Realism

Michael Parkes- Magic Realism painting

Realism

                            

As “isms” and ideologies go, realism is often passed over. Is this because, like the girl next door, one does not generally look for panaceas, or love for that matter, quite so close at hand?

But at least amongst American thinkers, you’ve had two notable realists, namely Hans Joaquim “the national interest” Morgenthau, and later, the much discussed “clash of civilisations” Samuel Huntington. Both were vigorously criticised at first, before being acknowledged for their prescience as political scientists.

And currently, we have Chicago University Political Science Professor John “offensive realism” John Mearshimer, making postulates to offend large sections of the intelligentsia.  

There was a hue and cry when Professor Morgenthau first argued for the need to amorally pursue the “national interest”, and not value-base it on right and wrong. But soon enough, this idea came to permeate every facet of international relations, including the sovereign use of military force and diplomacy.

Huntington’s “clash” idea for many people encapsulated the rise of the militant Islamic “terrorist” who, in his place, often justified his bombings and mass murders as a jihad. Culturally too, the jihadist has no compunctions against demonising anyone who doesn’t agree with him. Enemies to target include rival Islamic sects, so-called apostate Muslims and Christians in all their variety. There are also issues of perceived “decadence”. As for polytheists, it must be impossible for the madrasa indoctrinated jihadist to regard such people as anything but the infidel.

The ironic point is that a born again Christian, like former President George W Bush, who saw his battle against militant Islamists in crusading terms, and his arch enemy, the Sunni warlord Osama Bin Laden, had something in common after all.

Bin Laden directed the violence against America, the West, Israel, India, and their friends, relentlessly framing his rhetoric and moral imperative in jihadist terms. The crusading former American president, backed solidly by America’s Christian Right, and holy-warring Osama Bin Laden, are both stark illustration of Huntington’s postulations. 

Morgenthau, who died in 1979 and Huntington who passed on recently in 2008, have made their mark as realists. So, it may well be time to listen very carefully to the most vilified realist of current times, 63 year-old Mr. John Mearshimer.

Professor Mearshimer thinks celebrated Metternich/Bismarck admiring former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is a magisterial waffler who misses the point of what makes international relations tick. This despite Kissinger’s famous tilt towards China in the Nixon years that many say was a masterstroke that eventually led to the demise of the Soviet Empire.

Mearshimer does not dwell on the tremendous leg-up the US gave to China by endlessly buying Chinese for over thirty years of a most-favoured-nation (MFN) relationship. Instead, he concentrates on the present day, and says it is all heading for an inevitable showdown between the US and China.

When it comes, implies Mearshimer, it won’t be the stand-offs, shadow-boxing and covert attrition of the Cold War, but a gun battle on main street, like the climax of an old Western. He thinks China is building its military muscle and its forward diplomacy because it is the world’s most active “offensive realist”, bent on hegemony.

We in India can feel China’s aggressive mood first hand, as it seeks to relentlessly encircle us via Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Nepal, The Maldives, Pakistan, and menaces us directly at several points of our long land border with it.

Mearshimer, focussed on the US “national interest”, says China wants to take over the Eastern hemisphere, probably above and below the equator, land and sea, and would like to see the US confined to its own backyard, meaning, probably its own territory, Canada, South America and Western/Eastern Europe and the seas around them.

Africa, though certainly west of China, is not to be given up easily by either rival or their proxies, because of its vast natural resources able to feed the engines of industry, as well as massive arable land to grow more food for the planet.

India, a potential rival from South Asia aspiring weakly to world power status, with its muted forays into Africa, The Middle East, Eastern Europe, its loose alliances with the West and a tighter one with Russia, is nevertheless very easily bullied.

But Mearshimer thinks the great powers attack non-nuclear countries to settle things militarily, but cannot afford to go after the nuclear ones, whatever the human rights, terrorist and other provocations may be.

India, ideologically, has never pursued the Morgenthauist “national interest” line particularly, nor subscribed to the Huntington “clash of civilisations” theory, and certainly can’t reconcile Mearshimer’s “offensive realism” with Gandhian notions of non-violence. We can therefore expect to be continually menaced into submissiveness but survive nevertheless because of our nuclear power status.

The Middle East with its anachronistic forms of government and vast reserves of oil seems to be the arena where all three realists and their ideas can play out their potential in short order. The current hot button is Iran, though the instability in places such as Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan, Libya, Afghanistan and Pakistan are quite worrisome too.

China seems to be against the UN backed unilateralism that helps the West. Ever the covert proliferator, it enabled first neighbouring North Korea to go semi-nuclear, and then via it and directly, Pakistan, to do so openly. China wants to use nuclear diplomacy to reduce the power of the West by promoting proliferation via proxies, and there is not much the West can do about it.

If Iran goes nuclear, Saudi Arabia is determined to follow suit. Israel is a covert nuclear power already. Many more will join the club if China has its way, making it more and more difficult to resort to the kind of militarism that proved recently possible in Libya, and yet could in Iran. This is Mearshimer’s point precisely.

Iran’s current belligerence might indeed be taking some strength from China’s open support. Pakistan, the only nuclear Islamic nation, it is seen, along with non-nuclear but resource rich Afganistan and Iran’s neighbour, is also standing together in solidarity with it. 

China, with its mature nuclear arsenal capable of targeting every major city in the US and its burgeoning conventional military machine, seems determined to change the current global power equation. But this will have to play itself out.

At a minimum, even if there are no fireworks, as Andrew Kapinevich, President of the Centre for Strategic &Budgetary Assessments in the US says, much of China’s environs and sphere of influence is being “Finlandized”,  meaning nominally sovereign states that are forced to toe the Chinese line.

(1,097 words)

18^th February 2012

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader on Edit Page of The Pioneer on 23rd February 2012 as "It's time to get real about Iran". Also online at www.dailypioneer.com and in The Pioneer ePaper. Archived under Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com