Moving

Hi there – this blog is moving! Originally intended to cross post from my group blog at Kings of War, I’ve decided just to post directly there, for the time being. Come visit…

KP

Calling all Afghan experts

Can you help me? In his statement today about the latest British deaths in Afghanistan, Air Chief Marshal Jock Stirrup argues that Helmand is the key to defeating the Taliban:

the Taliban have rightly identified Helmand as their vital ground. If they lose there then they lose everywhere and they are throwing everything they have into it.

That’s strong stuff. Is it right?

Telling tales

Influence is all the rage: persuading key audiences that your ideas are right is seen by many as the key to success in our fight with militant Islamists of various stripes.

Surely it should be easy enough to obtain influence through our ‘strategic communications‘ with the Muslim world. After all, we’ve got a good story to tell – our values deliver prosperity and individual freedoms. What we need to do, clearly, is make sure our messages to Muslims are factual, truthful and consistent (these days its easy to get caught in a lie). Naturally, the messages should reflect our values: we want the audience to know what they’re missing out with all this takfiri repression. And telling the story should be easy – we’ve got the best minds in advertising, marketing, media and design.

What could possibly go wrong?

Somehow, it turns out that this well-meaning model of influence hasn’t been all that effective. Many of the studies on strategic communications put this down to bureaucracy – we need more money, different organizational structures, better minds – the ‘best and brightest’, even. A good survey is this recent RAND report [pdf]. Others suggest that its the result of our foreign policies – the best communications strategies in the world are just lipsticking the pig. Perhaps President Obama’s more sophisticated approach will sweeten the pill of western values. A third group suggest that the problem is our vague, incoherent message – in contrast to the allegedly simple, coherent line put out by the enemy: we don’t have a clear narrative, they do. I’m not persuaded, either that ‘their’ story is simple or coherent, or even that having a simple consistent story is the elixir.

I think there’s more to it. Why won’t they believe us? This Defense Science Board study has a stab at an answer [pdf]:

To be effective, strategic communicators must understand attitudes and cultures, [and] respect the importance of ideas. [...] To be persuasive, they must be credible.

Credibility. How to get that, if telling the truth doesn’t cut it? I’m writing a paper about this at the moment, so won’t spill all the beans. But as a tease – it turns out that theories of cognitive and constructionist psychology can tell us a great deal about how people receive and process incoming information. This offers some good clues as to why factual messages about attractive values have little traction with target audiences and, into the bargain, provides some insights on how to better achieve credibility and influence.

Oddly, this huge body of rigorous psychological literature doesn’t feature all that much in the recent strategic communication and influence work. Theorists of COIN, wars amongst the people, and so on have drawn in part on marketing and advertising, which – to some extent, of course – rest on psychology and sociology. This earlier RAND study is a fine example of that, and makes many good points. And yet the literature is on the whole maddeningly vague, beyond the commonplace thought that these wars are about ideas and persuasion.

So then, from cognitive psychology, we have theories of dissonance, bias, judgmental heuristics, analogical reasoning. And from constructionism, concepts of identity, mythology and memory. Communities are, to some degree, imagined by their members. The thrust of all this is that people are not passive recipients of information, that their identities are to some extent constructed, and therefore unfixed, but that these beliefs – once acquired – are stubborn to shift, even in the face of ostensibly plausible new information.

Frank Kitson once wrote that:

It is in men’s minds that wars of subversion have to be fought and decided.

That sounds right. But Kitson left it there, concluding ruefully that the area was

so hedged around with imponderables that no useful purpose would be served by further speculation in this context. Perhaps some qualified person will take the matter up later on, and research it in a scientific way.

Can we help him – and can you help me? Where are the psychologists who will do for COIN what David Kilcullen has done from an anthropological perspective? Any reading suggestions greatly appreciated, as always.

Here’s one from me: If you’re interested in the state of the art, Matt Armstrong has the best blog around on strategic communications.

Kenneth Payne

Kajaki revisited

You remember the story. It was a triumph of British military cunning, as a giant hydroelectric turbine was smuggled through the desert, past Taliban ambushes, and installed at the Kajaki dam on the Helmand River. The effort was a clear signal to the locals that the British were serious about their welfare, and were there for the long haul. With the new turbine, power generation and irrigation on a much larger scale would be possible.

I was reminded of all this fine sentiment when reading Eric Newby’s very funny book, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, recounting his travels in Afghanistan in 1956 – 3 years after the Kajaki dam was completed, by American contractors.

