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IRE0010.1177/0047117817726363International RelationsKarkour

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International Relations
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Unipolarity’s unpeacefulness © The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117817726363
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117817726363
consequences of a ‘coherent journals.sagepub.com/home/ire

system of irrationality’

Haro L Karkour
University of Leicester

Abstract
Drawing on Hans J. Morgenthau, this article argues that a key contributor to the unpeacefulness
of the post–Cold War unipolar order was the irrationality of US foreign policy. Post–Cold War
US foreign policy was irrational in that it failed to base its strategy on the prudent evaluation
of the empirical facts in the social and political context in which it was formulated. Instead, it
reinterpreted reality in terms of a simplistic picture of the world as accepted by US policymakers
a priori, and sought the use of military force as the sole national security strategy to impose
the inviolability of the ideals entailed in this picture. This turned post–Cold War US foreign
policy into a self-contradictory endeavour as far as the results were concerned: not only did it
confuse desirable for essential interests in standardising the enemy – whether Milosevic, Saddam
or Qaddafi – to fit the a priori categorisation, but it also opened a gap between the desirable
and the possible. For one thing such an irrational post–Cold War US foreign policy failed to
accommodate or annul was the empirical reality of conflicting interests in the social and political
contexts upon which it sought to impose its a priori picture. This resulted in consequences
that were untenable from the standpoint of US objectives and international peace and security,
contributing, overall, to the unpeacefulness of the post–Cold War unipolar order.

Keywords
Morgenthau, unipolarity, US foreign policy

Introduction
Although the stability of the world order requires a measure of peace to endure, peaceful-
ness and durability are analytically distinct concepts. When it comes to the stability of

Corresponding author:
Haro L Karkour, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester, Leicester LE17RH,
UK.
Email: hk209@le.ac.uk
2 International Relations 00(0)

the unipolar order that followed the end of the Cold War,1 the extent to which it is durable
was debated for over two and a half decades. In the early 1990s, commentators, such as
Charles Krauthammer, suggested that ‘the unipolar moment’ would last ‘for decades’.2
In line with his structural realist thinking, Kenneth Waltz 2 years later predicted that ‘in
the fairly near future, say ten to twenty years’ new powers may rise to balance US power.3
By the close of the century, William Wohlforth added the peacefulness variable to the
stability equation to affirm the durability of the post–Cold War unipolar order.4 About
2 years later, as Al-Qaeda militants succeeded in attacking America on its soil, and as,
following Afghanistan (2001), the United States shifted to unilateralism in its approach
in Iraq (2003), scholars raised concerns about this ‘unipolar moment’.5 In 2008 came the
financial crisis, raising further concerns apropos US global influence.6 For more than a
decade into the new century, the question whether the unipolar order is bound to endure
remained a matter of debate. At one end of the argument, commentators wrote about The
Post-American World,7 the ‘waning of US hegemony’,8 the ‘graceful decline’,9 even
theorised ‘after unipolarity’.10 Much attention was thus paid to the changing structure of
polarity to nineteenth century ‘plurality’,11 twenty-first century ‘non-polarity’,12 and the
implications of such shifts for US foreign policy, and international peace and security.
This did not deter more recent scholarship from rejecting the view that the United States
is likely to decline anytime soon.13
The question of durability was therefore debated in length in the literature on the sta-
bility of the unipolar order. But was this ‘stability’ peaceful? A quick glance at the con-
flicts in Iraq (1990–1991), Somalia (1993), Iraq (1998), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan
(2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011) and Syria (2011–present) shows that the answer is no.
If not, why did the explanation of the unpeacefulness of the unipolar order receive little
attention then? Despite its empirical significance, the question of the un/peacefulness of
unipolarity was overshadowed by its durability, and the line between the two concepts
was blurred in the general discussion of stability. The only exception in providing a sys-
tematic attempt at explaining the unpeacefulness of post–Cold War unipolarity in this
case can be found in Nuno Monteiro. In response to Wohlforth’s argument that the uni-
polar order is both durable and peaceful, Monteiro argues that although unipolarity ren-
ders great power war impossible, it ‘provide[s] incentives for two other types of war:
those pitting the sole great power against another state and those involving exclusively
other states’.14 Monteiro thus argues that unipolarity is unpeaceful, and explains the rea-
soning behind his argument: in attempting to maintain the status quo through a defensive
dominance strategy or to revise the status quo through an offensive dominance strategy,
the unipole finds itself in war. Meanwhile, in disengaging the unipole finds others in war.
But these strategies are ones of either war or inaction. In 1999, for instance, a defensive
dominance strategy was a bombing campaign against Belgrade. And disengagement
meant inaction. Were these the only two available options in US foreign policy? Should
the reader on this basis accept Monteiro’s deterministic explanation?15 To accept such
inevitability, as Ken Booth forcefully argued in Kosovo, would be a mistake, for there
were also engaging non-military strategies available.16
The intention here is not to investigate the available non-military strategies in post–
Cold War US foreign policy adventures, but to explain why they largely remained a non-
option. The explanation situates the overall argument of the article in Hans J. Morgenthau’s
Karkour 3

