Putting the ‘Classical’ in Neoclassical Realism: Neoclassical Realist Theories and US Expansion in the Post-Cold War

A matter of expansion

Expansion is a policy intentionally designed to increase the amount of a state’s political influence over other states. ¹⁴ States may seek to accrue their influence either in terms of domain (the number of actors influenced) or/and of scope (the issues over which power is being exercised). ¹⁵ This is to say that states expand whenever they bring additional states or geographical areas under their mastery, and also whenever their influence extends over additional political matters, for instance from the control of the foreign conduct of a state to that of its domestic arrangements. ¹⁶ Yet several stipulations should be added regarding which policy qualifies as expansion and which does not.

Not all instances in which a state ends up augmenting its international influence constitute evidence of a policy of expansion, because this increase may be unintentional − for instance, an inadvertent effect of the stagnation or decline of a competitor, or of the effort to deter the expansion of a third party. In this sense, the creation of NATO in 1949 was not political expansion, though it did result in the increase of American influence in Western Europe, because in so doing the US meant to reassure its allies and prevent Soviet advances. ¹⁷ Expansion therefore does not refer to any serendipitous byproduct, or to a fit of absent-mindedness, but to a deliberate line of power maximization. Thus, not every instance of the use of military power should be construed as evidence of expansion. For instance, the US involvement in Somalia in 1992−3 had little to do with extending American influence over the Horn of Africa, though it affected the Somali balance of power. ¹⁸ Therefore, genuine expansion applies only to those instances of the use of force when a state purposefully seeks to achieve control over a certain area of relative political significance. ¹⁹ Furthermore, expansion is a label that does not apply solely to the efforts of next-in-line dissatisfied great powers to realize gains at the expense of the already dominant powers in the system. ²⁰ Expansion may also describe the case when it is the already dominant states that seek to enhance their influence to an even larger extent, for instance Louis XIV’s France, or Victorian Britain. Hence, the emergence of the US as the most powerful actor in the aftermath of the Cold War does not necessarily rule out a policy of further expansion on its part.

The available evidence suggests that the US effectively followed a policy of expansion beginning in the late 1990s and culminating in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. By contrast, the hypothesis of expansion in previous instances, such as the enlargement of NATO in 1997 and the US presence in the Gulf since 1991, fails to unambiguously fulfill the requirement of purposeful power maximization. ²¹ Consequently, a disconnect may be thought to have occurred between a policy of status quo in the early 1990s and a policy of expansion in the later part of the decade. The latter represents expansion foremost in terms of scope, since the US claimed additional influence through the right to employ force without prior Security Council authorization, abandoning the requirement of consulting the interests of the other permanent-member great powers. ²² Moreover, the US sought to increase its influence not only over the foreign policy of Yugoslavia and Iraq, but also over their internal politics, by imposing conditions on Kosovo, which was at the time sovereign Yugoslav territory, and by intervening to effect regime change in Baghdad. ²³

Contending realisms

Presently, three schools coexist and compete in the neoclassical realist family. The first school is closest to orthodox neorealism − hence this article refers to it as ‘orthodoxy’. The third school leans toward reviving classical realism, which for the purposes of this article earns it the label ‘revivalist’. Finally, the second school attempts to straddle these two positions, while leaning towards orthodoxy, which is why the article refers to it as ‘semi-orthodoxy’. These sibling schools are identified both according to how they weigh the contribution of structural and non-structural variables in foreign policy making, and according to their emphasis on factors belonging to either the domestic or the international sphere. This classification is illustrated in Table 1 above.

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Table 1.

	International relations	Domestic attributes
Structural	Structural realism	Democratic peace theory
	Orthodoxy
	Semi-orthodoxy
Non-structural	Classical realism	Moravcsik’s liberal theory
	Revivalism	Constructivism

To clarify matters, realism is distinguishable from liberal and constructivist theories primarily because it argues that, on the whole, a state’s international relations are more important than its domestic attributes in shaping foreign policy outputs. Thus, realism offers an outside-in worldview that contends that states pay foremost attention to the international reverberations of their own initiatives. As Zakaria puts it, ‘states conduct their foreign policy for “strategic” reasons, as a consequence of international pulls and pushes, and not to further domestic ends’. ²⁴ By contrast, liberals and constructivists adopt an inside-out view of foreign policy, in which a state’s foreign conduct is predominantly determined by internal factors, whether non-structural, such as internal actors’ preferences, ideas, or identities, or pertaining to the nature of their domestic institutions. ²⁵ Of course, the point here is not that liberals and constructivists ignore international influences on an absolute basis, no more than that realists uniformly exclude from their analyses the internal specifics of states. Instead, the criterion for distinction is which element is considered, when all is said and done, to weigh the most in foreign policy making. Thus, based on the above scheme of ideal types, a theory is realist not because of its adherence to structural factors − an overstated claim that would deny the status of realist to luminaries such as Aron, Carr, Wolfers, Spykman and Kennan – but because of its emphasis on the international determinants of foreign policy. ²⁶

Furthermore, realist theories can be subdivided into theories that endorse the supremacy of structural factors, i.e. the relative distribution of capabilities and systemic pressure, and non-structural theories that, conversely, stress the strategic interactions between states. For Waltz, it is not only the attributes of states that should be expunged from a proper theory of international politics, but also their very transactions, communications and conflicts. For Waltz, interaction is fundamentally non-structural because it ‘occurs at the level of the units, not at the level of the system … conclusions about the condition of international politics cannot be directly inferred from the data about the formal or informal relations of states’. ²⁷ Thus, from a structural perspective, scholars should focus only on the position of units in the system − itself dependent on their comparative power resources. By contrast, as will be shown below, the main preoccupation of classical realists and their revivalist heirs is to examine precisely these strategic exchanges between polities.

