a baseline ‘market’ comparison to make the idea of ‘inflation’ intelligible. ⁸ Moreover, spurning the metaphor of the market means separating the concept of inflation from its original economic logic of rational utility-maximizing actors that makes it so appealing to neorealism in the first place. The problem is that such economic metaphors present a neutral process of political deliberation that obscures the role of power. In treating threat perception as a matter of economically efficient decision-making, realists gloss over why some threats come to be understood as matters of national security while others remain mundane.

Putting aside concerns over Trojan Horse utopianism, the concept of threat inflation still suffers from an additional problem of logical consistency. If threat inflation presupposes a marketplace, then this marketplace appears perpetually dysfunctional. As the recent collection of Thrall and Cramer (2009) demonstrates, there is now a cottage industry of research assessing the roots of persistent market failure and threat inflation. What is notable about these contributions is that explaining threat inflation entails moving away from its original economic logic and stressing the role of psychology (Jervis, 2009), myths (Snyder, 2009), norms (Cramer, 2009) and language (Krebs and Lobasz, 2009), to name only a few of the current correctives. This presents a picture of the marketplace of ideas as an aspirational ideal of rational choice theory that bears little relation to empirical reality. This makes it look like an idealist theory, not a realist one. Moreover, the fact that realists like Walt and Mearsheimer have spent much of the last decade raising the alarm over threat inflation raises the question of whether any self-regulating marketplace really exists. What value does the metaphor of the market add if scholars are always justifying why it so sharply deviates from practice?

The depth of these problems raises questions over why realism has come to rely on such a problematic conceptualization of security agenda expansion in the first place. This is puzzling precisely because of the breadth of alternatives offered by the widening and deepening debates in the 1990s (e.g. Baldwin, 1997; Krause, 1998). Why, for example, did the contribution of securitization theory go completely unnoticed by realists?

Part of the answer needs to acknowledge the national and cultural divides that are part and parcel of the broader development of IR between the US and Europe (Buzan and Hansen, 2009; Wæver, 1998). IR theory is neither good at being international, nor good at relating. Yet, I argue that a more robust accounting of realism’s reliance on threat inflation resides in the broader intellectual trajectory of the discipline, specifically in its fragmentation into self-styled Kuhnian paradigms at the end of the Cold War (Lapid, 1989). While the rise of paradigms is a well-worn narrative, the parallel institutionalization of incommensurability is often ignored. As Wight (1996: 296–297) notes, the organization of the discipline into differing paradigms is made possible only by holding the view that different epistemological and ontological commitments form irreconcilable differences. The consequence of this incommensurability is the inability to communicate across paradigms, making dialogue impossible (Wight, 1996: 297). Early post-Cold War texts like Hollis and Smith’s (1990: 57–61) Explaining and Understanding (see also Lapid, 1989: 248; Wight, 1996: 296–298, fn. 32) played a key role in institutionalizing this idea. ⁹

The timeline of this process is especially noteworthy. The incommensurability thesis became firmly institutionalized within IR by the end of the Cold War just prior to the emergence of the widening and deepening debates in security studies (Buzan and Hansen, 2009: 187–191). Just as a diversity of approaches to theorizing security were emerging, the incommensurability thesis came to offer a ‘convenient palisade to theoretical pluralism’ (Wight, 1996: 292). Forms of inquiry that did not strictly accord to the model of positivist research programmes were seen by realists as diversions ‘into a prolix and self-indulgent discourse’ (Walt, 1991: 223). Echoing this position, Mearsheimer (1994/1995: 40–41) argues that ‘realism and critical theory have fundamentally different epistemologies and ontologies, which are the most basic levels at which theories can be compared’.

Ironically, however, adhering to such metatheoretical fiats proved to entail serious political costs. It isolated realism from all but the most conventional forms of post-positivist theorizing so that Wendtian constructivism became ‘the most radical widening perspective to be addressed’ (Buzan and Hansen, 2009: 163), if at all. It arrested any richer conceptualization of security, save for the comparatively insular debates between defensive and offensive realism. At the end of the Cold War, realists were left with a deeply problematic and under-scrutinized concept of threat inflation as the only way to account for the broadening of security agendas. When the time came for explicit political advocacy against policies like the 2003 Iraq War, realists were confined by a framework where the perceived danger of Saddam Hussein’s regime rested solely on ‘distorted history and faulty logic’ (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2003a: 52). True to their microeconomic foundations, realists naively believed that such a market inflation could be corrected through superior information and reasoning, which they looked to provide. The results were tragic.