late juxtaposition of a ‘coherent system of irrationality’ with his notion of rationality in

foreign policy.17 It argues that a key contributor to the unpeacefulness of the unipolar
order was irrationality in post–Cold War US foreign policy. Irrationality in this case
explains the unpeacefulness of unipolarity in terms of a failure to formulate a US foreign
policy that bases its strategy on the prudent evaluation of the empirical facts in the social
and political context in which it is formulated. Central to this evaluation is Morgenthau’s
distinction between ‘essential’ and ‘desirable’ interests, on one hand, and ‘desirable’ and
‘possible’ interests, on the other. Essential interests are interests that concern the survival
of the state. Their urgency justifies the use of military force as a national security strat-
egy. Desirable interests, on the contrary, are interests that do not concern the survival of
the state. They thus do not necessarily justify the use of military force. The task for a
rational foreign policy is to engage in a prudent evaluation of the empirical facts in the
social and political context in which it is formulated in order to decide whether the inter-
ests are essential or desirable, and if desirable, whether they are possible to pursue and
what strategy is best to pursue them given the presence of other conflicting interests.
Post–Cold War US foreign policy, by contrast, was irrational in the sense that it failed to
engage in this evaluation. Instead, it reinterpreted reality to fit a simplistic picture of the
world as accepted by US policymakers a priori and in the abstract, and sought the use of
military force as the sole national security strategy to impose the inviolability of the ide-
als entailed in this picture. This turned post–Cold War US foreign policy into a self-
contradictory endeavour as far as the results were concerned: not only did it confuse
desirable for essential interests, but it also opened a gap between the desirable and the
possible. For one thing an irrational post–Cold War US foreign policy failed to accom-
modate or annul was the empirical reality of conflicting interests in the social and politi-
cal context upon which it sought to impose its a priori picture. The latter, this article
argues, resulted in moral and political consequences that were untenable from the stand-
point of US objectives and international peace and security, contributing, overall, to the
unpeacefulness of the post–Cold War unipolar order.
To proceed with this argument, the piece unfolds in two stages. In the first section,
it draws on Morgenthau to define irrationality in foreign policy. Section two applies
Morgenthau’s analysis to post–Cold War US foreign policy and explains its
implications.

Morgenthau and irrationality in foreign policy

There has been a growing interest in the past two decades in the normative and critical
dimensions of Morgenthau’s work.18 The recent body of scholarship on Morgenthau
argues, first, that his emphasis on power does not mean the abdication of morality in poli-
tics. Morgenthau’s work, second, entails a critique of the status quo. Indeed, in his assess-
ment of Vietnam, Morgenthau’s critical stance vis-à-vis US foreign policy finds its most
explicit articulation in Truth and Power.19 The events in Vietnam also led late-Mor-
genthau to juxtapose his previous theory of rationality in foreign policy with a foreign
policy that is part of ‘a coherent system of irrationality’. In the 5th edition of Politics
Among Nations, Morgenthau emphasised the importance of this notion of irrationality,
and argued that, akin to rationality, it could equally explain the future of US foreign
4 International Relations 00(0)

policy in a ‘counter theory of irrational politics’.20 Despite this, the literature on

