After three weeks of lectures devoted entirely to the main theories of international relations, my professor asked the class, “How would you categorize the Reagan Administration?” No one could provide an answer. “The Bush Administration?” Silence again.
Though scholars have written about international politics for centuries, the formal recognition of a separate discipline of International Relations can be traced to the end of WWI. In response to the devastation left by the World Wars, two basic theories of international relations emerged, realism and liberalism. Liberalism, the central tenet of Wilson’s foreign policy, emphasized the need for a global security community and economic interdependence in pursuing moral objectives in international affairs. In rejection of this Wilsonian idealism, realism defined national interest as the acquisition of power in an anarchical, state-centric world, with peace only possible through a balance of power. With realism and liberalism established as the foundations of International Relations, scholars began to incorporate new approaches into the discipline. Today, feminism, postmodernism, constructivism, peace studies, and, the all-time favorite of academia, Marxism, have been established as central theories in any basic International Relations curriculum.
Since the 1980s, however, traditional theories of International Relations in academia have become woefully inadequate in explaining foreign policy. When President Bush defied the United Nations in the hope that the “untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world1,” academics were jolted by the same sense of confusion and bewilderment they first felt in 1987 when President Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gates and demanded Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” While Reagan and Bush, in their willingness to use unilateral force, are certainly not liberal, their rhetoric is unmistakably idealistic. Realists and liberals, once fiercely at odds in the journals of academia, found themselves united on the editorial page of the New York Times in their opposition to the War on Iraq.
In their befuddled opposition to the Reagan-Bush approach, the International Relations establishment in academia has failed to acknowledge the emergence of a new theory of foreign policy. Though the roots of neoconservatism are inexorably linked to classical realism and liberalism, neoconservatism has materialized into a vision in its own right. In a sense, the rise of neoconservatism under Reagan and Bush represents a shift in paradigms in foreign policy by recognizing that the key to achieving long-term global security is by pursuing liberal goals in a realist framework. Liberalism is correct in believing that a foreign policy based on the universal values of democracy and free trade is conducive to peace while the realist conception of a state centric international order has proven to be largely accurate. Yet both theories, in their failure to recognize America’s potential to shape, unilaterally, a peaceful international order via a promotion of democracy and human rights, are incomplete at best.
The inability of an entire class of students to link two of the most ideologically driven Presidents in American history to a school of foreign policy is a clear reflection of the fact that International Relations curriculums at American universities are ideologically tilted to the point of being incredulous. The notion that neoconservatism, as a coherent ideology, cannot be incorporated into the International Relations canon is simply a farce. It has been over half a century since Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz published Commentary magazine. It has been three decades since the advent of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine. And it has been close to six years since the Project for a New American Century drafted a letter to President Clinton advocating aggressive action against Iraq. In its deliberate ignorance of neoconservatism, academia is essentially rewriting history by denying the importance of a movement indispensable in the collapse of communism and the continuing spread of freedom across the globe. Perhaps more tragically, it is depriving an entire generation of International Relations students a core understanding of an ideology pertinent now more than ever. An academic discipline that continues to canonize theories now in the “ash heap of history” can surely make some room for neoconservatism.
- Bush, George W. “Inauguration 2005.” Washington DC. 20 Jan. 2005. [↩]
