US grand strategy after the Cold War: Can realism explain it? Should realism guide it?
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117817753272 |
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| Author | Stephen M Walt |
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117817753272
International Relations
2018, Vol. 32(1) 3 –22
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117817753272
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US grand strategy after
the Cold War: Can realism
explain it? Should realism
guide it?
Stephen M Walt
Harvard University
Abstract
This article uses realism to explain past US grand strategy and prescribe what it should be today.
Throughout its history, the United States has generally acted as realism depicts. The end of
the Cold War reduced the structural constraints that states normally face in anarchy, and a
bipartisan coalition of foreign policy elites attempted to use this favorable position to expand the
US-led ‘liberal world order’. Their efforts mostly failed, however, and the United States should
now return to a more realistic strategy – offshore balancing – that served it well in the past.
Washington should rely on local allies to uphold the balance of power in Europe and the Middle
East and focus on leading a balancing coalition in Asia. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump
lacks the knowledge, competence, and character to pursue this sensible course, and his cavalier
approach to foreign policy is likely to damage America’s international position significantly.
Keywords
Donald Trump, E.H. Carr, grand strategy, Kenneth Waltz, offshore balancing, realism,
unipolarity, United States
For someone who has long admired E.H. Carr’s scholarship, it is both a great pleasure
and an honor to be invited to deliver the 2017 E.H. Carr Memorial Lecture. Of course,
every International Relations scholar is familiar with Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, a
classic work that offers a powerful statement of the realist perspective and a sharp-eyed
critique of its limitations.1 My admiration for Carr increased after I read his masterful A
History of Soviet Russia – and especially the volumes dealing with Soviet foreign rela-
tions – and came to appreciate how well these books had stood the test of time.2
Corresponding author:
Stephen M Walt, Harvard Kennedy School, 79 John F. Kennedy St. Cambridge, MA 02138 USA.
Email: Stephen_Walt@ksg.harvard.edu
753272IRE0010.1177/0047117817753272International RelationsWalt
research-article2018
Article
4 International Relations 32(1)
Carr is an inspiring figure for another reason: his prose is crystal-clear and his books
are a pleasure to read. This quality is rapidly vanishing from our discipline, I fear, and if
I may offer a word of advice to students in the audience: you will do yourselves and the
world a great service if you learn to write well and you strive to be both clear and some-
times entertaining. Clear writing requires clear thinking, and to think clearly is some-
thing we all strive to achieve. Some scholars think being hard to understand makes them
sound profound, but I urge you not to succumb to that temptation. In reality, poor writing
can make a smart person sound stupid, just as crude public speaking or the indiscreet use
of Twitter can make an American president sound like an ignorant and hateful buffoon.
Carr is worth imitating because he was an independent thinker – even when he was mis-
taken – and his writing was always a model of clarity.
I shall try to emulate his example in the remainder of this essay. My topic is realist
theory and US grand strategy, and I will focus on two main questions.
First, can realism explain the strategies and policies that the United States has pursued
on the world stage? Americans often portray their country as an exceptional nation, and
a diverse array of scholars have explained US foreign policy by focusing on its liberal
ideology, capitalist system, divided system of government, partisan divisions, tradition
of interest group influence, bureaucratic politics, and other supposedly distinctive fea-
tures.3 ‘Unit-level’ analyses of this sort are often insightful, but they inevitably focus
attention on America’s special features and downplay the broader environment in which
the United States is set.
Realism, by contrast, is a general theory that is supposed to apply to all great powers.
If its claims have any validity, therefore, they should tell us a lot about US behavior. To
be specific, to what extent does US grand strategy conform to a realist blueprint, and to
what extent does it depart from it?
In fact, realism has a great deal to say on this topic. US leaders often insist their
actions are driven by deep idealistic convictions, but their actual behavior is often strik-
ingly consistent with realist predictions. Yet at the same time (and somewhat paradoxi-
cally), the realist perspective can help us understand why these same leaders sometimes
neglect the lessons of realism, as they have repeatedly done over the past 25 years. As
realism warns, ignoring those lessons has had unfortunate consequences for the United
States and for many others.
Second, if realism can help us understand why the United States acts as it does, can it
also prescribe what US grand strategy should be? If US foreign policy has gone badly off
the rails since the Cold War ended – and I think it has – could a greater reliance on realism
get it back on track? Here, I will outline the strategy of ‘offshore balancing’ proposed by
John Mearsheimer and myself (and a number of other scholars), show why it is consistent
with realist principles, and argue it would be better for the United States and for others.
Realism and foreign policy
One of the strengths of the realist school is its deep commitment to engaging with the real
world, rather than focusing primarily on arcane academic disputes.
This commitment is obvious in Thucydides, for example, who describes his history of
the Peloponnesian War ‘not as an essay which is to win applause of the moment, but as
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