The hell of good intentions

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Notes

¹ See John Mearsheimer, ‘Reckless States and Realism’, International Relations 23 (2009); for a critique of this approach, see James Fearon, ‘Rationalist Explanations for War’, International Organization 49 (Summer 1995).

² For a recent and dire report, see Daniel R. DePetris, ‘The War on terror’s total cost: $5,900,000,000,000’, National Interest, 12 January 2019, Available at: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/skeptics/war-terrors-total-cost-5900000000000-41307

³ See David Samuels, ‘The Aspiring Novelist who became Obama’s Foreign-policy Guru’, The New York Times Magazine, 5 May 2016.

⁴ Mary Elise Sarotte, ‘A Broken Promise: What the West Really Told Moscow about NATO expansion’, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014.

⁵ I write this sentence in Bordeaux, where the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ have taken to the streets.

⁶ Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, ‘Realism, Liberalism and the Iraq War’, Survival 59 (2017); and Patrick Porter, ‘Iraq: A Liberal War After all; A Critique of Dan Deudney and John Ikenberry’, International Politics 55 (November 2017).

⁷ On this see Patrick Porter, Blunder: Britain’s War in Iraq (Oxford University Press 2018).

⁸ See John Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (Yale University Press 2018).

⁹ See Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: the Politics of Insecurity (Harvard University Press 2009), and also Campbell Craig, ‘The Not-So-Strange Career of Charles Beard’, Diplomatic History 25 (March 2001), ‘American Realism vs American Imperialism,’ World Politics 57 (October 2004), and Fredrik Logevall, ‘A Critique of Containment’, Diplomatic History 28 (September 2004).

¹⁰ Securitisation refers to the political process of attempting to transform an issue into a matter of security and thus shutting down dissent and debate. See Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Lynne Rienner 1998) .

¹¹ See Matthew Kroenig, The Logic of Nuclear Strategy (Oxford University Press 2018).

¹² StephenWaltandJohnMearsheimer,‘TheCaseforOffshore-Balancing’, Foreign Affairs, 95 July/August 2016; on the inevitability of a new great-power rivalry with China, see John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great-power Politics (Norton 2001).

¹³ This same question is also asked in explaining the absence of traditional military balancing against the United States after the Cold War: see William Wohlforth and Stephen Brooks, America Abroad (Oxford University Press 2016); and Nuno Monteiro, Theory of Unipolar Politics (Cambridge University Press 2014).

¹⁴ See Eric Van Rythoven, ‘The Perils of Realist Advocacy and the Promise of Securitization Theory:  Revisiting the Tragedy of the Iraq War Debate’, European Journal of International Relations 22 (2016), 487–511

¹⁵ See Daniel Deudney, Bounding Power (Princeton University Press 2007). On classical realists like Morgenthau reaching the same conclusion, see Campbell Craig, Glimmer of a New Leviathan (Columbia University Press 2003).