Qn: To what extent can the realist thinking be held responsible for the world conflict?

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Realism focuses on state security and power above all else. Early realists such as E.H. Carr and
Hans Morgenthau argued that states are self-interested, power-seeking rational actors, who seek
to maximize their security and chances of survival. Any cooperation between states is explained
as functional in order to maximize each individual state's security (as opposed to more idealistic
reasons). Similarly, any act of war must be based around self interest, rather than on idealism.

Many realists saw World War II as the vindication of their theory.

The Bush administration was in a difficult position so is Osama’s todate; Even the most ardent
supporters of the war in Iraq are admitting to the fact that the war has been a much more arduous
battle than they had originally contemplated. Many political strategists on both sides have been
interpreting the mid-term defeat of many congressional Republicans as a referendum not only on
the Iraqi War, but on the entire Bush foreign policy agenda, including his ideas of bringing
democracy to the Middle East, and his suspicion of certain regimes.

Owing to the lack of alternative viable strategies to that of the Bush administration;
In an attempt to directly counter and undermine the White House, the Speaker of the House of
Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, visited authoritarian regimes. There, in what only can be entitled,
‘Grovel Diplomacy’, she met with Syrian President Bashir Assad, simply closing her eyes to the
fact that every Islamic terrorist jihadist organisation openly sets up shop in Damascus, thus
empowering this rogue regime.
The thinking behind this approach is founded upon the fundamentally flawed Baker-Hamilton
report which demonstrates that this paradigm of thought is not dead and buried as previously
thought or hoped, but rather continues to influence the formulation of alternative foreign policy
proposals. In the cold light of day the flawed thinking behind this approach is even easier to
identify, albeit noticeable since the time of its formal inception.

In December 2006, former Secretary of State James Baker III and former Congressman Lee
Hamilton made a dramatic re-entrance into the field of public policy with their much touted Iraqi
Study Group (ISG) Report. The quite proficient public relations firm of Edelman had generated
quite a public ‘buzz’ before, during and after the immediate release of the results of collective
wisdom of this venerable group, which includes many of the Washington elite from a few
decades ago.
Much has been made of the fact that the study was produced by a bipartisan group of authors.
This is a distinction that is almost routinely admired. One might do well to ask oneself, whether
the spirit of bipartisanship which is necessary to pass laws and get the business of government
done in Washington, is the best process to arrive at a meaningful policy analysis of and
prescription for a rather complex situation? Do we, instead, find ourselves, as a result of this
process, with the least common denominator for agreement? In terms of policy does that make
for a resolute way forward, or rather, does it make for a sort of ‘dummying down’ by consensus?

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Has the analysis actually been carefully studied, and do the prescriptions actually remedy the
illness, or do they, rather, simply disguise the true problems that America now faces?

Iran has been a key player causing the maiming and murdering American and coalition forces in
Iraq. It is Iran that has produced the Improvised Explosive Devises that are responsible for the
brutal maiming and murdering of American and coalition forces, as well as Iraqi civilians.
How can the desire for regional stability be attributed to the President of the Islamic Republic of
Iran whose activities have ranged from making transparently bellicose statements towards both
America and towards Israel, enriching uranium, and the convened conference on Holocaust
denial?
Concerning Syria, includes its full adherence to UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which
allows Lebanon to become a sovereign nation and Syria’s cooperation with all investigations into
political assassinations in Lebanon, especially those of Rafik Hariri and Pierre Gemayal. It also
advances a verifiable cessation of Syrian aid to Hezbollah and Hamas, a Syrian commitment to
help obtain from Hamas an acknowledgement of Israel’s right to exist, and to use their influence
with Hamas and Hezbollah for the release of the captured Israeli Defence Force soldiers. Finally
it seeks a cessation of arms shipments through Syria to Hamas or Hezbollah, and the sealing of
the borders with Iraq.