Sticky with melon, we arrived at a town called Girishk on the Helmand River. There, under a mulberry tree, squatted the proprietor of a chaie khana [tea shop], a long-headed, grey-bearded Pathan, chanting a dirge on the passing of a newly founded civilisation, no new thing in this part of the world.

‘There is no light in the bazaar. the Americans brought light when they came to build the great dam, but when they left they took the machine with them, and now there is no more light. [...] Once I worked in a German woollen mill but now I am poor; we are all poor.’

[...] We asked him about the dam, that vast scheme of which so much vague ill had been spoken all along the way.

‘It is all salt,’ he moaned, ‘the land below the American dam. They did not trouble to find out and now the people will eat salt for ever and ever.’

We rose to leave.

‘You will be in Kandahar in two hours’ he went on. ‘The Americans build the road; they have not taken that away.’

This environmental degradation has affected not just local Afghans, but the delicate ecosystem across the border in eastern Iran, where the Helmand drains into Lake Hamun. There’s long been an agreement between the two countries about the level of water that should flow across the border, but it hasn’t always worked in practice – the Taliban, in particular, cut the flow dramatically. There have been social consequences too, with displaced Afghanis moving into the eastern Iranian province, and Iranian farmers moving out as competition for resources drives down the productivity of their land.

Still, I’m sure more thought has been put into things this time round.

Eric Newby in the Hindu Kush, 1956
photographed by his traveling companion Hugh Carless

Are British soldiers mercenaries?

The paper by Hew Strachan I mentioned last time makes another intriguing point:

The British armed forces are composed of volunteers who have enlisted because soldiering is their chosen career: in this sense (rather than in any pejorative sense) they are mercenaries. Britain has no tradition that men serve in the armed forces out of civic obligation, partly because it escaped the Rousseauist legacy of the French Revolution but principally because home defence has not been a prime requirement of strategy.

 I think that on this point, Professor Strachan draws the contrast between the military and civilian society too starkly. Civic obligation might not require that most British men serve, but nonetheless, I am sure that a great many of those who do are motivated by an idea of Britain and of its values, as well as by the desire to pursue their vocation in the military profession.

There is, however, a bigger point here about civil-military relations, and the separateness of the military from wider society – and on this I’m in complete agreement with Strachan. The military is necessarily different from the rest of liberal, postmodern British society, not least because – as I’ve written - its members must have a different view on killing and being killed than do many of us civilians. 
 
More broadly, the armed forces have a moral ethos that is radically different from societal liberalism that emphasises the individual’s worth. As Strachan writes:

The armed forces believe that they cleave to higher moral standards than civil society; that they elevate the collective good over individual needs; and that they do both for excellent reasons. Why, they ask, should they be required to forfeit such qualities? And, if they do, is there not a danger that they will fail in the next war? [...] The underlying tension in civil-military relations resides in the fact that civil society is predicated on an expectation of peace, whereas military society anticipates war.

This is convincing – the values of the British army have been tested in battle. I would though, add two important caveats: first, civil society does not always fit the neat liberal label I’ve given it. I suspect that old fashioned notions of patriotism, sacrifice and the greater good are still held by a great many civilians too. After all, many soldiers serve only a few years before returning to civilian society themselves. And second, soldiers may cede some of their rights as individuals while still holding to the importance of those values for wider society.

The article, well worth a read if you’ve got access, was written in 2003. Since then there has been much fretting within the armed forces about their relationship with wider society – what’s called the military covenant. One unpopular war in Iraq, and a troubled one in Afghanistan have exacerbated these concerns. But as public trust in other institutions crumbles, the military convenant seemingly remains strong.

Liberals like me seem to recognise that protecting our values sometimes requires the employment of people who voluntarily opt out of our ethical code. In that sense, Strachan’s point about mercenaries makes sense, provided the term is understood non-pejoratively, as he suggests. As a society, we have contracted out our defence to a group of people who espouse different values.

Political soldiers?

Should serving military leaders be openly political?  In a provocative paper a few years ago, Hew Strachan argued that they should. Not necessarily in the party political sense, though he thinks that mightn’t be a bad idea too; but in the sense of being willing to openly engage with and critique the defence policies of the day: the ‘politics of professional self-interest [...] not of the individual, but of the profession’.

The armed forces of the United Kingdom have been hoodwinked by the model of civil-military relations propounded by Samuel Huntington in The Soldier and the State: they are professional, therefore they are apolitical.