Morgenthau since the end of the Cold War took little notice of it.21
Morgenthau’s view on politics as essentially dealing with moral dilemmas was pub-
lished early on in Scientific Man Versus Politics.22 The key moral dilemma the political
actor must deal with, according to Scientific Man,23 is that political action is evil:
‘Whatever choice we make, we must do evil while we try to do good; for we must aban-
don one moral end in favour of another’.24 This tragic condition, according to Morgenthau,
results from the endless drive for power in human nature that can neither be completely
satisfied nor reconciled with the moral test of ‘treating others not as means to the actor’s
ends but as ends in themselves’.25 ‘It is the tragedy of man’, therefore, ‘that he is incapa-
ble, by dint of his nature, to do what Christian ethics demands of him’.26 This notion of
human nature, as Robert Schuett argues, can be traced to Morgenthau’s earlier unpub-
lished works, particularly the ‘Freud Script’.27 The struggle for power, according to this
view, ‘does not derive from immediate survival concerns; man lusts for power in the
sense of Freud’s pleasure principle’.28 It follows ‘Freud’s sexual instinct’, which is an
instinct for ‘self-assertion’,29 or, in Felix Rösch’s words, to ‘prove oneself’ in social
activities.30 This is distinguished from the ‘self-preservation’ instinct, which is more lim-
ited to ‘survival’. As Morgenthau puts it in Scientific Man, ‘the selfishness of man has
limits; his will to power has none’.31 ‘Thus the scholar seeking knowledge seeks power;
so does the poet who endeavours to express his thoughts and feelings in words’.32 The
notion only becomes political when men ‘choose as their object [of power] other men’.33
In Politics Among Nations, the notion makes its way to the nation’s interest defined
‘in terms of power’. In the latter, the individual’s lust for power, which is suppressed in
civilised society through legal and moral restrictions, is now projected outside the state
‘on the international sphere [where] there are no societal restrictions’.34 The lust for
power, through the medium of the nation state, becomes a limitless, irrational, drive for
self-assertion (or self-proving), which, left unhindered, leads to disastrous consequences
in international politics. This is, Morgenthau argues, because unlike in domestic politics,
societal morality and legal rules do not restrain, but primarily serve and justify the nation
state’s power: ‘it makes it appear as though the interests and policies of individual nations
were the manifestations of universal moral principles’.35 As Rösch argues, therefore, to
Morgenthau ‘attention needs to be paid on what kind of power is established’.36 Indeed,
in his French and German writings, Morgenthau distinguishes between two forms of
power: empirical power, or pouvoir, which ‘allows for depoliticisation of social life’, and
power in the normative sense, puissance, which ‘establishes the political, as it enables
people to pursue their interests and work together for a common good’.37
Morgenthau’s defence of power in a normative sense comes as a corollary to his argu-
ment against the ‘appearance’ of knowledge of universal moral principles. The latter is
‘morally indefensible and intellectually untenable’ says Morgenthau, ‘and leads in prac-
tice to that distortion of judgment, born by the blindness of crusading frenzy, which has
been the curse of nations from the beginning of time’.38 Instead, Morgenthau accepts
what Hartmut Behr refers to as the ‘ethics of anti-hubris’, which is ‘aware of the limits
of know-ability of the political’.39 Knowledge in matters moral and political is not abso-
lute according to this ethics, but spatio-historical and representative of the power and
interests of its holders.40 International politics is thus a ‘clash of interests with outcomes
Karkour 5