Orthodox, semi-orthodox and revivalist tenets

Orthodoxy holds that ‘the more capabilities a great power has at its disposal relative to its competitors, the stronger its urge to expand’. ²⁸ Accordingly, orthodoxy has come forward to ‘refine, not refute’ Waltz. To quote Schweller:

in theory and practice … structural-systemic alternatives … can and should be used by neoclassical realists as a first cut, providing a baseline expectation for state behavior. Only when behavior and outcomes deviate from these structural-systemic theories expectations should unit-level variables associated with neoclassical realism be added to these theories to explain why. ²⁹

Hence, for the orthodox, non-systemic variables do not interfere in every single foreign policy decision, but are at work only when states choose to behave in ways that contradict the system’s constraints. ³⁰ At times, states will be unable to pay heed to structural requirements, either because the signals sent by the system are garbled by misperceptions, or because domestic politics impede the state’s ability to mount a timely or an appropriate response.

Nevertheless, for orthodoxy, any non-structural effect will be temporary, since states that pass up the opportunity to expand when at their peak in power, risk seeing their more opportunistic rivals securing significant gains at their expense and placing their own imprint on the conduct of international affairs later on. ³¹ Hence, even if a great power were inclined to resist expansion tooth and nail, it will eventually be coerced by the threat of systemic punishment to fall into line. In this sense, the US could only have acted in the post-Cold War period as a typical unipolar power, and consequently had to seek additional influence in the international system, simply because it was able to and because not doing so entailed dire consequences. To quote Waltz, ‘the winner of the Cold War and the sole remaining great power has behaved as unchecked powers have always done’. For the orthodox, the disparity of capabilities benefiting the US is sufficient cause for America’s decision to expand − expansion may have been delayed because of domestic concerns, but it was scheduled to eventually occur no matter what because of structural duress. ³²

The semi-orthodox share the orthodox belief that expansion is caused foremost by a state’s lead in capabilities, but add that domestic politics matter as well. ³³ Accordingly, non-structural factors are no longer the crutch on which neorealism leans every time it has to account for anomalous behavior. Instead, they represent the normal, if convoluted, channel through which the system’s pressure is translated into foreign policy. Accordingly, the semi-orthodox emphasize:

the utility of neoclassical realism as an approach to foreign policy, rather than merely as an explanation of suboptimal policy choices. Certainly in a turbulent international system, when security is scarce, domestic actors have limited ability to influence foreign policy … When the security environment is more stable, however, states have a greater degree of freedom in choosing policies, and domestic actors have a greater role in directing the national foreign policy choices. ³⁴

As such, non-structural factors are the intervening variable that regularly affects foreign policy tactics and even, in a congenial absence of threats, foreign policy content.

By implication, the semi-orthodox argue that up to 9/11 the US enjoyed an unimpeded opportunity to expand. But at the same time America’s foreign policy throughout this interval also bore the distinct imprint of its domestic politics precisely because this was a time of extraordinary security plenty. The domestic effect was best seen in the reluctance to commit large military resources to expansion, resulting in the seemingly incoherent policy of the Clinton administration, which attempted to cater at once to isolationist sentiment at home, to Wilsonian faith in human rights and democracy, and to systemic requirements − hence the apparent oxymoron of ‘a reluctant crusader’ policy. However, once the international system reasserted its authority with a vengeance in the form of 9/11 and the subsequent threat of global terrorism, these domestic niceties were gradually pushed into the background: they still affected the tactics of the Global War on Terror, but no longer had a major say in the content of foreign policy, as in George W. Bush’s first term. ³⁵

While the orthodox restricts non-structural variables to elucidating anomalous behavior, and the semi-orthodox allows them a limited role in accounting for foreign policy, revivalism goes furthest by contesting the absolute supremacy of the international system. Revivalism is rarely acknowledged as a distinct body of thought, but some of its assumptions may be considered implicit in the research of a number of neoclassical realists who had to struggle in the muddy trenches of foreign policy analysis. ³⁶

An important caveat is in order here: whenever the orthodox and semi-orthodox refer to non-structural factors, they mean principally the domestic attributes of the state in question with little attention paid to the matter of its actual interactions with other polities. ³⁷ These latter are subordinated to the distribution of relative capabilities among states. But the interaction between any two states is influenced by much more than just their comparative military forces and GDP, or by their respective institutions, ideologies and internal group interests. Accordingly, the states’ geopolitical position, the historical record of previous interactions with each other and with other polities, the perceptions and learning processes of their key decision makers, as well as the anticipation of the other party’s likely response to any action also sizably shapes the decisions they would adopt. ³⁸ Yet these strategic variables are not accurately addressed by structural-minded neoclassical realists. The reason for this inaccuracy is because the orthodox and the semi-orthodox fail to specify how often and to what degree the international system will relax its pressure on the states, or in other words how stringent anarchy will be. In turn, this ambiguity occurs because they both endorse the opposing views that anarchy must be heavily exacting so as to be able to argue the continued supremacy of the international system as well as having to portray anarchy as sufficiently lax to allow deviations − and hence diversity − in state responses.