An apolitical military is unlikely to park its tanks on the Downing Street lawn, but it is also one that is divorced from the attitudes of the wider public. Without open political advocacy, the relationship between the military and the public suffers, as important debates happen behind the scenes and without scrutiny. Strachan argued that

the services, by subscribing to a theoretical norm, have lapsed into anonymity. Public ignorance of their concerns is largely their fault.

In Clausewitzian terms, the passion for warfare originates largely in the civil population. Without the engagement of the people in the wars of the day, the armed forces and their government are in a fix.

Since he wrote that paper in 2003, things have changed somewhat.  Lately there’s been an increasing willingness on the part of senior officers to publicly air their views on strategy, procurement, and a range of other issues.

This weekend, for example, Air Chief Marshal Sir Glenn Torpy, Britain’s senior airman, took to the pages of the Telegraph, to argue that the RAF should take over all fixed wing flying: ‘We have got to kill some sacred cows to make ourselves more efficient,’ he averred. The sacred cow in question is the Navy’s Fleet Air Arm.

A week earlier, it was the turn of head of the Royal Navy, Admiral Sir Jonathon Band, to argue the case for the Navy’s new aircraft carriers. ‘I am not volunteering for the second division,’ he said. ‘While Afghanistan is rightly our priority it is not the only show in town.’

His adversary here is his senior Army colleague, General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, who argued in May that the defence capabilities

we will field over the next decade are largely a legacy of decisions taken 20 years ago rather than a true reflection of what we need today. [...] At present I can only take the view that Defence is over-investing in the far future at the expense of relevance for the threats we face today and in the medium term.

And so, a three-way argument about the future of Britain’s armed forces is underway at the top of the services. This debate is increasingly playing out in public, as the service chiefs adapt their bureaucratic skills to the cut and thrust of public argument. Richard Dannatt might have been reading Strachan’s paper as he drafted his speech:

the degree of public understanding and awareness of the nature and extent of the threats we face, now and in the future, and the role of the Armed Forces in tackling those threats, is probably as low as I have known it to be – and that is not the fault of the general public.

The debate between the service chiefs has partly been a response to that lack of public understanding and engagement, coupled with two aggravating factors:

First, there has been an acute lack of political direction from the government of the day. Earlier, I posted about the Korean War dispute between President Truman and General MacArthur. One of the enduring lessons of that episode was Truman’s recognition of the need for sustained and informed civilian input in shaping strategy. In the UK, the sixth Defence Secretary in the last decade has just begun work. With a half-life of about a year, it will be a considerable achievement for him to acquire the necessary experience and influence to shape the military for the longer term.

Second, the stagnant or declining resource base available for defence spending is concentrating minds. If strategy is about choice, tough choices are coming the way of the British military. With a new national security strategy in the works, a Strategic Defence Review likely, and a general election too, we should expect more overt politicking from the armed forces than we have been used to.

Whilst attention is focused on what sort of platforms we should procure, the debate between the services might not seem that important. But the issue is far more profound – it is about the role that Britain should aspire to in world affairs, about the utility of force, and the character of war. The more heated the argument between the Chiefs gets, and the more openly politicized the military becomes, the better for all of us.

Truman, MacArthur and all that…

Things have taken a decidedly military turn over at Andreas Kluth’s always fascinating Hannibal Blog, with a discussion on the lessons of Clausewitz, followed by one on strategy, tactics, and leadership.

Andreas picks out the Korean war spat between General Douglas MacArthur and President Truman on the advisability of  using nuclear weapons.  MacArthur, under pressure on the battlefield, favoured expanding the war into China, using nuclear weapons if necessary. Truman disagreed, and MacArthur, iconic American hero, was unceremoniously sacked. 

As Andreas sees it, the problem is that MacArthur was fighting tactically, focused on the immediate battlefield. Truman, however, saw the big strategic picture and didn’t want to escalate for fear of bringing in the Soviets. Strategy should trump tactics, and so MacArthur had to go.

For me, though, the main lesson is not about tactics versus strategy - I think the spat was about strategy, on which the two men had conflicting perspectives. It’s what the episode tells us about leadership and personality, not strategy and tactics, that captures my attention. 

The dispute opens up interesting territory about tensions between civilian and military leadership in war. But there’s a danger here: excessive reductivism.  

I’ve just been reading Bernard Brodie’s classic book, War and Politics. Brodie’s thesis is that while there’s always the potential for clashing military and civilian perspectives on war, the civilian should always triumph. He was writing in 1973, in the shadow of the Vietnam war.

