"Progressive Realism" and International Law
Almost a decade ago, when I was blogging at Foreign Policy magazine, the well-known realist scholar Stephen Walt was a fellow FP blogger. Then as now, Walt was an articulate advocate of restraint in U.S. foreign policy and an acerbic critic of U.S. military adventures in Iraq, Libya, and many other places.
During the debate surrounding the 2011 Libya intervention, Walt several times referenced what he saw as the Obama administration’s abuse of the UN Security Council resolution that authorized intervention. As most readers will recall, that resolution authorized the use of force to protect civilians. As the intervention ground on, however, the Western military campaign morphed into a regime-change operation, leading some Security Council diplomats to argue that the West had gone well beyond its international mandate.
Walt was among those making this criticism. “[A} commitment to multilateralism and international law,” he wrote at the time, “is not something you can invoke when it suits you and ignore when it doesn’t, at least not without paying a price. Powerful states like the United States can (and do) act with impunity on occasion, but they shouldn’t be surprised when such behavior backfires later on.” Given the traditional realist insistence that international law is little more than flimsy and self-serving rhetoric, this argumentation struck me as odd. I wrote at the time that Walt’s arguments (almost) amounted to an endorsement of international law as a mechanism for encouraging restraint by powerful states:
My own guess (maybe more of a hope) is that Walt may be tiptoeing toward making a realist case for international institutions and law. The argument might run like this: in a world where damaging and potentially catastrophic conflict is always possible, the primary political virtues are prudence and restraint (something classical realists have long argued). International law and institutions in many respects attempt to build up habits of prudence by requiring that action–particularly military force–clear certain procedural hurdles, notably the Security Council veto. The realist will never believe that political leaders would follow organizational rules or international law out of any sense of obligation. But maybe leaders can be convinced that following the rules is almost always the most prudent course.
If I recall correctly, Walt insisted that I misunderstood realism and denied that there was any tension between his criticism of the Obama administration’s capacious interpretation of its Security Council mandate and the traditional realist reluctance to see international law as meaningful. I’ve thought about that exchange recently as a new debate swirls in certain circles about values, international law, and the foreign policy goals of the Biden administration.
The protagonists in this latest skirmish (at least the parts of it that I have seen) have been Michael McFaul, a well-known academic and former U.S. ambassador, and noted author and blogger Robert Wright. As the Biden administration gathers, McFaul has been bursting at the seams with ideas about how to build democracy promotion into the U.S. foreign policy machine and the multilateral architecture. (This essay in American Purpose offers a good synthesis of his recommendations).
For Wright, McFaul’s zeal for rejuvenated U.S. democracy promotion is a nightmare.
Alarm that the views represented by McFaul may be taking hold in the coming administration prompted Wright to pen a “grand unified theory” of what he describes as progressive realism. Wright sees this doctrine as an important antidote from the political left to the pathologies of U.S. exceptionalism and messianism. It echoes much of what prominent realists have been arguing for decades, including warnings about the dangers of a Manichaean view of the world. In his piece, Wright echoes realism’s encouragement of strategic humility and approvingly cites realist luminaries such as Hans Morgenthau.
So what is really new about this progressive variant of realism? That’s where international law comes in. On Wright’s telling, a critical element of progressive realism is respect for international rules:
[P]rogressive realists are more likely than conservative realists to couch that respect in terms of international law. One reason is their belief that effective international governance will require robust international laws and norms. Another reason is the recognition that, had the United States abided strictly by international law over the past couple of decades, a number of big mistakes — such as the invasion of Iraq and the proxy intervention in Syria — wouldn’t have happened.
And that brings me back to the 2011 exchange with Walt and the question of whether realism and international law cannot at long last walk arm-in-arm in a campaign to subdue superpower hubris. I’m hopeful that we may soon hear what traditional realists like Walt make of Wright’s formulation.
For my part, I’d offer a couple of questions about Wright’s heavy reliance on international law as the distinctive feature of progressive realism. First, the international law that Wright invokes is just one part of international law: the jus ad bellum. Understandably, he is laser focused on whether military intervention has international legal authority. But such a limited focus ignores swathes of international law—including human rights law, the Genocide Convention, and law surrounding crimes against humanity—that tug in a more proselytizing direction. Before jus ad bellum purists cry foul, I am not arguing here that massive violations of human rights create legal authorization for military intervention (although there are certainly international lawyers who make that case). I’m simply pointing out that McFaul and others have plenty of international law on their side of the ledger when they insist that democracy promotion and human rights should be central to U.S. foreign policy.
Wright’s formulation also comes very close to reifying UN Security Council authorization as the determinant of the wisdom of a military intervention. Wright skirts this problem when it comes to Libya by arguing, as did Walt and others, that the West abused its legal authority. So what might have been a troubling data point—a wildly unwise intervention with full legal blessing—becomes instead a cautionary tale about the need to scrupulously follow international rules. But does Security Council authorization, or lack thereof, really tell us all that much about the wisdom of interventions or potential interventions in places like Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo, Rwanda, and Darfur?
Moreover, there is a whole category of intervention questions that don’t get solved in the least by a rigid adherence to international rules on the use of force. Should the U.S. back a foreign government as it attempts to put down an internal rebellion? International law tells us that we are within our rights to do so (just as Russia is within its rights to assist the Assad regime in Syria). Should the United States help defend the Senkakus if China moves to take them from Japan? Under the UN Charter, collective self defense is permitted, with or without Security Council blessing. And the U.S. legal obligation to Japan demands that the United States provide assistance. U.S. legal commitments to NATO countries similarly mandate that the United States help defend Estonia if Russia makes a move there. The point is simply this: that adherence to international law and legal commitments does not necessarily produce a non-interventionist foreign policy. And a progressive realist’s deference to international law arguably generates interventionism that a more traditional realist might spurn.