By contrast, revivalism proceeds from the explicit assumption that anarchy is rarely as severe as Waltz makes it out to be. If credence were given to Waltz, states that flout the dictates of anarchy face swift and severe punishment, if not the prospect of being wiped from the map by would-be invaders. ³⁹ However, this is clearly not the case: structural realists can rely on a surprisingly small number of cautionary tales of states that were soundly chastised or that ceased to exist as a result of their disobeying the system. This does not mean that anarchy is irrelevant, but rather that it more often resembles a house that overheats rather than a house that is on fire. Consequently, if anarchy is on the whole permissive, states − and in particular the better-endowed great powers − may turn a blind eye to systemic pressures for considerable lengths of time without necessarily being forced to pay a prohibitive price. ⁴⁰ For this reason, while the international distribution of power limits what states will ultimately be able to achieve (the general rules of the game), it will not absolutely determine, let alone indicate, what states will actually do (the way players actually play the game). As Aron has argued, the way any game is played on the field cannot be deduced from the rules. True enough, without rules, the movements in the game will not make any sense, but on the other hand, the rules of the game will never determine the course or the score line of any particular match. ⁴¹

Since anarchy is not stringent, states do not have to respond in the same way to anarchic stimuli by universally pursuing security or expansion as assumed by structural realism. For this reason, states choose different goals − whether gain, security or prestige − and hence face a real choice between expansion and non-expansion, which is not necessarily predetermined by their superiority or inferiority in capabilities. ⁴² Accordingly, a serious investigation into the goals that states choose to pursue should complement any discussion of their capabilities, because in the absence of severe anarchic constraints, states must have a motive and not merely an opportunity for adopting a given foreign policy line. ⁴³ This is why the study of foreign policy is the study of motive par excellence: decision makers are rarely content to inquire what competitors are able to do and leave the matter at that. Instead, they spend considerable time and effort investigating what their counterparts seek to achieve by a given course of action.

This is precisely the path of inquiry into foreign policy that was suggested by some notable forefathers of classical realism. ⁴⁴ As Wolfers writes:

undoubtedly, the anarchical condition … constitutes one of the prerequisites of international conflict: without it, there could be no international relations, peaceful or non-peaceful. Yet, in the last analysis, it is the goals pursued by the actors and the way they go about pursuing them that determine whether and to what extent the potentialities for power struggle and war are realized … If one fails to inquire why actors choose their goals, one is forced to operate in an atmosphere of such abstraction that nothing is revealed but the barest skeleton of the real world of international politics. ⁴⁵

Hence, this is to say that the goals that states follow are not determined by the distribution of power capabilities − itself an attribute of the anarchical system − but, and necessarily so, by non-structural variables.

However, revivalism is not a surreptitious crossover into ‘Innenpolitik’, because it also refrains from arguing that domestic attributes predominantly dictate a state’s external behavior. ⁴⁶ Instead, revivalism contends that a state’s motivation is principally shaped by the strategic context of its interactions with other states. Domestic politics is by no means negligible in foreign policy making, and may both promote and inhibit a given policy − to this extent it is an important enabling factor that contributes to the ultimate success or failure of a given policy. But revivalism supports the view that domestic politics rarely hijacks the foreign policy agenda to the point of defining the direction of grand strategy. ⁴⁷

For this reason, revivalism treats the state as a political actor in its own right, instead of as the sum of the competing coalitional agendas of powerful societal actors. Consequently, the state is capable of setting its foreign policy agenda independently of domestic actors and institutions, even if internal repercussions are also taken into account in foreign policy making. This means that revivalism goes beyond the conclusions of semi-orthodoxy by contending that the executive can withstand internal pressure, and, as such, does not have to compromise its foreign policy on a regular basis in order to cater to domestic criticisms. Thus, domestic politics is less evident in foreign policy making, whether in content, timing or style, and more responsible for the ‘packaging’ or the rhetorical form the policy assumes as it is presented to the public in a fashion that would maximize acceptance and mobilization. ⁴⁸ Therefore, revivalism contends that expansion was the result of strategic interactions between the US, challenger states and second-tier great powers. It was only after US decision makers became convinced that America’s erstwhile policy of restraint had backfired in ensuring both the challengers’ compliance and the cooperation of partner powers, threatening its prestige as world leader, that it embarked on a course of unbridled expansion.

At this point, it might be useful to succinctly revisit the expectations of the three neoclassical realist schools for the post-Cold War period in order to highlight the conditions that would falsify each theory. Since orthodoxy holds that structural factors are a sufficient cause of expansion, it sees the US decision to seek additional influence in the late 1990s as the consequence of structural pressure in the form of a major threat to American security. Meanwhile, semi-orthodoxy holds that at times of security plenty the domestic politics of a state exercises a pivotal role in determining its foreign policy, but only affects tactics in periods of security scarcity. For the semi-orthodox, this results in two forecasts. First, US foreign policy prior to 9/11 should have been heavily affected by the domestic agenda. Second, following the terrorist attacks, America should have undergone an adjustment as a result of the more threatening international environment, ultimately leading to expansion in Iraq. Finally, revivalism argues that foreign policy is determined by a state’s goals, which are in turn chosen as a result of its strategic interactions with other polities. Therefore, revivalism expects US foreign policy to have evolved from status quo in the early 1990s to expansion late in the decade according to the changing nature of America’s exchanges with both allies and foes.