At the beginning of the War in Iraq, President Bush had said that the road to peace in the Middle
East runs through Baghdad. Today, we are hearing that the road to peace in Baghdad runs
through Jerusalem. A weakened Israel will not enhance the perception of America, not in the
region or anywhere else in the world. Out of reasons not of America’s or of Israel’s choosing,
but simply because they are both free and open democracies, in the minds the radical Islamist,
Israel and the United States are wedded at the hip.
There is a great danger that under the current conditions, in the US's aims to cultivate greater
allies in the region, Western leaders exert enormous pressure upon Israel to retreat to the 1948
armistice lines. In that case, the enormous appetite of the radical Islamist will be whetted, and
Israel will become the Sudentenland of this whole sorry saga. This would almost certainly
guarantee a weakened America, and a weakened free world.

Realism, as Robert Gilpin once observed, "is founded on a pessimism regarding moral progress
and human possibilities." From the realist perspective, incompatible goals and conflict are the
defining features of world politics. Without enforceable international rules, decision makers have
little choice but to compete with other states for security, status, and wealth. The competition is
expected to be difficult, since the others are also likely to view their power resources and
security positions in relative terms. According to Kenneth Waltz, realists thus expect "the
necessities of policy to arise from the unregulated competition of states.... Calculation based on
these necessities can discover the policies that will best serve a state's interests ...and the ultimate
test of policy ... is defined as preserving and strengthening the state."
 
The roots of realist thinking go back thousands of years. Thucydides' History of the
Peloponnesian War, an account of the conflict between the ancient Greek city states of Athens
and Sparta, links those wars and their outcomes to arguments by the actors in which realist
beliefs featured strongly. This led Thucydides to conclude that "what made war inevitable was
the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta." Thucydides also

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attributed one of the most famous, and bleakest, observations in the Western intellectual tradition
to an Athenian general besieging a far weaker force on the island of Melos: "For you know as
well as we do that right, as the world goes, is in question only among equals in power, while the
strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must."4 Less well known, but equally
blunt, are the words of Frangois de Callieres, adviser to Louis XIV in 1713: "When a prince or
state is powerful enough to dictate to his neighbors, the act of negotiation loses its value, for
there is need for nothing but a mere statement of the prince's will."

In short, classical realism sees competition and conflict as inevitable, with the roots of conflict in
the nature of human beings. Human beings compete for scarce resources they value and desire
power over their fellow people. Neither of these patterns can easily be overcome. Given these
expectations about human behavior, classical realists often emphasize the importance of
organizing individuals into groups that can protect their members through a focus on improving
the group's relative power position over others.
This argument is not entirely new; it was a key theme in the work of seventeenth century English
thinker Thomas Hobbes. In his book Leviathan, written during the English Civil War, Hobbes
contended that in a world without a common power that could guarantee security, people had a
"right of nature" to use any means necessary to preserve themselves. But Hobbes also assumed
that "all mankind ...has a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceases only in
death.""
The classical realist worldview appealed to many statesmen during the period that states were
evolving in Western Europe-an era rife with conflict, as medieval forms of rule broke down and
rulers asserted new claims to authority against feudal lords or the Pope. It jumped to the United
States when the experiences of World War II were followed by the onset of the Cold War.
Neorealism later emerged when the bipolarity of the Cold War drew analysts' attention to the
effects of the structure of the interstate system.
 
However, while realism has important insights to offer about some sets of circumstances in
world politics, its value is limited when its distinctive assumptions about the nature of actors'
objectives and political life don't fit as well. What happens to the value of realism, for instance,
when actors value building legitimate relationships or when there is little conflict because they
have compatible goals? What happens to the value of neorealism when policy makers'
calculations are affected more by domestic considerations than by interstate security concerns?
These limitations of the realist worldview are highlighted by liberalism, which is, in many ways,
its mirror opposite.
  
On the other side; unlike realists, liberals are optimists about the human condition and the
possibilities for cooperation. Instead of viewing world politics as a "jungle"-a metaphor com-
monly used by realists-liberals see it as a cultivatable "garden" in which peace as well as war can
grow. For liberals, the building block of politics is the individual acting alone or, more typically,
as part of voluntary groups. Liberals view much of realist thinking as a self-fulfilling prophecy:
If one expects competition and acts accordingly, others will tend to respond in kind. Liberals'
main concern is to understand the conditions under which this cycle can be broken. As Michael
Doyle points out, they expect this to happen when "the good of individuals has moral weight
against the good of the state
or nation."