The inability of realists to grapple with, engage in, benefit from and respond to the widening and deepening debates underscores the first-order political risks of the incommensurability thesis. The effect is to silence alternatives even though they have a direct bearing on one’s own political practice. The thesis ‘be[came] a legitimisation of apartheid for paradigms, a dialogue of the deaf which precludes any exploration of the possibility of synthesis’ (Wight, 1996: 292). Yet, theories of security ‘are not hermetically sealed bodies of thought … there are often significant areas of overlap’ (Wight, 1996: 312). Jackson and Nexon (2009) would agree and go even further by arguing that most substantive bodies of research in IR are, in fact, commensurable at some level. Discarding the language of paradigms and programmes, they suggest an ideal-typical mapping of the discipline along different dimensions of commensurability, such as the plasticity of anarchy (Jackson and Nexon, 2009: 918). Sil and Katzenstein’s (2010: 414–415) recent call for analytical eclecticism similarly challenges the idea that incommensurability poses a hopeless barrier to communication among theories. Notably, this argument is made in the hopes of creating a more practical, policy-oriented study of social science (Sil and Katzenstein, 2010: 412), which closely resembles the kind of knowledge that realists look to use in their own advocacy.

All of this is to suggest that realism and securitization theory need not be thought of as paradigms to be synthesized, yet there may be practical value in a dialogue that has yet to occur. For those still sceptical, I close this section by highlighting two significant points of common ground. First, while realists are commonly seen as wrapping themselves in the vestments of positivist social science (e.g. Walt, 1991), this connection has always been far more tenuous in practice (Freyberg-Inan, 2004: 145–152; Krause and Williams, 1996; Vasquez, 1997). Mearsheimer and Walt’s (2013) recent rejection of positivism in lieu of a scientific realism makes them, in principle, significantly more amenable to a range of constructivist alternatives (e.g. Wendt, 1999: ch. 2). As soon as neorealism is recognized as decoupled from its traditional moorings in positivism, a space is cleared for dialogue with alternative approaches.

Yet, the most compelling rationale for dialogue between these two lines of thought arguably resides in their overlapping normative concerns. This entails returning to the widening and deepening debates of security studies of the 1990s and how they are typically framed as an eclectic group of wideners against traditionalists or realists (Buzan and Hansen, 2009: 187–191). A crucial and overlooked feature of this debate is how the label of ‘widener’ can be read in two ways. Buzan and Wæver are certainly analytical wideners as securitization theory looks to expand the empirical purview of security studies beyond the military and state (Buzan, 1997: 13). They are not, however, normative wideners in the sense captured by Critical Security Studies, whose scholars seek to appropriate the concept of security for wider emancipatory intent (Buzan, 1997: 19). Put alternatively, while Buzan and Wæver are analytically ‘radically constructivist’, they are ‘in [their normative] purposes closer to Traditional Security Studies (TSS), which at its best attempted to grasp security constellations and thereby steer them into benign interactions’ (Buzan, 1997: 20). The discursive production of security issues is an empirical reality that cannot be ignored, but that does not mean that it should be actively endorsed. An excess of securitization is worrisome in so far as it leads to the subversion of democratic politics, to the labelling of certain groups as dangerous and to governments violating their own procedural and legal rules in order to meet perceived security demands (Aradau, 2004; Buzan et al., 1998; Williams, 2003). While realists may invoke a differing rationale for why the widening of security agendas is dangerous — namely, for how it distracts from great power conflict — they are, in principle, aligned with the normative stance of Buzan and Wæver, and potentially other securitization scholars as well.

The incommensurability thesis plays an important role in the paradigmatic organization of the discipline and reminds us of the risks of naive comparisons that gloss over deeper points of disagreement. Yet, it can also end up shielding theories from dialogue and debate, leading to their stagnation. Insofar as it narrows the range of alternative theories that may inform practice, incommensurability entails significant political risks, including naive and utopian visions of threat construction.

Realists as (de)securitizing agents

Securitization theory allows for a fundamental re-envisioning of realist advocacy by recognizing that the concept of security is discursively produced among multiple and often competing actors. Here, the quality of ‘securityness’ is brought about through the constitutive power of speech acts that create new social realities, such as ‘naming a ship’ or ‘betting’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 26, 32). Although now widely viewed as insufficient ( Balzacq, 2005; Salter, 2008; Stritzel, 2007), the facilitating conditions outlined by the Copenhagen School offer a starting point for explaining why security speech acts succeed or fail. The initial premise of these conditions is that, theoretically, anyone can label an issue a matter of security, but, practically, there are conditions that make some securitizing moves more politically resonant than others (Buzan et al., 1998: 31–33). The success, as well as failure, of a particular security speech act depends upon: 1) invoking the grammar of security; 2) the social position of the speaker; and 3) the nature of the threat. Parsed in more realist terms, the power to securitize or desecuritize is unevenly distributed among actors and conditioned by context.