US expansion and the flouting of the international system

From the strict point of view of systemic opportunity, in the 1990s America’s military budget of $267.2 billion well exceeded the combined defense expenses of the ten next-largest powers, a list that included Japan, France, the UK, Germany and China. Furthermore, throughout the post-Cold War period, the US remained the only state truly capable of projecting its power worldwide. ⁴⁹ In economic terms, in 2000 America’s GDP of $9.25 trillion put the US well ahead of Japan’s $2.95 trillion, China’s $4.8 trillion and Germany’s $1.3 trillion. ⁵⁰ Nonetheless, throughout much of this window of unimpeded supremacy, the US also unequivocally rejected expansion. The clearest plea for expansion, the draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) of 1992 was strongly discounted by the George H. W. Bush administration. ⁵¹ Nor did expansion fare any better during the ensuing Clinton administration’s first term in office, during which the US National Security Strategy argued in a distinct status quo vein that:

no matter how powerful we are as a nation, we cannot secure these basic goals unilaterally … the threats and challenges we face demand cooperative, multinational solutions. Therefore, the only responsible strategy is one that seeks to ensure US influence over and participation in collective decision making in a wide and growing range of circumstances. ⁵²

For the orthodox, this anomalous reluctance to expand despite having an open field is not necessarily impossible to explain, as it may be put down to the effects of either isolationist-minded US public opinion and/or an ideological framework that placed, however temporarily, international cooperation, human rights or democracy promotion above security. But the orthodox get into trouble when trying to explain why the US was then forced to reverse this status quo line. Typically, this should have been the product of major security crises that, by punishing the US, would have forced it to switch policy. The problem is that despite this manifest refusal to act ‘as unchecked powers have always done’ throughout history, no such noticeable punishment befell the US.

In effect, the US did not face any pressing threat to its physical security in the later 1990s. In the interval it maintained an appreciable lead in both military and economic terms over other great powers. Furthermore, the US acted to nip would-be attempts at expansion in the bud, whether from great powers, as in the 1996 Taiwan Straits confrontation, or from ambitious regional players such as Iraq in 1990−1, so that there was no danger that a competitor would make sizable gains due to America’s restraint.

The development of nuclear weapons and missile technology by the so-called rogue states − primarily North Korea − was indeed a significant US concern. But this was not existential − the US decision makers certainly had no expectation that a rogue government would be foolish enough to contemplate an attack on the American homeland. Instead, the US worried primarily that its ability to intervene successfully in either the Gulf or the Far East would be hampered. As John Holum, the State Department’s Senior Advisor on Arms Control in the second Clinton administration, put it: ‘we have come to the view that such states [rogues] seek missiles and WMD programs primarily as weapons of coercive diplomacy, to complicate US decisionmaking or limit our freedom to act in a crisis’. This view was also endorsed by Walter Slocombe, Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, according to whom the goal of the US in relation to rogue states was:

to render less credible any possible attempts by a rogue state adversary to use ballistic missiles armed with weapons of mass destruction to coerce the United States into holding back from supporting a friend or ally the rogue state threatens with attack. ⁵³

Therefore, important as it was to prevent rogue states from gaining deployable nuclear weapons, this was not seen by the administration as a threat to the survival of the US, and, by implication, was not serious enough to prompt expansion.

Moreover, America’s expansionist undertakings in the Balkans and Iraq in the late 1990s also had little to do with an overriding physical security emergency. True enough, in relation to Kosovo, Clinton mentioned in his war message to the nation that one of the goals of bombing was to defuse a ‘powder keg at the heart of Europe that has exploded twice before this century with catastrophic results’. ⁵⁴ One may also recall in this respect the so-called ‘Christmas warning’ delivered by Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger in December 1992 and then reaffirmed by his successor Warren Christopher in 1993: this warned Belgrade that an escalation of the fighting in Bosnia through a Serb attack on Kosovo would trigger military intervention by the US. ⁵⁵

Nevertheless, by 1998, US decision makers were unsure whether the Christmas warning had been taken off the table − assuming that it had ever been on the table in the first place other than as a bluff. ⁵⁶ In any case, this became a moot point, as throughout 1998 Serb forces conducted several major offensives into Kosovo without any invocation on the American side of its previous threat. As one expert put it: ‘it was very clear that from the moment the violence started that the Christmas warning was off the table … as far as the president is concerned’. ⁵⁷ Furthermore, had the US been genuinely concerned about the security of the Balkans and implicitly about the wider system’s security, it would presumably have taken preventive action before the 1999 crisis erupted, most notably by intervening in the case of the collapse of the Sali Berisha government in Albania in March 1997, which destabilized the region by allowing the Kosovo Liberation Army to become a viable fighting force; by listening to the advice of the US ambassador to NATO, Alexander Vershbow, who advised the deployment of a joint American−Russian force in Kosovo in August 1998; and by increasing the numbers of UN peacekeepers in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, UNPREDEP. ⁵⁸ Accordingly, American apathy in these instances contradicts the hypothesis of a US genuinely on tenterhooks about the security of the Balkans.

Similarly in 1998, in the case of Operation Desert Fox, the three-day bombing campaign against the Baghdad regime was not aimed at addressing a pressing danger from Iraq’s alleged WMD programs, but to safeguard the sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein in 1991 through Security Council Resolution 687. Through 1997 and 1998 Iraq attempted repeatedly to coerce the UNSCOM inspectors into offering it a clear bill of health on disarmament, which would have strengthened the case for lifting the draconian sanctions. ⁵⁹ While ostensibly the sanctions dealt with the destruction of WMD programs, their purpose as far the US was concerned was not simply to defang Iraq, but, more importantly, to trigger the eventual fall from power of Saddam Hussain. In May 1991, the Bush administration specifically stated in a memo sent by Eagleburger to embassies in the chief Gulf War coalition countries that ‘all possible sanctions will be maintained until he [Saddam] is gone. Any easing of the sanctions will be considered only when there is a new government.’ ⁶⁰ This remained established policy under Clinton well into the second administration, as seen in Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s declarations: ‘clearly, a change in government in Baghdad could lead to a change in US policy … Until that day, containment must stay in place.’ ⁶¹ Therefore, America’s position was to bottle up Iraq through sanctions as long as Saddam was in power, regardless of the extent of Iraq’s disarmament. In this way, sanctions would have sapped Saddam’s power base over time, encouraging the likelihood of an internal coup. ⁶² Therefore, the main risk in 1997−8 was that the pressure mechanism of the sanctions regime was going to crumble, conferring in the process considerable prestige on America’s nemesis in Baghdad for having successfully outmaneuvered the system’s hegemon. ⁶³ Unpalatable as this prospect was, it was not so alarming as to represent a pressing threat: many years would have passed until Saddam would have been able to reconstitute his capabilities to the levels of 1990. ⁶⁴ Thus, the orthodox premise that structural constraints explain America’s sudden fondness for expansion turns out to be faulty.