There’s a chapter in his book on Korea, in which Brodie excoriates MacArthur:

Such men are dangerous. One almost has to be grateful to MacArthur for finally making himself so flagrantly and publicly insubordinate as to provoke dismissal  from his patient and too long abused President.

Truman, though, doesn’t escape completely. Brodie is sure that US forces could have made much deeper inroads into the Communist forces under MacArthur’s replacement Matthew Ridgway. With new commanders in place, US forces were soon on the front foot, blunting Communist offensives with such effectiveness that they were ‘ripe for destruction’. But then came orders from Washington not to press home their advantage. As Brodie writes:

I have hitherto been stressing the all-important idea that politics must control strategy, but this conception does not exclude the need for responsiveness to feedback from the fighting fronts.  In this case the military situation could not have been better.

 The tension between military and political perspectives is always with us. We see it in the Cuban missile crisis; in the conduct of coercive bombing in Vietnam; in the dispute between Rumsfeld and Shinseki over Iraq. We see it in the UK too, in the relationship between Downing Street and General Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff.

But there are big two problems with this picture. First, as Brodie notes, politics should properly have primacy, but that doesn’t excuse politicians from not reflecting adequately on the advice of their military subordinates. They must make themselves sufficiently involved and informed in military affairs to have a sensible perspective on strategic issues.

Second, characterising tension as being primarily between military and civilian mindsets, which we often do, risks oversimplifying the range of factors involved.

Sometimes in war and politics, where you stand depends on where you sit – as Graham Allison argued in his classic book – but sometimes it doesnt.

In Korea, MacArthur and many of his subordinate commanders favoured expanding the conflict. But back in Washington, it wasn’t simply Truman against the military: the Chiefs also saw things the President’s way. Samuel Huntington (yes, that one) tells the story in his great account of US civil-military relations, The Soldier and the State:

The extent to which the generals as a group of field commanders were out of sympathy with the policy of the government probably had few precedents in American history.

And yet, once the Administration had resolved that the Korean war would have limited aims, which in turn would limit the approach to operations,

all the civilian and military leaders of the administration – the President, Acheson, Marshall, Lovett, Bradley, the Joint Chiefs – were in agreement on this fundamental concept.

Not all Generals think alike – for every Franks, there is a Shinseki. Nor do all civilians – Rumsfeld and Gates have dramatically different views on the utility of force.

In the end, bureaucratic and organisational loyalties are just part of an individual’s personality. Truman wasn’t just any President, and MacArthur was much more than just another sabre rattling General. As Truman himself said:

Men make history , and not the other way around.

Obama: Conservative realist

I’ve just finished reading Paul Berman’s Power and the Idealists – a cracking good read, which, as with his Terror and Liberalism, makes some telling points on the totalitarian nature of Al Qa’eda’s ideology and its echoes of earlier, European, totalitarianism.

Towards the end, he delivers an intriguing insight: that the once radical ‘68ers, Joschka Fischer and Bernard Kouchner, have belatedly found much common foreign policy ground with George W. Bush. These three men traveled a long way from opposite ends of the political spectrum to meet together in broad agreement that individual human rights matter in international affairs, sometimes more than state sovereignty, and that sometimes its worth fighting for them.

What’s more, the three would characterize today’s conflict between AQ and the west as one between rival ideologies, totalitarian and liberal. And, like Tony Blair, the personification of this fusion of liberal activism and neo-conservatism, they wouldn’t be averse to intervention to protect individual and group rights from brutal leaders, and to promote societal change. That might not have been the reason that Bush got into Iraq, but it became his leitmotif once the situation deteriorated there.

Where does that leave Obama and his agenda for change? You might think he’d be in tune with Kouchner and Fischer, but no. In fact, Obama sometimes sounds a bit like George W. did, before his conversion to democracy-promoting evangelical.

Here he is, on the campaign trail, in Powell Doctrine mode:

As Commander-in-Chief, I will never hesitate to defend this nation, but I will only send our troops into harm’s way with a clear mission and a sacred commitment to give them the equipment they need in battle and the care and benefits they deserve when they come home.

Here he is, arguing against the surge in 2007, and arguing too for the Iraqi version of Nixon’s Vietnamization strategy, because in his view intervention by outsiders cannot achieve political change:

In the end, no amount of American forces can solve the political differences that lie at the heart of somebody else’s civil war. As the President’s own military commanders have said, escalation only prevents the Iraqis from taking more responsibility for their own future.