The grammar of security refers to an actor’s ability to ‘construct a plot that includes existential threat, point of no return, and a possible way out’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 33). Resistance to this grammar is predicated on being able to contest the security narrative (Is this really an existential threat? Is there really no point of return? Is there only one way out?). Realist scholars should be ideal for this role as their professional status is organized around the so-called ‘scientific’ and objective scrutiny of security claims (Freyberg-Inan, 2004: 145–146; Walt, 1991: 221; see also Jackson and Kaufman, 2007), and are able to do so with an array of long-established and widely recognized conceptual resources, such as deterrence, containment, balance of power and so forth. One way to qualify the strength of this proposition is to look at how well realist academics were able to prevent critical and alternative approaches to security studies from emerging in mainstream IR. For a significant period of time during the Cold War and beyond, realism was able to subordinate alternative grammars of security (i.e. environmental security) through a series of disciplinary practices that painted new viewpoints as unserious or unscientific (Buzan and Hansen, 2009: 164; Krause and Williams, 1996; Walt, 1991: 223).

The issue of realist academia and social capital (feelings of public trust) is more problematic. There are reasons to believe that realists suffer from a paucity of public trust. Mearsheimer (2001: 402) suggests that ‘American political culture is deeply liberal and correspondingly hostile to realist ideas’. Part of the ‘tragedy’ of political realism is that it suffers from poor esteem in the public sphere, even though it is the safer bet for the survival of the state (Mearsheimer, 2001: 24–25). The issue of public trust has been exacerbated in recent debates, with neoconservatives framing scholarly credentials as evidence of a broader academic elite that is out of touch with the American public (Schmidt and Williams, 2008: 218). Yet, Kertzer and McGraw (2012: 254) have produced experimental evidence to suggest that ‘a simplified “folk realism” exists among ordinary citizens’ in the US. Opinion research has also shown that the American public is just as sympathetic, if not more so, to realist ideas than to liberal internationalism (Drezner, 2008: 63). Recent polling in foreign policy supports these conclusions as the American public appears reluctant to support increased involvement in the civil war in Syria, Iraq and the Ukraine, and generally prefer (67%) to limit military involvement to only ‘direct threats to [US] national security’ (Burns, 2014), an ostensibly realist prescription. Additionally, the securitization literature emphasizes the importance of expert authority and technical knowledge in constituting and disciplining the security discourse (Aradau, 2004: 394–395). In short, it is not clear where realists rank in terms of public trust, but there is no a priori basis for rejecting them as capable interlocutors.

Finally, how might realists be in a privileged position to contest the nature of a threat? One response to this question lies in realists’ use of history. In the case of the 2003 Iraq War debate, a centrepiece of Walt and Mearsheimer’s argument against neoconservatives was that the nature of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime had to be understood historically. They argued that:

The belief that Saddam’s past behavior shows he cannot be contained rests on distorted history and faulty logic. In fact, the historical record shows that the United States can contain Iraq effectively — even if Saddam has nuclear weapons — just as it contained the Soviet Union during the Cold War. (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2003a: 52; see also Mearsheimer and Walt, 2003b)

Threats are relative to the historical record. Inflation is evident when dangers are seen to increase despite historically similar social, economic, political and, especially, material conditions. A comparative historical perspective draws out the tension between framing something that has traditionally been a manageable threat — like the Saddam Hussein regime — and rapidly shifting it into the category of existential danger. By drawing on a well-established, though by no means uncontested, ¹⁰ history of great power conflict and international security, realists can effectively and authoritatively contest the nature of threats raised by their interlocutors.