In the meantime, the semi-orthodox believe that a lax anarchical environment such as the one in effect from 1989 to 2001 maximizes the role of domestic actors in determining foreign policy. But as it turns out, domestic politics did not substantially affect America’s foreign line even in the remarkably auspicious setting of security plenty of the 1990s, since on several occasions the executive showed that it could successfully withstand internal discontent. Indeed, throughout the decade there was a widespread consensus that American public opinion was leaning towards isolationism. ⁶⁵ This sentiment was best captured by the Congressional victory in 1994 of Contract Republicans, whose 20-point program contained only a single point dealing with foreign policy, specifically National Missile Defense. ⁶⁶ Consequently, the government could count on a tempest of criticism from Congress, the media and even public opinion in each of the US major interventions abroad. For instance, in the case of the Gulf, only 35 per cent of Americans supported a war undertaken to liberate Kuwait, and only 44 per cent supported a war in which the US would have suffered 1000 casualties. In relation to Bosnia, Congress favored no military action and a concomitant unilateral lift of the UN weapons embargo. With regard to Iraq in 1998, a Congress about to vote on the impeachment of the President raised questions as to the timing of the operation. Finally, in April 1999, the House of Representatives passed a resolution requiring that the President ask for its authorization before deciding on any ground deployment in Kosovo. ⁶⁷ Nonetheless, the executive had the last word in seeing its commitments through in each of these examples. To this extent, America’s interventions clearly took place despite, not because of, domestic pressure, and as a result cannot be construed as an effort on the part of the government to secure domestic popularity or support. ⁶⁸

Moreover, the record indicates that the origins of America’s line of status quo in the early 1990s had actually little to do with domestic concerns − confirming instead revivalist expectations that it is strategic interactions that define policy. In effect, status quo was the distinct product of the modus operandi developed by the US during the Gulf crisis. To quote National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft: ‘in the first days of the crisis we had started self-consciously to view our actions as setting a precedent for the approaching post-Cold War world’. He added that: ‘one of the underlying premises of the Gulf War … for the president and me, probably for Baker, was to conduct this whole thing in a way that would set a useful pattern for the way to deal with crises in an area of cooperation’. ⁶⁹ This meant that the US, satisfied with the influence it already enjoyed, committed itself during the Gulf crisis to acting in partnership with the world’s other leading states, preferably under the aegis of the UN Security Council. The rationale for this restrained policy was that the US was gaining overwhelming diplomatic, economic, military and moral support to deal with challengers such as Saddam, while giving in return other important international actors a stake in maintaining an order congenial to the US. Since making concessions to America’s partners and refraining from any unilateral action that risked provoking their concerns resulted in overwhelming success in isolating Saddam, and then in evicting him from Kuwait, it is small wonder that the first Clinton administration chose to continue this proven policy. ⁷⁰ Effectively, though he stood accused of following a chaotic foreign policy in his first term, Clinton by and large stuck to the policy of restraint inaugurated by the previous Bush administration. This amounted to America acting by means of consultation with other states, preferably in the form of large-scale coalitions sanctified by the UN. ⁷¹ If no coalition was feasible, the administration did not force the matter, giving up on more than one occasion on its preferred course of action so as not to bruise the ego of international partners. ⁷²

Even on the issue of the influence of domestic concerns on the tactics of US foreign policy, specifically on the reluctance to commit ground forces in the 1990s interventions, the evidence is not compelling. This might have stemmed less from an exaggerated fear of a domestic outcry over casualties and more as an effect of learning from past strategic interactions. The military orthodoxy of the 1990s was after all defined by the Powell doctrine − itself an consequence of Vietnam. The Powell doctrine specified that the US was to seriously contemplate intervention only if it sent an overwhelming number of troops, thus avoiding gradualism. For this reason, every time military action was contemplated in the 1990s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed maximum-size deployments − an all-or-nothing option, which in view of the costs involved, favored military inaction on the ground, and left the US government only the option of air and missile strikes. ⁷³ The hypothesis that the choice of tactics was due more to the evolution of military strategic thinking than to domestic politics is given further confirmation by the tactics chosen by the US in the 2000s, especially during the invasion of Iraq. Once the Powell doctrine was superseded by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s pet concept of transformation, which relied more on technology than on numbers, the US was able to commit ground troops, but it only deployed a force of 250,000, which represented half the troops America had deployed in the Gulf in 1990−1. This switch in battle tactics had little to do with Rumsfeld’s worries over the potential domestic impact. ⁷⁴

The other shortcoming of semi-orthodoxy consists in its view of 9/11 as the crucial event that prompted the US decision to expand, most notably through the invasion of Iraq. It is certainly undeniable that, unlike the threats of the 1990s, the US took 9/11 seriously. But two difficulties still persist. First, the alleged effect of 9/11 cannot account retroactively for a policy of expansion that had been manifestly at work since Operation Desert Fox. ⁷⁵ Second, one still has to demonstrate that 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq are linked in the sense that the US attacked Iraq primarily out of security concerns over WMD falling into the hands of terrorists. This is an arduous task because it contradicts the record in several respects.

