On Kaplan’s “Realism”

A bit more on Stephen Walt’s views of Robert Kaplan as an important “realist” voice:

There are a lot of different definitions of “realist,” and I suppose that Robert Kaplan ticks off some of the major points; he’s primarily interested in “power politics” broadly defined, and he’s skeptical of liberal internationalism.  As Justin Logan suggests, however, that’s really not enough to support Walt’s claim that Kaplan “sees the world through a realist lens.”  For my part, the most important insight that realism writ large has to offer about international politics is that balances recur, generally through some quasi-automatic mechanism.  This observation is very old, but it forms a core element of Morgenthau’s realism and of both variants of Kenneth Waltz’s realism.  It’s not at all clear to me that Kaplan accepts this; indeed, his comments about the impact of Afghanistan on US-Indian relations suggest that he doesn’t.  Suggesting that US commitment to Afghanistan will convince the Indians that the United States has sufficient resolve to face down China is all kinds of things and is surely compatible with some forms of realism, but not really the good kinds. While all but the most extreme variants of neo-realism allow that real world balancing requires some actual diplomatic and defense statecraft, it’s not particularly “realist” to claim that the long term strategic interests of three of the largest and most powerful nations in the world hinge on the extent of the US diplomatic commitment to a state that’s largely irrelevant on its own merits.  Indeed, it’s worth noting that Walt’s own work suggests that excessive concern over maintaining commitments to places like Afghanistan can have negative balancing effects.

Moreover, realists don’t normally employ the travelogue-style detail that Kaplan uses in his most well-known work; it’s not quite 100% true to say that realists don’t give a damn about “ghosts,” Balkan or otherwise, but realism as a school of thought does not depend on ancient hatreds, ideological conflicts, ethnic rifts, et al.  Focus on structural factors in explicit in Waltzian neorealism, but is at least implicit in Morgenthau and earlier realist texts.  Kaplan talks about this kind of stuff all the time, which is fine if you do it well (in my view Kaplan consistently fails to do it well), but isn’t realist. And it should further be observed, as Logan points out, that the geostrategic insights that Kaplan draws from his stories are often really, really bad.

So yeah; if something needs to be rescued, best not to offer up Robert Kaplan.