Lawrence Eagleburger, Secretary of State for Bush Sr, once argued similarly about the Balkans. ‘This tragedy is not something that can be settled from outside’, he said: the quote is from Richard Holbrooke’s insider account To End a War.  ‘Until the Bosnians, Serbs and Croats decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it,’ he concluded. Colin Powell, who stayed on as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the first months of the Clinton administration, thought in similarly conservative terms: No President, in his view, could ‘likely sustain the long-term involvement necessary to keep the protagonists going at each others throats all over again at the earliest opportunity’. Ancient hatreds were not susceptible to liberal intervention.

And when it comes to nation-building, Obama is skeptical of the west’s ability to actively reshape other societies. Here he is in a recent interview:

What we can do is make sure that Afghanistan is not a safe haven for al Qa’eda. What we can do is make sure that it is not destabilizing neighboring Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons. [...] We are not going to be able to rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy.

Again, Colin Powell, reflecting on an earlier intervention, comes to mind: ‘Somalia was not an African version of a western state,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘Nation building … struck me as a way to get bogged down in Somalia, not get out.’ And get out they did. ‘We could not substitute our version of democracy for hundreds of years of tribalism,’ Powell recalled telling President Clinton.

One word for Obama’s position is realist, another is conservative. The chaos of the last few years in Iraq and Afghanistan should concentrate the minds of anyone who favours radical, liberal interventionism to redress wrongs in other countries. Such conservative realism might, though, be a difficult sell for a man so publicly committed to change.

Assassination norms

State assassination, the targeted killing of named individuals by state actors or their proxies, has been frowned upon since at least the early 17th century. It’s still not quite the done thing, but there’s more of it about than you might think: So far in Pakistan, there have been about 50 strikes by armed American UAVs, according to reporting by Bill Roggio at the Long War Journal. Not all of these appear to have been at named individuals (rather than aimed at training camps, for example), but many were.

The question then: Is assassination becoming more acceptable and widespread, and if so, why?

In a fascinating article and book chapter, Ward Thomas traces the development of the norm against state assassinations. His epigraph comes from Voltaire:

Killing a man is murder unless you do it to the sound of trumpets.

That’s certainly been the view in international relations.

Norms usually have both a moral and practical dimension, and, while you could make a good moral case for certain types of assassination, it was chiefly the practical dimension that shaped the strong proscriptive norm against it. As states became more effective at organising and financing large conventional forces, so they privileged this sort of military activity over others.

That’s not to say that state assassinations went away – even in the hardest case, a state plotting to kill the leadership of a rival state – we have a few good examples from the 20th century: the US plots against Castro, and Patrice Lumumba, for example. There are a few more cases where state involvement is strongly suspected: for example, the Syrian government’s role in the assassination of Lebanon’s Phalangist President-elect Bashir Gemayal in 1982, or the killing of its former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005.

But the degree of secrecy (key memos about Castro and Lumumba were only released in 2007, for example), combined with the relative paucity of cases, suggests that state action is heavily influenced by the expectation that they will not indulge in such underhand activities.

Not all assassinations, however, are equally problematic for states. The assassination of non-state actors has been a relatively frequent occurrence in recent decades. Both Israel and the US have regularly and successfully engaged in activities of this type, against various Palestinian groups and AQ respectively. Moreover, it’s easier to assassinate during ongoing hostilities than it is in other circumstances, because outside of war, the assassination norm is strengthened by other norms against either preventive war or reprisals.

In the sort of protracted irregular wars that we see fought today, these factors often blur together. Was the assassination of Hezbollah’s Imad Mugniyah, or the botched assassination of Hamas leader Khaled Mishal, or the aborted US assassination attempts against bin Laden, conducted as reprisals, for pre-emptive reasons, or as part of ongoing hostilities? All three factors, clearly, were in the mix. A similar case could be made about the 1986 US raid on Tripoli, with the added twist of the involvement of a state leader on the receiving end.

If, on the other hand, you wanted to wage a covert preventive war against Iran’s nuclear programme by assassinating its nuclear scientists, your action would cut against the general proscription on preventive war, the proscription on assassination, and the legal (though not necessarily moral) distinction between military and civilian targets. Add in the element of state sovereignty, as opposed to an irregular adversary, and it clearly wouldn’t be sensible to advertise that sort of activity.