To begin with, had the US been truly motivated by security because of Saddam’s alleged weapon programs, as claimed in a variety of speeches by Bush officials, the decision to invade would have been critically affected by alarming intelligence reports referring to the stage of the development of WMD. This would point to the fall of 2002 as the moment of decision, when the unclassified version of the key such document, the National Intelligence Estimate, was unveiled. ⁷⁶ However, the available evidence confirms the decision had already been taken by the spring of 2002, if not much earlier, independent of any intelligence assessment of the threat from Baghdad. ⁷⁷ Moreover, as seen from the above, traditionally the US had employed the WMD argument not because of the weapons themselves, but rather as a political tool to maintain sanctions in place and hence keep up the pressure on Saddam’s regime. To this end, the US had included in its definition of WMD not only deployable weapons, of which it was commonly believed that precious few remained, but also any component equipment, facilities, technology or data that could be used to develop them. ⁷⁸ To invoke the specter of deployable WMD in 2002 was thus to knowingly vamp up a non-existent peril, particularly considering the comparably advanced stage of development of WMD in North Korea and Iran. Finally, there are at least two verifiable instances of the executive lying: in the case of the aluminum tubes imported by Iraq, and the alleged sale of uranium from Niger. In both instances, Bush officials, despite having prior knowledge of the falsity of the charges, still put them forward in the hope of persuading the public and world public opinion that Iraq had an active nuclear-weapons program. ⁷⁹

Does at least the semi-orthodox contention that domestic politics affected the tactics of expansion post-9/11 hold? The jury may be out on this point, since as a blanket term ‘tactics’ could cover the unilateralist George W. Bush style, the timing of key decisions, or particular ways of conducting the War on Terror. However, in at least one respect domestic politics was clearly irrelevant: it did not affect, as some semi-orthodox analyses hold, the decision to focus on Iraq as a testing ground for the so-called ‘great challenge’ of promoting democracy in the Middle East. This theme after all figured prominently in several speeches, notably in the State of the Union Address of 2006, in which Bush pledged that ‘our nation is committed to an historic, long-term goal − we seek the end of tyranny in the world’. ⁸⁰ This is interpreted as possible evidence that the decision to conduct the Global War on Terror through the tactic of targeting hostile autocratic regimes in the Middle East such as Saddam’s, was the outcome of domestic convictions and interests, notably on the side of neoconservatives. ⁸¹

But the historical record discounts this hypothesis − democracy became the justification of choice for the Bush administration only after the search for WMD proved futile in November 2003. ⁸² Prior to the invasion, this rationale was avoided on purpose − since as members of the administration admitted that the issue of democracy promotion was considered not to have any ‘legs’, in the sense of being able to sell the policy to the US public. ⁸³ Moreover, had the administration been animated by a genuine desire to bring democracy to the Iraqis, it would have spent more effort in preparing the process of transition after the fall of Saddam. Instead, the evidence shows considerable resistance to even contemplating nation-building, particularly in the ranks of the Pentagon officials, who refused any political commitment that would have contravened the overall line of transformation in terms of troop deployment. ⁸⁴

Accordingly, semi-orthodoxy, while a more refined version of neoclassical realism than orthodoxy, ultimately also fails to explain the reason why the US chose expansion in the post-Cold War period and how this process took place.

Strategic interactions and US expansion

Revivalism contends that the answer to the puzzle of US expansion after the Cold War lies in the goals America chose to pursue during this period, which were determined mainly by America’s interactions with other great powers and challengers. Specifically, the US resorted to expansion in order to safeguard its prestige as the leader of the international system, after being challenged in the successive contexts of Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo and 9/11.

A state that was as dominant as the US after the Cold War had to live up to higher standards than other polities: it could not allow itself to be challenged with impunity by much less well-endowed political actors such as the Bosnian Serbs, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic and al Qaeda if it wanted to maintain its number one ranking. Consequently, it has to emerge as the perceived undisputed winner of political (and military) clashes against challengers. The recurrent problem after the Cold War was that the US found itself unable to reconcile the imperative of achieving such clear-cut victories with the requirements of restraint and cooperation of a status quo strategy. This led to the status quo being gradually pushed aside by a much more forceful line of expansion.

As the US discovered, effective settlement of the Bosnian civil war could not be reached as long as Washington insisted on acting only with the prior blessing of its allies and partners. The more the US sought to create an all-around satisfactory compromise, as it had in the Gulf in 1990−1, the more it found that its ability to act efficiently was impeded by European concerns of possible Bosnian Serb retaliation against their peacekeepers in UNPROFOR. After all, complained the Europeans, the US did not face the same costs as they did, since it had no troops of its own on the ground. Of course, the US sought to avoid such ground deployment, because under the Powell Doctrine it anticipated a Desert Storm-size commitment of no less of 400,000 troops and also worried about a feasible exit strategy. Accordingly, for US decision makers Bosnia represented ‘a quagmire’, ‘a shooting gallery’ and ‘a problem from hell’ − a fight in which America ‘did not have a dog’, so that in terms of costs versus benefits, the US would have preferred to rely on airstrikes. ⁸⁵ Nonetheless, on two occasions, in May 1993 and November 1994, the US found that its lift and strike project was blocked by the strong opposition of its NATO allies and Russia, and rather than confronting them with a fait accompli, preferred each time to adopt a passive stance. ⁸⁶ As Clinton repeatedly argued: ‘the United States cannot proceed here unilaterally’ and ‘Europe must be willing to act with us. We must go forward together.’ ⁸⁷

However, doing next to nothing allowed the Bosnian conflict to metastasize, with sizable costs to the US in terms of its prestige as a strong-willed world leader. Emboldened by the lackadaisical reaction of the US, which reached its worst point in the symbolic airstrikes in response to the attacks on the Muslim enclave of Bihać in the fall of 1994, in June 1995 the Bosnian Serbs proceeded to conquer the enclaves of Srebrenica and Žepa, leading to the summary execution of thousands of Bosnian Muslims. The disgrace of having witnessed the worst war crime in Europe since 1945 was heightened by the fact that at the same time the Bosnian Serbs had taken hostage French, Canadian and Dutch peacekeepers guarding the enclaves, despite the fact that their protection had been guaranteed by NATO. The situation threatened to go from bad to worse, as the UN considered pulling out of Bosnia altogether, which would have committed NATO, and implicitly the US, to either intervene on the ground to extricate the peacekeepers or publicly lose face.