determined by power’.41 Accordingly, empirical power, which Morgenthau opposes,

allows the depoliticisation of social life because it replaces the empirical reality that
consists of various conflicting interests, with ahistorical, apolitical, decontextualised
‘dichotomies of good and bad, right and wrong, or friend and enemy for which
Morgenthau had criticised Schmitt’.42 The abstract ideals entailed in these dichotomies
hinder the formation of normative power, the adjustment of conflicting interests through
the instrument of diplomacy, and serve empirical power, the desire to dominate. A poten-
tial consequence, Rösch argues, is violence, which is characteristic of empirical power.43
Indeed, in denying the spatially and temporally conditioned interests conflicting with
one another in international politics, foreign policy also forgoes diplomacy, ‘the tech-
nique of accommodating such conflicting interests’.44
To preclude abstract ideals from diverting the policy maker from the reality of con-
flicting interests in international politics, Morgenthau presents his notion of interest
defined as power, which, as Behr argues, is a ‘critical device for reflecting upon foreign
policy’,45 that is, a device to ‘save us’ from the ‘moral excess’ and ‘political folly’ in
irrational attempts at imposing inviolable abstract moral and political ideals (as accepted
a priori) on other nations.46 It allows each state to regulate its potentially endless drive
for power through setting a priority of interests, depending on the social and political
context, to ‘avoid that their consequences may be worse than the initial insecurity they
were supposed to counter’.47 In other words, having embraced the notion that political
action is inherently evil, interests ‘defined as power’ strive to commit among the avail-
able acts the lesser evil.48 ‘The existence of the lesser evil’ thus in the words of Sean
Molloy ‘gives rise to the development of specifically political virtues such as prudence
and moderation which raise the possibility of moral politics beyond mere expedience’.49
And Morgenthau on this basis can respond to his critics:

The contest between utopianism and realism is not tantamount to a contest between principle
and expediency, morality and immorality. [It] is rather between one type of political morality,
one taking as its standard universal moral principles abstractly formulated, the other weighing
these principles against the moral requirements of concrete political action, their relative merits
to be decided by a prudent evaluation of the political consequences to which they are likely to
lead.50

The aim of this ‘prudent evaluation’ in Morgenthau’s rational analysis of the national
security interest is, moreover, to ‘safeguard the survival of the United States in its territo-
rial, political and cultural identity and at the same time to contribute the most to the
security and liberty of other nations’.51 Rationality in this case seeks power in the norma-
tive sense through embracing the political as the realm of conflicting interests and allow-
ing states to pursue and adjust their interests. It is on the basis of this normative aim that
in Vietnam Morgenthau divided the US national security interest into ‘essential’ interests
and ‘desirable’ interests, on one hand, and ‘desirable’ interests and ‘possible’ interests, on
the other.52 This set a rational order of priorities that dictated the national security strat-
egy that the United States ought to have followed. The conflation of these interests and
the strategy that the United States ought to have followed in Vietnam, Morgenthau
argued, was due to a failure to engage in a prudent evaluation of the empirical facts in the
6 International Relations 00(0)

social and political context, and instead seeking ‘to put the principle of the Truman
Doctrine into practice by identifying revolution with Communism and trying to stop
Communism everywhere’.53 In this case, ‘containment’ as an abstract, inviolable, con-
cept ‘trying to stop Communism everywhere’ failed to distinguish between cases such as
Cuba, ‘a military and political outpost of the Soviet Union’ in the Western Hemisphere,
where containment was essential from the point of view of US interests, and Vietnam,
‘an independent national Communism after the model of Yugoslavia’, where contain-
ment was only desirable from the point of view of US interests.54 Once containment
blurred the line between US vital and desirable interests in Vietnam, the use of military
force to impose it appeared as though it was the sole strategy: both desirable and essen-
tial.55 Empirical power, the unhindered irrational Freudian self-assertive impulse, as a
result, prevailed over normative power.
Frustrated by such irrationality in Vietnam, Morgenthau argued in his later life that
US foreign policy could also follow ‘a coherent system of irrationality’, which encom-
passes inter alia ‘the imposition upon the empirical world a simplistic and a priori pic-
ture of the world derived from folklore and ideological assumption […] the refusal to
correct this picture of the world in the light of experience […]’. 56 In other words, instead
of engaging in a prudent evaluation of the empirical facts in the social and political con-
text, an irrational US foreign policy forgoes reality altogether. In lieu of examining the
likely consequences of political action, it lets abstract ideals as accepted a priori decide
the course of action, creating ‘the illusion of mastery over a recalcitrant reality’.57 This,
Morgenthau argued, turns US foreign policy into a self-contradictory endeavour as far as
the results are concerned: not only does it confuse its desirable interests for its essential
interests, but it also opens a gap between the ‘desirable’ and the ‘possible’. For instead of
accommodating the conflicting interests in the social and political context, an irrational
US foreign policy denies the existence of such interests altogether to impose the inviola-
bility of its abstract ideals (as accepted a priori). ‘Thus’ the reader learns from Morgenthau,
‘policy moves in a wonderland of the policy maker’s creation’,58 serving only the policy
maker’s self-assertive, irrational, ego, and leading to consequences that are detrimental
to US moral and political objectives, on one hand, and to international peace and secu-
rity, on the other.
The next section applies Morgenthau’s analysis of irrationality to post–Cold War US
foreign policy, with the aim to provide a non-deterministic explanation to the unpeace-
fulness of the unipolar order.