Among other factors, then, the norm against assassination is weakened when states are acting clearly in self-defence, or when they can make strong consequentialist arguments about avoiding widespread casualties. An example of the latter is the failed US effort to assassinate Saddam Hussein immediately before the ground invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is further weakened by the involvement of non-state targets, and by the location of the killing being in under-governed territory, like Somalia, the Occupied Territories, or the FATA. Finally, it’s weakened still further by the development of new technologies, chiefly persistent and precise air power, which together reduces the risk of detection, while allowing more  discriminate force.

In his work, Ward Thomas concludes that the norm against assassination is weakening in recent times, the product of more prevalent and challenging terrorist and irregular adversaries; and (less convincingly, I think) an appreciation by states of the destructive nature of modern war. I suspect he’s right about the former, and would go further. The hold that the norm has had over states has rested chiefly on practical concerns, most notably the privileging of conventional military force at which states have a marked comparative advantage. The application of such conventional force, however, is of diminished utility against irregular, footlose opponents.  Targeted killing, on the other hand, is effective, cheap, and comparatively low-risk.

Reading realists

Those crazy classical realists spent too much time thinking about power, didn’t they? It’s their fault that IR, including strategic studies, became overly reductive and increasingly obsessed with a material ontology, rather than the role of ideas. Right?

Well, no. They were certainly interested in power and states, but we sometimes forget now how rich their writing was. Take Hans Morgenthau, who in a burst of prototype constructivism, wrote about the role of ideas and culture in shaping state behaviour:

National character cannot fail to influence national power; for those who act for the nation in peace and war, formulate, execute, and support its policies, elect and are elected, mould public opinion, produce and consume – they all bear to a greater or lesser degree those intellectual and moral qualities which make up the national character. [Politics Among Nations]

Raymond Aron also saw the importance of ideas in explaining policy decisions: power was about much more than security for him.

A collectivity does not desire power for itself, but in order to achieve some other goal – peace, glory – so as to be able to influence the future of humanity through the propagating of an idea. [...] One cannot suppose, even in a simplifying hypothesis, that a collectivitiy has no other objective than to possess the maximum means of acting on others. [Peace and War: A theory of International Relations]

Even EH Carr, strident realist though he was, found room both morals and the role of beliefs in shaping state behaviour:

[...] it is an unreal kind of realism which ignores the element of morality in any world order. Just as within the state every government, though it needs power as a basis of its authority, also needs the moral basis of the consent of the governed, so an international order cannot be based on power alone, for the simple reason that mankind will in the long run always revolt against naked power. [The Twenty Years Crisis]

Too often we, or at least I, have been guilty of lazily seeing their scholarship through a filter of a half century of positivist structural realism. I’ve been reading Duncan Bell’s recent International Affairs article, about the intellectual history of IR. It might, as he notes himself, seem a bit narcissistic to study the history of ideas in your own discipline, rather than the history of ideas in the world itself – but as he shows, the effort is worth it.

The standard narrative of IR has the realist scholars triumphing over the misplaced idealism of the interwar liberals, before themselves being supplanted by a new, more rigourous realism, rooted in positivist, scientific approaches that have dominated the discipline (in America at least) right up to the present day. It’s a story, as Bell notes, that is either told

in the register of decline, as signalling the rejection of a rich and multifaceted understanding of political life in favour of a misplaced (even dangerous) obsession with science, or as a tale of victory, of the welcome transition from maddeningly vague and unsystematic attempts to comprehend the world to a proper social-scientific enterprise.

But the story itself, though with enough truth to it to be credible, is a bold oversimplification, as those three quotes from the classical realists show.

This is a theme I’ve picked up from two other recent readings – Michael Howard’s lectures on War and Liberal Conscience from the late seventies, still in print and remarkably fresh; and a paper in International Organization a few years ago by Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink on how norms change.

First, Howard reminds the reader that liberal idealism about war has a much longer and more multifaceted history than the standard story of IR might suggest, focused as it is on the brief bubbling of idealism in the interwar years, which makes  a good contrast for the triumph of the post-war classical realists. Eclipsed, that liberalism never went away, from either the discipline of IR or the practice of international affairs.

Second Finnemore and Sikkink, among much other fascinating stuff, repeat the point that beneath the surface of (largely structural) realism, scholarship that reflected on the role of ideas went quiet, but didn’t stop.

The moral, if there is one – if you read the old stuff too, a much longer and richer history of international behaviour emerges than that seen through the half-century old prism of structural realism.