Unipolarity’s unpeacefulness and US foreign policy: consequences of a ‘coherent system of irrationality’
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| Author | Haro L Karkour |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117817726363 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117817726363
International Relations
2018, Vol. 32(1) 60 –79
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117817726363
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Unipolarity’s unpeacefulness
and US foreign policy:
consequences of a ‘coherent
system of irrationality’
Haro L Karkour
University of Leicester
Abstract
Drawing on Hans J. Morgenthau, this article argues that a key contributor to the unpeacefulness
of the post–Cold War unipolar order was the irrationality of US foreign policy. Post–Cold War
US foreign policy was irrational in that it failed to base its strategy on the prudent evaluation
of the empirical facts in the social and political context in which it was formulated. Instead, it
reinterpreted reality in terms of a simplistic picture of the world as accepted by US policymakers
a priori, and sought the use of military force as the sole national security strategy to impose
the inviolability of the ideals entailed in this picture. This turned post–Cold War US foreign
policy into a self-contradictory endeavour as far as the results were concerned: not only did it
confuse desirable for essential interests in standardising the enemy – whether Milosevic, Saddam
or Qaddafi – to fit the a priori categorisation, but it also opened a gap between the desirable
and the possible. For one thing such an irrational post–Cold War US foreign policy failed to
accommodate or annul was the empirical reality of conflicting interests in the social and political
contexts upon which it sought to impose its a priori picture. This resulted in consequences
that were untenable from the standpoint of US objectives and international peace and security,
contributing, overall, to the unpeacefulness of the post–Cold War unipolar order.
Keywords
Morgenthau, unipolarity, US foreign policy
Introduction
Although the stability of the world order requires a measure of peace to endure, peaceful-
ness and durability are analytically distinct concepts. When it comes to the stability of
Corresponding author:
Haro L Karkour, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester, Leicester LE17RH,
UK.
Email: hk209@le.ac.uk
726363IRE0010.1177/0047117817726363International RelationsKarkour
research-article2017
Article
Karkour 61
the unipolar order that followed the end of the Cold War,1 the extent to which it is durable
was debated for over two and a half decades. In the early 1990s, commentators, such as
Charles Krauthammer, suggested that ‘the unipolar moment’ would last ‘for decades’.2
In line with his structural realist thinking, Kenneth Waltz 2 years later predicted that ‘in
the fairly near future, say ten to twenty years’ new powers may rise to balance US power.3
By the close of the century, William Wohlforth added the peacefulness variable to the
stability equation to affirm the durability of the post–Cold War unipolar order.4 About
2 years later, as Al-Qaeda militants succeeded in attacking America on its soil, and as,
following Afghanistan (2001), the United States shifted to unilateralism in its approach
in Iraq (2003), scholars raised concerns about this ‘unipolar moment’.5 In 2008 came the
financial crisis, raising further concerns apropos US global influence.6 For more than a
decade into the new century, the question whether the unipolar order is bound to endure
remained a matter of debate. At one end of the argument, commentators wrote about The
Post-American World,7 the ‘waning of US hegemony’,8 the ‘graceful decline’,9 even
theorised ‘after unipolarity’.10 Much attention was thus paid to the changing structure of
polarity to nineteenth century ‘plurality’,11 twenty-first century ‘non-polarity’,12 and the
implications of such shifts for US foreign policy, and international peace and security.
This did not deter more recent scholarship from rejecting the view that the United States
is likely to decline anytime soon.13
The question of durability was therefore debated in length in the literature on the sta-
bility of the unipolar order. But was this ‘stability’ peaceful? A quick glance at the con-
flicts in Iraq (1990–1991), Somalia (1993), Iraq (1998), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan
(2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011) and Syria (2011–present) shows that the answer is no.
If not, why did the explanation of the unpeacefulness of the unipolar order receive little
attention then? Despite its empirical significance, the question of the un/peacefulness of
unipolarity was overshadowed by its durability, and the line between the two concepts
was blurred in the general discussion of stability. The only exception in providing a sys-
tematic attempt at explaining the unpeacefulness of post–Cold War unipolarity in this
case can be found in Nuno Monteiro. In response to Wohlforth’s argument that the uni-
polar order is both durable and peaceful, Monteiro argues that although unipolarity ren-
ders great power war impossible, it ‘provide[s] incentives for two other types of war:
those pitting the sole great power against another state and those involving exclusively
other states’.14 Monteiro thus argues that unipolarity is unpeaceful, and explains the rea-
soning behind his argument: in attempting to maintain the status quo through a defensive
dominance strategy or to revise the status quo through an offensive dominance strategy,
the unipole finds itself in war. Meanwhile, in disengaging the unipole finds others in war.
But these strategies are ones of either war or inaction. In 1999, for instance, a defensive
dominance strategy was a bombing campaign against Belgrade. And disengagement
meant inaction. Were these the only two available options in US foreign policy? Should
the reader on this basis accept Monteiro’s deterministic explanation?15 To accept such
inevitability, as Ken Booth forcefully argued in Kosovo, would be a mistake, for there
were also engaging non-military strategies available.16
The intention here is not to investigate the available non-military strategies in post–
Cold War US foreign policy adventures, but to explain why they largely remained a non-
option. The explanation situates the overall argument of the article in Hans J. Morgenthau’s
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