Irrationality and the unpeacefulness of the unipolar order

An irrational foreign policy leads to consequences that are detrimental to US moral and
political objectives, on one hand, and to international peace and security on the other,
because it does not distinguish between ‘essential’ interests and ‘desirable’ interests, on
one hand, and ‘desirable’ and ‘possible’ interests, on the other. Did post–Cold War US
foreign policy distinguish between these interests? And if so, did it base its strategy on
the basis of this distinction? To narrow the scope of the empirical analysis and to keep it
consistent with Morgenthau’s initial inquiry, this section focuses on the cases of the use
of military force under William J. Clinton, George W. Bush and Barak Obama. As the
Karkour 7

discussion aims to explain the unpeacefulness of the unipolar order, the cases chosen,
moreover, are the most detrimental to US objectives and international peace and security.
This explains the omission of Bush Sr. and the first Gulf War from the analysis. This is
because, as an intervention it did not involve an attack on the sovereignty of another
nation state but sought to defend sovereignty. It therefore sought to defend the interna-
tional order, and its impact on the unpeacefulness of the unipolar order was trivial
(though not non-existent, as it still had an impact on groups such as Al-Qaeda).59

Irrationality in the Clinton years

As the Cold War ended, and ‘containment’ no longer applied to the realities of post–Cold
War international relations, a new strategy had to be devised in US foreign policy. Thus,
former US National Security Advisor Anthony Lake remarked on 21 September 1993
that ‘the successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement –
enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies’.60 This strategy of
‘enlargement’, albeit much less convincing as an overall framework than containment,61
remained a key guiding US foreign policy principle in the post–Cold War era. Akin to
containment, enlargement was abstract and incapable of distinguishing between cases
where different US national security interests were involved and different military/non-
military strategies were required. Beyond US vital interests, US national security strat-
egy thus remained vague. Thus the 1994 US National Security Strategy read, ‘in other
situations posing a less immediate threat, our military engagement must be targeted
selectively on those areas that most affect our national interests’. 62 As the exact thresh-
old for the use of force remained equivocal, early critics of ‘the reluctant Wilsonian’
found their empirical validation for Clinton’s ‘mediocre record’ in Somalia and Bosnia.63
In subsequent years, the language of national security strategy under the Clinton admin-
istration became more precise. In 1999, for example, the US National Security Strategy
divided the national interest into three categories: ‘vital’, ‘important’ and ‘other’ inter-
ests. Although only ‘vital interests’ threatened the survival of the US government, the use
of force was also a chosen strategy to protect other important interests, such as human
rights in Kosovo.64 If, contrary to Morgenthau’s advice, the use of force was employed
in Kosovo where no US vital interests were at stake, then, what were its consequences
for US objectives and international peace and security? The latter, after all, as Morgenthau
argued, is the moral and political test by which any foreign policy must be judged.
Kosovo ‘raised false hopes’,65 to use the words of John Gaddis. Not only were the
moral consequences disastrous to the 200,000 Serbian minorities,66 turning Albanian
victims to ‘victimizers’,67 in addition, against the United Nations Security Council
(UNSC) Resolution 1244, on 17 February, 2008 Kosovo unilaterally declared its inde-
pendence from Serbia. The first consequence was thus the destruction of a multi-ethnic
democracy in Kosovo. US support of Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence,
moreover, left a precedent on the basis of which other minorities, with the support of
major powers, such as Russia or China, could claim the same rights to reshape the inter-
national order. Critics reject the ‘precedent argument’.68 Although the use of force in
Kosovo in 1999, to use Inis Claude’s simile, invoked the fuse in the collective security
system due to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) overlooking Russian and
8 International Relations 00(0)