In the aftermath of the Srebrenica massacre, the newly elected French President Jacques Chirac summed up the result of America’s lack of reaction in the face of this outrage: ‘the position of leader of the free world is now vacant’. This was not only the French assessment − Clinton himself concluded that Bosnia was ‘doing enormous damage to the United States and our standing in the world. We look weak.’ To quote Halberstam, Bosnia had become a test: ‘its importance … appeared to suggest … impotence on the part of the Clinton administration not just in this but in all matters’, particularly in the light of the US record of hasty withdrawals, inconclusive results or passivity in the face of ethnic cleansing, nuclear proliferation, human rights abuses or even genocide in such places as Somalia, Haiti, North Korea, Rwanda and Iraq. ⁸⁸

Basically, the US was facing a choice between imposing its point of view on its partners or seeing its prestige continue to decline in the eyes of the world. Thus, since it was crucial to show that the US was no longer, as Clinton put it, ‘the world’s punching bag’, a substantial change of policy was needed. Unlike the previous rounds of inconclusive negotiations when the US had taken to heart its partners’ objections, this time it adopted an explicit ‘don’t ask, tell’ attitude, which then led to several weeks of vigorous strikes against the Bosnian Serbs immediately following their next infraction. ⁸⁹ This, as it turns out, was the first step towards expansion. The US did not suddenly give up on cooperation – in fact, the major allies were represented at the subsequent peace talks in Dayton. But it was also undeniable that the settlement of the Bosnian conflict was distinctly predicated on America’s preferences.

The solution of the Bosnian conflict − which had been going on for five years − in a matter of less than four months was hailed by US decision makers as a watershed similar to the Gulf crisis. ⁹⁰ If 1990−1 had taught the US the virtues of relying on large-scale coalitions, 1995 had exposed their limitations. The conclusion of the Clinton team was therefore that the US was the only state that was able to produce concrete results. While the participation of allies was still welcomed, it was no longer seen as a sine qua non for military action. As Christopher put it, ‘the success at Dayton reaffirmed the imperative of American leadership. Some Europeans grumbled about how we had dominated the Dayton process … but … they really knew that without us the settlement would not have happened.’ ⁹¹ In this manner, Bosnia paved the way for a different policy from the established status quo, which came to be known as the ‘indispensable nation’. ⁹² The indispensable nation meant the US would singlehandedly charter the political course to follow; then, rather than offer concessions to other great powers that would have diluted or delayed the policy, America would act, dragging partners and allies in its wake through sheer strength of will. This implied that the US could not be held back by the reservations or disagreement of other states, and in so doing, America was beginning to arrogate special indulgence to act whenever and however it saw fit. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright most famously expressed this point by stating that: ‘if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and see further than other countries into the future.’ ⁹³

The indispensable nation decisively affected the US response in relation to the twin challenges of Iraq and Kosovo in 1998−9. In each case, the US was challenged by a wily strongman, who after taunting America, hid behind the protection discretely offered by some of the permanent members of the Security Council. Therefore, the US found it could not go on to soundly punish Saddam or Milošević, since on various occasions France, Russia and China refused to issue authorization, called for more time for compliance, or brokered last-minute deals with Baghdad and Belgrade. Further down the road, Saddam and Milosevic renewed their transgressions, exposing the US as an impotent hegemon in the process.

For example, the US threatened action against Iraq on four distinct occasions − December 1997 and January, August and October 1998 − without ever being able to actually employ force against Saddam for his repeated obstruction of weapon inspections. In November 1998, the US had to countermand the bombing orders on two successive days, due to last-minute accords negotiated by France and Russia. In Yugoslavia, the US warned Milošević with increasing severity to end his attacks on the Kosovars and also to pull his forces from the province on four separate occasions − February, June, July and December 1998. In each case, largely at Russia’s behest, Milosevic promised to reduce his deployment in Kosovo, only to renew his onslaught later on. ⁹⁴

Expansion, in the sense of giving up on the requirement of Security Council authorization (and hence of the other permanent members), had therefore become necessary if the US wanted to conserve its pretensions to international leadership, since it had become clear that Moscow and Beijing (or Paris, for that matter, in 2003) would not be persuaded of the need for punitive military action. In effect, by December 1998, America’s prestige was in free fall, since by extracting concessions in each crisis, Saddam had diluted the inspection process to the point that UNSCOM issued a statement that a report giving a green light for the lifting of sanctions was only weeks away. This is why the US and its closest ally Britain indicated that the very first Iraqi obstruction would automatically result in bombing. As British Prime Minister Tony Blair put it there were going to be ‘no warnings, no wrangling, no negotiations, no last minute letters’. ⁹⁵ When Iraq again restricted UNSCOM’s access in December, the US and Britain replied in a matter of days with a swift bombing campaign that paid little attention to the vehement protestations of France, Russia and China. ⁹⁶

Similarly, after the massacre of 30 Kosovars at the village of Račak in January 1999, the US decision makers agreed that their only recourse was to use force against Milošević without waiting any longer for the assent of the Security Council. The events at Račak vindicated Albright, who had pressed for intervention all along, warning that continued inaction in Kosovo would hurt America’s prestige. As she put it, Kosovo

was emerging as a key test of American leadership and of the relevance and effectiveness of NATO … And we would look like fools for proclaiming the alliance’s readiness for the twenty-first century when we were unable to cope with a conflict that began in the fourteenth.