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This liberal world view has been shaped by many writers interested in democracy, peace, and
individual prosperity. Liberals believe that the actions of states reflect internal bargaining among
politically active groups. It follows from this, according to liberals, that states cannot focus on
international problems and ignore domestic politics. Even in dictatorships, foreign policy
significantly reflects domestic incentives. Based on this reasoning, liberals expect state behavior
abroad to reflect the way citizens' rights are treated domestically. Consequently, the freer a state
is internally, the likelier it is to be influenced by other like-minded societies. Also, liberals
believe that the importance of military coercion in world politics has declined over time. As
democracy, economic and social ties among societies, and international institutions have
developed, liberals believe that force has become a relatively less effective tool of international
statecraft. This does not imply a complete end to war, but it does suggest that a distinct "zone of
peace" can develop among internally liberal, interconnected societies.
 
Like realism, the persuasiveness of liberal arguments has varied with the circumstances that
thinkers and statesmen faced over the centuries during which this tradition developed. Beginning
in the seventeenth century, one group of thinkers conceived of liberty in terms of a small,
unobtrusive government. This variant was introduced by Englishman John Locke and was later
supported by the French philosopher Voltaire and early American thinkers such as Thomas
Paine. For them, as for Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Jeremy Bentham, who focused (during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) on the benefits to the individual and society from
unrestricted international commerce, the goal was to give individuals as much freedom as
possible, consistent with public safety and order. Among other things, this broad objective meant
that individuals should be able to exchange goods and services freely across state boundaries.
Living in eighteenth-century Prussia-a more repressive political atmosphere than England or
America at that time-Immanuel Kant contributed to liberalism the argument that war stemmed
from authoritarian regimes, since governments based on popular consent were less likely to take
actions that ordinary citizens would find costly in human lives and money.

Liberal thinking views international organizations such as the Council of Europe, the World
Bank, and the Arab League as helpful in achieving common purposes among states. Once such
organizations are created, they foster even deeper cooperation down the road. Another version of
this argument sees international organizations as limited tools through which governments can
act together to deal with certain specific problems. They do this mainly by spreading information
about members' behavior-particularly their behavior in carrying out agreed commitments. Armed
with that kind of information, the members can use the organization to put pressure on states that
violate the agreements, making it more likely that agreed objectives will be achieved.
 
Not surprisingly, the contributions and limitations of liberalism mirror those of realism. Liberals
have analyzed important reasons for international cooperation and many of its implications.
Having found reasons to open their societies to others, political leaders can "appreciate that the
existence of other liberal states constitutes no threat and instead constitutes an opportunity for
mutually beneficial trade and alliance against non-liberal states.” But just as the value of realism
is limited by the assumption that conflict and competition are the defining or essential issues of
political life, the value of liberalism is limited by its inability to offer meaningful guidance for
dealing with situations in which actors' objectives are not compatible. In those situations, actors'

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relative power positions do matter. Like realism, liberalism helps us interpret certain cases-those
in which actors' goals fit its assumptions.
 
More so; Karl Marx believed both that capitalism was evil and that it was a historically in-
evitable stage on the way toward a communist revolution that would produce a just, classless
society. Traditional Marxism makes three basic assumptions: First, people's position in society is
determined by the way in which they are connected to patterns of economic activity. In every
society, the divisions between classes (peasants, landowners, merchants, and so on) are
determined by what is produced, how it is produced, and how goods and services are exchanged.
Second, everything else in society, including ideas, laws, and religion, reflects the economic
structure. In other words, the foundation of society is seen as materialist; social life is run and
transformed not by any independent set of ideas, but rather through the technological and
socioeconomic forces at work in a given period.
 