Chinese veto powers, they reason, there was no more risk of the house catching fire.
This argument however evades the problem by consuming a progress already made in
the international society. That there is no threat of great power war is an argument that
can be used by any state, particularly China and Russia. Indeed, echoing his NATO
counterparts earlier in Kosovo, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in 2008
spoke of the ‘genocide’ against the Ossetians and Abkhazians, only to recognise the
independence of their republics from Georgia. In 2014, moreover, Putin made a direct
reference to Kosovo:

[…] the Crimean authorities referred to the well known Kosovo precedent – a precedent our
western colleagues created with their own hands in a very similar situation, when they agreed
that the unilateral separation of Kosovo from Serbia, exactly what Crimea is doing now, was
legitimate and did not require any permission from the country’s central authorities.69

Still, critics reject this argument and instead explain the events through an analysis
of Putin’s personality.70 Although Putin is the final decision maker in Russian foreign
policy, however, Russia’s geopolitical interests cannot be reduced to his personality
when others such as Medvedev also followed the same ‘opportunistic’ approach in, for
example, using the Kosovo precedent to justify Russian actions in Georgia. As Ted
Hopf explained in detail lately, it was Russia’s disappointment with US unilateralism,
dashing its hopes for a multilateral partnership that pushed it into the direction of
regional hegemony.71
Against these setbacks, US actions in Kosovo in 1999 (in contrast to Somalia and
Bosnia earlier) received a high rate of approval for its humanitarian aims.72 In US foreign
policy, the justification, partly, came in the form of Clinton’s depiction of Kosovo as a
security threat. ‘Sarajevo, the capital of neighbouring Bosnia’ Clinton thus argued in his
statement on Kosovo in March 1999, ‘is where World War I began. World War II and the
Holocaust engulfed this region. In both wars Europe was slow to recognise the dangers,
and the United States waited even longer to enter the conflicts’.73 In the scholarship, it
relied on the invalidation of the classical realist concept of legitimacy.74 Thus the new
belief was not only in that the international society and its norms legitimating the use of
force are changing,75 rather that ‘once established, norms will serve to constrain even the
most powerful states in the international system’.76 Theoretically, this argument drew on
Quentin Skinner’s conventionalist analysis of language,77 which argued that agents are
constrained by linguistic conventions because otherwise they could not be understood.
The latter was refuted by interpretivists such as Mark Bevir,78 for downgrading the role
of agency in favour of discursive structures. ‘Conventions’, as Bevir argues, leave room
for agency, for they ‘are too vague to fix performances’.79 Indeed, if conventions were
not so vague, norms that legitimate the use of force would have been static, for no new
reinterpretation would have been possible. In the latter case, the new account of norms
that legitimate (and constrain) the use of force, although it argues that they are constantly
changing, would not itself be able to account for change.
The theoretical error had empirical consequences. For it became clear in Kosovo that
the norms legitimating the use of force could empower a bloc of powers, such as NATO,
rather than the larger international community, and that the norms could also be
Karkour 9