The facilitating conditions offer a baseline to conceptualize realist academia as competent security interlocutors. The problem emerges when trying to leverage these conditions in order to explain why they so often fail to influence public security debates, and, in particular, the Iraq War debate. If realists are even semi-competent interlocutors, then why should they not be more influential in public affairs debates? ¹¹ A more incisive answer requires an expanded analysis showing how realists ceded powerful cultural resources in the form of collective identity and emotion to their neoconservative opponents. ¹²

Realism, securitization and the statecraft of threat construction

Critiques of realism all too often devolve into claims of its imminent demise (e.g. Legro and Moravscik, 1999; Vasquez, 1997). Instead, I look to steer to a different track with a brief sketch of a shared research agenda for both realism and securitization theory. One way to establish a common coherence for such an agenda may be to frame it around the much older and largely forgotten classical realist concept of statecraft. In Chris Brown’s (2012: 441) formulation:

[classical] realist prudence involves both a deep knowledge of statecraft, that is, of how to practise international relations, as well as the possession of the intellectual ability to think through how things might be different, and to weigh the consequences of action. ²⁰

Threat construction, including both practices of securitization and desecuritization, can be thought of as a form of statecraft whose emphasis on practical knowledge cuts across both schools of thought. This form of explicitly political knowledge can be explored in at least two concrete areas: the advocacy of restraint and the politics of emotion in security debates.

In the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War and the subsequent excesses of the Global War on Terror, realist advocacy has gravitated towards a more active promotion of restraint. Walt’s (2006) Taming American Power makes the case to a popular audience for the value of the US exercising restraint on the global stage. Similarly, Posen (2013, 2014) has argued for a grand strategy of restraint against an increasingly expansive liberal hegemony. Rosato and Schuessler’s (2011: 813) realist foreign policy manifesto explicitly ‘counsels restraint’ in dealing with minor powers such as Iran. While less visible, a similar concern with restraint is also evident in securitization theory. Increasingly, its proponents are carving out a nuanced middle ground, where the dangers of intense patterns of threat construction mean that the practice of ‘desecuritization is preferable in the abstract, but concrete situations might call for securitization’ (Wæver, 2011: 469). Vibeke Schou Tjalve goes even further by pointing to how visions of civil society inspired by early 20th-century Atlantic republicanism could be used to curb, but never altogether eliminate, securitizing moves. She argues:

Ultimately, human beings can only restrain each other. The creation of a system of checks and balances, of playing interest against interest, was the only viable means of restraining the monopoly of ideas or the advance of uncontested demonizing, securitizing moves. (Tjalve, 2011: 446, emphasis in original)

Tjalve’s work represents a stark departure from the metaphor of the marketplace by focusing on an agonistic and competitive public sphere. Yet, it shares with US realists a distinct understanding of restraint as a virtue in security discourse. How one advocates for the importance of this virtue to contemporary forms of statecraft is possibly one of the most fruitful grounds for dialogue between these two approaches today.

Yet, restraint in security debates is typically held to be elusive, especially when such debates play to populist impulses such as fears over terrorism or nuclear proliferation. As noted in the previous section, both realism and securitization theory are beholden to a vision of fearful publics acquiescing to security arguments. The problem with this logic is that it artificially narrows the range of emotional dynamics at play. Reducing security debates to popular and elite fears ignores how such debates circulate and are sustained by a variety of different emotions and affects. Great power politics is frequently punctuated by a diplomacy of anger, which may escalate into conflict in the absence of conciliatory gestures (Hall, 2011). Honour and shame have powerful catalyzing effects for security policy, as exemplified by the broadly circulating feelings of shame in the US after 9/11 (Saurette, 2006). Humanitarian operations, such as the Western intervention in Libya, may be wellsprings of joy and jubilation for liberal internationalists, who envision them as heroic efforts that avert near-genocides and produce deeply grateful local populations (e.g. Kristof, 2011). Nor is the role of emotions purely facilitative in making security arguments. In some cases, societies may come to fear the politics of fear itself as it allows for the ‘collective concentrations of power that make possible “institutionalized cruelty”’ (Williams, 2011: 455). Thus, the use of torture by the US may have left an enduring anxiety over how public fears have been manipulated to support and sustain institutionalized cruelty. The broader point is that as long as these emotional dynamics are part and parcel of security debates — in ways that both inhibit and expand the security agenda — they should be of special interest to both realist and securitization studies. ²¹

Conclusion

The failure of realist advocacy, despite its hegemonic status within the discipline, to curb the expansion of national security agendas constitutes a genuine puzzle. Focusing principally on the 2003 Iraq War debate, this article has leveraged the tools of securitization theory to offer an explanation for this failure centred around three contributions. First, by viewing the expansion of the security agenda as a product of threat inflation in the marketplace of ideas, realists employed a liberal model of discourse that stressed efficient economical reasoning over questions of power. This was a model protected, in part, by the incommensurability thesis. Second, while generally competent interlocutors in eyes of securitization theory, a closer examination of realist advocacy reveals how ignoring identity and emotion ceded powerful cultural resources to their neoconservative opponents. Third, the article sketched a common research agenda for realism and securitization theory under the auspices of a shared interest in the statecraft of threat construction.