America’s course of threatening retaliation, while vainly searching for a multilateral solution, was increasingly seen as a policy of ‘muddling through’ that would have reduced the hegemon to a condition of ‘a gerbil running on a wheel’ only to face the same problem further down the road. ⁹⁷ So eager was the US to avoid conveying the impression of vacillation that it eschewed appealing to the Security Council and this time around did not even consider claiming legitimacy from the many previous UN resolutions on Kosovo, as it had done in Operation Desert Fox. ⁹⁸

The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was also conditioned by concerns over America’s prestige as a hegemon. The key Bush decision makers, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney believed that 9/11 had to be answered by more than just a retaliatory campaign in Afghanistan against al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts. Rumsfeld was convinced that ‘weakness was provocative’, that America’s exercise of restraint in the 1990s had emboldened its enemies to escalate their challenges, and that toppling the Taliban was not enough to prove America’s continued strength and will. ‘The United States’, Rumsfeld argued, ‘needed to do more to demonstrate that there were serious consequences for mounting an attack on the US and show it would not suffer any unsavory governments that were affiliated with terrorists’. ⁹⁹ In a similar vein in the aftermath of 9/11, according to his foreign policy advisors, Aaron Friedberg and Stephen Yates, Cheney thought that ‘the United States could not destroy every potential foe, unseat every hostile government, but tackling one would send a powerful message to the rest’. Consequently, what was needed in Cheney’s view was a ‘demonstration effect’, to show that ‘we were able and willing to strike at someone. That sends a very powerful message.’ ¹⁰⁰

A second act was therefore required in the Global War on Terror in order to send the world an appropriate signal of America’s sustained strength and will after suffering an embarrassing setback on 9/11. Afghanistan was obviously where the perpetrators were located, but it failed to satisfy the requirements for an adequate showcase of might in two respects. First, because of the mountainous terrain and scarcity of targets any military action would sooner or later have assumed the character of a tedious police hunt. Second, at the time neither the Taliban nor al Qaeda had a prominent profile as a challenger. Therefore, tackling Saddam, who had been vilified for over a decade as America’s nemesis, and whose country was both more significant to Arab public opinion because of its location, and more vulnerable to attack because of the lie of the land and the weakened state of its military, was seen as a much more profitable exercise than chasing after al Qaeda. In effect, attacking Iraq in addition to, if not instead of, Afghanistan, was proposed from the very first National Security Council meetings following 9/11. ¹⁰¹

To sum up: for revivalism, the key to US expansion is the goal the US wanted to achieve. The choice of this goal was itself the product of strategic interactions, chiefly of US decision makers’ perceptions of other states’ actions and of their prognosis as to the international reaction to America’s policies.

Conclusion

Based on the above analysis, revivalism, which emphasizes the role of international interactions in shaping foreign policy, emerges as the most promising avenue for developing a realist theory of foreign policy. This is not necessarily surprising as this school departs the most from Waltz’s insistence on systemic constraints, while bringing back the insights of the forefathers of classical realism regarding the goals that states entertain.

To this extent, the revivalism brand of neoclassical realism does the most to actually live up to its name, by comparison with the first two schools. The term ‘neoclassical’ originated in eighteenth-century literature and fine arts, where it designated a return to the original principles of ancient Roman and Greek artists. ¹⁰² Yet this is not the way neoclassical realism has developed up until recently: rather than rekindling interest in the realists of yore, the theory’s mission was to achieve a synthesis between classical realism’s alleged, but never demonstrated, emphasis on domestic politics and neorealism’s structural premises, and in the process emerge as a theory superior to both. ¹⁰³ This agenda may be rectified by the emerging revivalism that suggests that the best way to conceive of a theory of foreign policy consists in bringing back into the limelight the insights of classical realism, especially those regarding the significance of international non-structural variables in foreign policy making.

One may well object that such a development would result in a loss of theoretical parsimony. As Waltz puts it: ‘in making assumptions about men’s or states’ motivations, the world must be drastically simplified, subtleties must be rudely pushed aside, and reality must be grossly distorted’ for the purpose of building a theory of international politics. Yet in so doing he himself admits that states’ motives are actually diverse: ‘if states have not one but many goals, as surely they have … then one can never hope to fashion a theory’. ¹⁰⁴ Thus one could argue that the reduction in parsimony is well compensated by explanatory accuracy in accounting for the world as it is, not as it should ideally be for the sake of theoretical convenience. It is precisely this complexity and ensuing ‘messiness’ of states’ international behavior that is the stuff of everyday politics, and as such should be the bread and butter of neoclassical realism, justifying Schweller’s description as the only game in town for the current and next generation of realists. This is so, according to Schweller, because neoclassical realism is the only realist theory that captures the concrete, political dimension of international relations. ¹⁰⁵ Thus, despite frequent claims that neoclassical realism has gone too far by smuggling in variables pertaining to other theories, and as a result may no longer represent realism at all, this article concludes that the opposite may be true. Neoclassical realism has not yet gone far enough in shedding orthodox structural thinking – something that would actually reaffirm realism. ¹⁰⁶

This leads to the most significant challenge neoclassical realists of all hues have to confront in the future: how best to build upon the rich insights of classical realism without ending up reiterating structural realism. Even though foreign policy analysis all too often constitutes a frustrating exercise, fraught with research into the anomalous, the atypical, the paradoxical and the downright strange, this is not a mission impossible.