While these thinkers disagreed on whether imperialism was inevitable under modern capitalism,
Lenin synthesized their work into an argument that made precisely that point, asserting that
industrial firms and financial institutions needed to expand abroad. Industry needed guaranteed
supplies of raw materials at stable prices to operate efficiently; banks needed profitable
investment outlets. At first on their own, then acting through their governments, banks and
industrial firms solved their problems by dominating and exploiting large areas of Asia, Africa,
SouthAmerica.
According to Lenin, imperialism would have two consequences. Workers in the underdeveloped
areas would become a new target of opportunity for exploitation by capitalists in developed
nations. Until those workers took political control in their countries from the capitalists, their
nations could expect to remain poor. And as the governments in the developed states-which, by
this reasoning, are controlled by capitalists-realized that their firms needed new areas to exploit,
conflict among those states for acquisitions abroad followed.
 
Critical Theory is another influential set of ideas that builds on the Marxist intellectual tradition.
It grew out of the work of a group of intellectuals in Frankfurt, Germany, beginning in the 1920s.
This group rejected the assumption that the world can be understood objectively, arguing that the
analysts' ideas and values are always embedded in their political and social observations.
As you might imagine, arguments in these traditions have been very controversial. On the one
hand, the Marxist and critical theory traditions provide ethical lenses through which important
issues can be examined. For example, one might ponder the legitimacy of a world economy in
which 1.2 billion people (about one out of every six) lived in dire poverty in 1998. This was the
same number (although a somewhat smaller percentage) as in 1990.
During those eight years, global spending on assistance to poor countries dropped from $60
billion to $55 billion a year, even though many developed countries, particularly the United
States, enjoyed significant economic growth.

On the other hand, the Marxist and critical theory traditions can be critiqued on analytic grounds.
Marx's major predictions-that capitalism would succumb to a worldwide revolution, and that the
middle classes would drastically shrink over time-have missed the mark. Equally off target was
Lenin's assertion that World War I was but the first of an inevitable series of wars of imperialist
re-division. Dependency writers have largely avoided these kinds of sweeping predictions. But

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this perspective has been troubled by questions about whether an intellectual tradition that
usually assumes that poverty and underdevelopment reflect exploitation from the outside should
also take domestic influences into account. Some analysts in this tradition acknowledge that
poverty typically reflects both a country's internal problems (such as a lack of marketable natural
resources or a limited population on which an internal market for industrial goods can be built)
as well as the way in which outsiders exploit those weaknesses. Many others assume that only
the external dependencies really matter; however, that conclusion has been widely critiqued as
simplistic. Critical theorists also often seem to want to have it both ways: saying that theories of
cause and effect in politics must be evaluated from the perspective of a particular set of values
and objectives, at the same time as they appear to assert that their own interpretations about how
the "prevailing order of the world ... came about" should be exempt from the criticism that their
conclusions are biased by their values.
 
Finally, critics of the Marxist tradition emphasize the injustices created in its name. Self-
proclaimed Marxist governments have been responsible for tremendous cruelty and repression.
Millions of people starved to death as a result of the famine deliberately created by Soviet leader
Josef Stalin in the early 1930s. The famine was designed to weaken resistance to Stalin's
dictatorship and to pave the way for the forced abolition of private agriculture. Millions of
people spent time-often decades-in Soviet and other communist-run political prisons. In the
communist People's Republic of China, Mao Zhedong's government similarly engineered a
famine that killed millions as part of an effort to collectivize agriculture. And in Cambodia, a
radical Marxist government that took power in the 1970s exterminated virtually everyone who
might have been an opponent of the regime. The Cambodian nightmare was later portrayed in an
extraordinarily powerful film, The Killing Fields.
 
 In conclusion; Realists emphasize the prevalence of conflict; liberals focus on finding ways to
promote individual liberty and to identify and achieve common objectives. Dating almost as far
back as the liberal tradition is the Marxist tradition, which analyzes class conflict and presents a
normative critique of capitalism. In recent years, a number of new intellectual schools, such as
feminism, have appeared alongside these older traditions.
A worldview is an intellectual tradition built on a distinctive set of ideas and arguments about
political life. Each such tradition embodies a set of concerns-for example, security, wealth,
liberty, or social justice. It also includes a body of causal reasoning about how the political world
works, particularly in ways deemed relevant to explaining the identified concerns.
Every perspective has steered conflict in its own defines arena.

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References

http//www.cliffnotes.com/wileyCDA/section

http//www.foreigh affairs.com/author/William-j-Perry.