DR Show Watch - Unthinking About the Unthinkable

Liberal public radio talk show host Diane Rehm had one Joshua Cooper Ramo of Kissinger Associates on her show this morning, reviewing his recent book "The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It ". Now, of course, it is antinomious to think about unthinkable things...among the antinomies that Mr. Ramo exposes in the interview is his rejection of the strategy of deterrence. Older readers might remember this quaint Cold War era concept - the idea that if one prepared to impose unacceptable consequences on one's adversary, that adversary could be dissuaded from taking actions unacceptable to oneself. This worked in a bipolar world, with the distressing proviso that both sides must prepare to annihilate each other, and barring that, be prepared to limit the stakes in any direct confrontation within certain "rules of the game". This was thinking about the unthinkable, circa 1965, and Mr. Ramo's boss Dr. Kissinger was one of the primary thinkers about these unthinkable things.

But the irony cuts a bit deeper - for Henry Kissinger was and remains the most successful exponent of Hans Morgenthau's realist school in international politics. In realist theory, the material cause is power, and efficient causation is rendered by the balancing of power. While realist theory does not have a very strong teleology, its systemic goal is the maximization of power for individual (state) actors, but an equilibrium of power for all actors. Now, such an equilibrium could be multipolar (as was the case in Europe for most of the 18th century), bipolar (under the conditions extant during the Cold War), or unipolar - the much overrated US "hegemony" following the downfall of the Soviet Union. The policy bias for Kissinger and those who have followed in his train, therefore, has been to favor whatever status quo exists at any given time...although realist theory does not quite require state actors to underwrite the status quo, actions by states that seek to overturn the status quo are regarded as suspect, destabilizing, dangerous - irrespective of their moral worth. It is not that deterrence, retaliation, all the methods of "hard power" are not worth the cost, are not ineffective...they are simply not enough. Adequate security against terrorism requires defensive measures, measures that can and do impinge on the life of civil society, as any air traveler will attest. As Frederick the Great said, "he who defends everything, defends nothing", so even here, strategic choices must be made, and achievable ends matched to affordable means.

Ramo turns realist theory on its head, citing the intended consequences of state actions, such as the War on Terror, and claiming his ideas to be based on chaos theory as applied to international politics. Thus, rather that a policy of deterrence - and certainly not preemption - Ramo recommends that the US learn to roll with the punches, to react more effectively to unforeseen events - such as 9/11, the global financial crisis, and swine flu. I have to say, that in my own thinking about how to deal with 9/11, I had similar thoughts. While I generally supported President Bush's actions abroad, I felt that the whole "Department of Homeland Security" effort was misguided, the creation of a bureaucratic monster rather than the adoption of a sensible set of long term measures, with a strategy to mitigate the threat of terrorism against targets that by their nature cannot be fully protected in all possible scenarios.

Problem: if one takes Ramo at his word, systemic change is not controllable, even though it is unpredictable. For in chaos theory, system dynamics are deterministic even though they appear to be random. This, by definition, is a problem for policy makers, especially in democratic governments in which the officials of the state are at least formally responsible to the citizens of the state. If a butterfly causes Hurricane Katrina, is it the President's fault that New Orleans is devastated ? Ramo's response to this problem is ambiguous. On the one hand, he wishes to see a radical restructuring of government and perhaps a rethinking of its role - to the point of creating a "Department of Resiliance". On the other hand, in his interview with Diane Rehm, he stated that resiliance is an attribute that individuals must acquire, and he went on to praise the importance of religious faith as a means of sustenance under adversity. What are public policy makers supposed to do with all this ?

Neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush nor Barack Obama could be fairly tagged as "realist" in their approach to foreign policy. Clinton and Obama campaigned on a platform of change rather than the status quo. George W. Bush's detractors attack his policies as being neither realistic nor morally acceptable in the idealistic tradition of Kant. It would not be unthinkable to posit the notion that the United States has adopted the role of Tsar Alexander's Russia, the "revolutionary" power in Kissinger's "A World Restored", in contrast to the balancing efforts of Castlereagh and Metternich, who Kissinger praises and exalts for having restored Europe's political equilibrium at the Congress of Vienna. Reasonable persons may indeed argue whether the United States has asserted its power to the point where it is not the butterfly that causes the hurricane by flapping its wings, but the giant gorrilla whose roar - what effect does it have ? Well, in chaos theory, it is virtually impossible to know, as first order effects evolve into second...third..nth order effects, whose true propagation is difficult, if not downright impossible, to estimate.

As a died-in-the-wool realist in international relations, I think one ought to give Mr. Ramo his due - for even in a strictly realist model, deterrence is not the only option for an autonomous and self-interested actor. However, one does gain the impression that Mr. Ramo, in concocting his - new ? - theory ? - has somewhat tossed the realist baby out with the idealist and constructivist bathwater. No doubt, a Carteresque foreign policy who primary feature is its inefficacy would not suffer the consequences of externalities caused by Yin resulting from executing the politics of Yang to their logical conclusion. But this is really just power politics on the cheap. Those who advocate "smart power" will need to invest more in the way of blood and treasure, to authenticate their investments at an acceptable level of risk. In this regard, Mr. Cramer's mad money rules are as worthy a strategic guide as Clausewitz's Principles of War.

I am not - quite - willing to leave the matter in this somewhat unsatisfactory state. The antithesis to Ramo is not, in my view, to be found in the writings of Kissinger or Morgenthau, but in a perhaps unexpected place - in the writings of another relic of the 20th century, Sir Karl Popper. For Popper's writings, particularly in "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (OSE) and "The Poverty of Historicism", attack determinism as such. Now, to a certain extent - and I am still exploring this question - Popper's complaint about historicism seems to be grounded in ideology, in the realm of preferred values, rather than fact. Like Ramo, Popper deals with change; Popper advocates change, demands change, does everything in his power to remove barriers to changes he regards as humanitarian, within the legitimation of Kant's authority. To a degree perhaps less clearly than Popper, Ramo also denies the universality of historical thought- deterrence was a fine paradigm during the Cold War period, not for today. In like manner does Popper reject the philosophies of Heraclitus and Plato: too static, too conservative, opposed to change. Unlike Ramo, Popper offers a middle way between revolutionary change and status quo conservatism. Given that the world is uncertain, our theories imperfect, and the consequences of our actions unpredictable, Popper offers an approach derived from Fabian Socialism - what he calls "piecemeal social engineering". Popper contrasts his approach to that of utopianism thus:

It is

"the difference between a reasonable method of improving the lot of man, and a method which, if really tried, may easily lead to an intolerable increase in human suffering. It is the difference between a method which can be applied at any moment, and a method whose advocacy may easily become a means of continually postponing action until a later date, when conditions are more favorable. And it is also the difference between the only method of improving matters which has so far been really successful, at any time, and in any place, and a method which, wherever it has been tried, has led only to the use of violence in place of reason, and if not to its own abandonment, at any rate to that of its original blueprint".

Now, perhaps Sir Karl was indeed being a bit polemical here, as he is found to be in many places in OSE. But what he advocates, despite its clear neoconservatice overtones, does strike me as being much more rational and humane and pragmatic than Ramo's recent accretion to the corpus of postmodern thought.