There is a sense in which this argument is unfair to Walt and Mearsheimer, as well as to other realists who opposed the 2003 Iraq War. Their advocacy may have failed but so, too, did a host of other institutions (Kaufman, 2004), including a lacklustre political opposition, particularly among elites, and an uncritical media. It may be more accurate to say that this was a failure of the collective public sphere, rather than any one actor or strategy (Tjalve, 2011). Yet, the significance of realist advocacy cannot be dismissed. The fact that neoconservatives spent so much time and energy engaging realist arguments, including agreeing to a public debate with Walt and Mearsheimer in February 2003, reflects how the intellectual architects of the war saw in realism a trenchant and potent source of opposition.

Equally important is the concern that calling on realists to engage with the role of identity and emotion in discourse challenges the traditional academia–policy divide. In the Weberian view, appropriate scholarly activism entails ‘entering the debate in a non-partisan way, and confining [oneself] to disclosing “facts” rather than making pronouncements about “values”’ (Jackson and Kaufman, 2007: 95). Objectivity, in the Weberian sense, is crucial in ensuring the authoritative nature of academic ‘facts’. Yet, despite their ‘measured scholarly tones’, such efforts can easily be read as ‘obviously “political”’ by the public and therefore be dismissed as another partisan voice (Jackson and Kaufman, 2007: 99). This does not mean that objectivity and, thus, authority are unimportant, but that these concerns need to be balanced with a message sensitive to the vicissitudes of power in discourse. Instead, it may be ‘due to the very subjectivity that some perceive as a liability’ that some academics ‘are well positioned to issue the kinds of critiques that may resonate more deeply’ with popular audiences (Sucharov and Sasley, 2014: 177). Rather than pursue a ‘hygienic’ objectivity, we might consider our attachments to specific communities as reservoirs for thinking about richer forms of public engagement.

Finally, this critique of realist advocacy may appear poorly timed. Recent patterns of relatively limited engagement and restraint in the Middle East and Eurasia have left Stephen Walt (2014) questioning whether Barrack Obama is more realist than he is. Neoconservative criticism of the Obama administration has met with significant public backlash over issues ranging from their contribution to the rise of the Islamic State to their historical support for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture programmes.

Yet, there are a number of reasons why asserting the ascendency of realism in US security policy may be premature. First, despite a notable curtailment of large-scale interventions, the underlying expansionary dynamic of US national security remains, a point continually challenged by realists (e.g. Mearsheimer, 2011a; Walt, 2010). Second, for those instances where restraint is exercised in threat construction, such as in viewing a near-nuclear Iran as manageable through disarmament diplomacy rather than preventive war, it is not evident that realist advocacy plays a significant role. The reluctance of the public and the foreign policy community to support further preventive war may be attributable to a correction not in the underlying marketplace of ideas, but in the shifting distribution of cultural resources. Collective memories over the fallout of past preventive wars (e.g. the 2003 Iraq War) may generate anxieties over reckless military interventions, feelings that are likely to fall by the wayside if not sustained through discursive or institutionalized practice. Finally, it is worth noting that neoconservatives are not the only interlocutors that realists engage with. As Mearsheimer (2011a: 19, 30) notes, ‘liberal imperialists’ are among the central agents of threat inflation and are highly influential in US foreign policy. Indeed, practices of liberal humanitarian intervention often reflect a very particular kind of securitizing move (Watson, 2011).

Looking forward, this article has sought to demonstrate that tackling the challenges of advocacy cannot be done within the narrow confines of contemporary US neorealism alone. A re-engagement with the broader field of security studies is required lest neorealism become ‘diverted into a prolix and self-indulgent discourse that is divorced from the real world’ (Walt, 1991: 223), especially concerning the practical problem of the broadening of security. Yet, instead of making a trite call to scholarly openness and engagement, it may be more fitting to close with a comment regarding the oracle of neorealism, Kenneth Waltz. In one of his last academic pursuits, Waltz attended a conference on the ‘Politics of Securitization’ at Copenhagen University in 2010. ²² The event was a stocktaking exercise on almost 20 years of securitization research. It would be crude to suggest that Waltz’s attendance reflects an eleventh hour disregard for neorealism in favour of securitization theory. His participation, however, can be interpreted as an act of engagement borne out of curiosity and interest in roads less travelled in the discipline, an act that we can all hope to emulate.