interpreted by Russia to suit its interests.80 In other words, as norms legitimating the use
of force theoretically require interpretation, empirically these interpretations are based
on conflicting interests that become clear in the application of the norms. Failing to
acknowledge and/or address the empirical reality of these conflicting interests, human
rights and democracy as norms legitimating the use of force (and as accepted a priori)
equaled ‘containment’ and ‘enlargement’ in their level of abstraction. In disregarding
the conflicting interests within Kosovo, and in the UNSC, US foreign policy in turn
overlooked the consequences of the use of force for Serbia’s territorial partition, and
Russia and China’s alienation. As Timothy Waters recently noted, neither those who
approved of Kosovo on humanitarian grounds, nor later proponents of the Responsibility
to Protect (R2P) considered the impact of the use of force to defend the norm on the
territorial changes they might implicate.81 This is, despite all claims by later proponents
of the R2P (who previously approved of Kosovo) that the notion had no intention to
overthrow or redraw sovereign boundaries.82
Kissinger understood the matter from the start. ‘The Albanians’, he wrote, ‘did not
fight for autonomy but for independence and surely not to remain under Yugoslav suze-
rainty’.83 What Kissinger pointed at, without using the present Morgenthauian frame-
work, was that in failing to base its strategy on the prudent evaluation of this empirical
reality of conflicting interests, US foreign policy became irrational. It sought, by any
means, to defend the inviolability of its abstract ideals as accepted a priori, leaving the
use of military force as the sole strategy to defend these ideals. What Kissinger did
notice, in addition, was how Clinton drew on false historical analogies to defend his case.
In response to Clinton’s remarks on history, Kissinger therefore replied: ‘but the Second
World War did not start in the Balkans, and the First resulted from the way the great pow-
ers tied themselves to Balkan factions. And Milosevic was a local Balkan thug, no Hitler
[…]’.84 There is no novelty in this criticism, for Morgenthau also castigated Lyndon B.
Johnson for ‘making worse mistakes’ than Chamberlain because of his ‘thinking in false
historical analogies’85 in Vietnam. As Morgenthau understood it, the political act of secu-
ritisation, that is to say, the act of raising an issue to a level of national security that
necessitates prompt military action, did not have a descriptive end: it was a means to the
reinterpretation of empirical reality to fit policy. In other words, its key purpose was the
justification of an irrational foreign policy – an act that became all too ubiquitous under
the Bush administration, after the events of 9/11.86

9/11, George W. Bush and Iraq: a textbook case of irrationality

Although, as Chris Brown argued, 9/11 did not pose a genuine threat to the unipolar
order,87 following the attacks, the Bush administration expanded its definition of self-
defence to entail ‘preemptive’ strikes against terrorists. Thus, the 2002 National Security
Strategy sought an expansive definition of threats to US national security seeking to
destroy ‘the threat before it reaches [US] borders’.88 After 9/11, moreover, realists such
as Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer lost their battle for US foreign policy to the neo-
conservatives.89 The latter – who included prominent figures in the Bush administration,
such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, as well as journalists and academics such as
Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and Bernard Lewis – had the
10 International Relations 00(0)

intention to topple Saddam since the 1990s.90 This is, even though Condoleezza Rice
explained in Foreign Affairs that a severely weakened Iraq could not pose a threat to the
United States.91 The question to the neo-conservatives, however, was not whether Iraq
posed a genuine threat to the United States, but how to sell the Iraqi threat to the Bush
administration and to the American people.92
9/11 helped the latter’s case in convincing the Bush administration that Saddam
could not only threaten the United States with weapon of mass destructions (WMDs),
but also hand these weapons over to ‘terrorists’.93 In reality, the a priori Schmittian
friend/enemy dichotomy already informed the neo-conservative position,94 abstracting
the political, and rendering any empirical judgment superfluous. For, like Milosevic in
Kosovo, Saddam was already branded as a new Hitler, with whom appeasement does
not work. This was already anticipated by Madeleine Albright, the US State Secretary
during the Kosovo war, when she noted in her memoirs: ‘[Milosevic] came crashing
through the door’ when other enemies, namely, ‘Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gadhafi,
Fidel Castro, and Ayatollah Khamenei’ were already in the room, leaving space to
wonder who were going to be next on the list.95 Using false historical analogies through
likening Milosevic and Saddam to Hitler, however, only served the case to justify irra-
tionality in US foreign policy. To list enemies who ought to be toppled one after
another, without looking at the empirical distinction between the cases and the conse-
quences is characteristic of an irrational foreign policy. It forgoes what foreign policy
requires: a prudent evaluation of the empirical facts that differentiates the cases from
the standpoint of the US national interest. To those who differentiated between the
cases, irrationality in Iraq was conspicuous. On 17 March 2013, former British Foreign
Secretary Robin Cook (who supported the Kosovo bombing a few years earlier) for
instance argued:

Ironically, it is only because Iraq’s military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its
invasion […] We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and
at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.96

What were, then, the consequences of the use of force to remove Saddam for US
objectives and international peace and security? As Adam Roberts argued, the interven-
tion in Iraq greatly undermined US moral standing and its leadership role necessary for
peace and security in the post–Cold War unipolar order.97 Furthermore, potential partners
in the war against terror, particularly Russia, were disillusioned and later chose similar
unilateralist paths.98 In terms of US objectives in Iraq, neither the removal of Saddam by
force could bring about democracy or stability to Iraq, nor US officials were prepared for
post-Iraq war reconstruction. In using military force to topple Saddam, while ignoring
the empirical reality of conflicting interests within Iraq, US foreign policy, like in Kosovo
before and Libya after, replaced one victim(izer) with another. The new Shi’ite govern-
ment, under Nuri Al-Maliki’s leadership, suppressed the Sunnis, often violently. In this
environment of suppression of Sunni political activism, Sunni militancy grew to the
benefit of the Islamic State (IS).99 With the Shi’ite gains, moreover, Iran’s influence in
the region became predominant. The decision to use force in Iraq, thus in the final analy-
sis, represented a textbook case of an irrational foreign policy.
Karkour 11

To justify a foreign policy so irrational in Iraq, neo-conservatives in the Bush admin-

istration endeavoured to confuse desirable interests for vital interests, through the mis-
use of intelligence.100 In combination with the media campaign, at the outset of the Iraq
war, Noam Chomsky thus notes in Hegemony or Survival, ‘some 60 per cent of
Americans came to regard Saddam Hussein as an “immediate threat to the US”’ who
must be removed quickly in self-defense’.101 The pursuit of irrational foreign policy
through the misuse of intelligence is also not a novelty in US foreign policy. Writing on
the events in Vietnam, for instance, Morgenthau defined an irrational foreign policy in
terms of, inter alia, ‘the use of intelligence for the purpose of not adapting policy to
reality but of reinterpreting reality to fit policy’.102 In a crucial sense, therefore,
Morgenthau’s analysis anticipated the actions of US neo-conservative officials in Iraq.
For the intelligence in the Bush era did not play the role of gathering the empirical facts
about Iraq’s capabilities, but instead built a narrative to interpret Saddam as the kind of
threat that fits neoconservative policy as accepted a priori. It was not the empirical
assessment of facts that mattered, but the reinterpretation of facts in a way that allowed
the a priori picture seem rational, and present the use of military force as the sole avail-
able foreign policy strategy to defend it. And when it became evident that Saddam did
not possess WMDs that could attack the United States or its allies, it turned out there
were also no US vital interests at stake.
Once this period was over, the early Clintonian irrationality was brought back to US
foreign policy in the Obama years.

Barak Obama: a return to Clintonian irrationality

With Lake, Clinton’s national security advisor, being ‘the co-head of Obama’s foreign
policy’ in 2008, and liberal interventionists such as Hilary Clinton being his secretary
of state, ‘democratic enlargement’ remained as crucial to Obama as it was to Clinton.103
And although the 2010 US National Security Strategy favoured multilateralism over
preemption, there was confusion, again, due to the choice of military force as a foreign
policy strategy, not necessarily limited to US vital interests.104 The US national security
strategies under the Obama administration, as under Clinton before, argued that the use
of force could meet different types of security threats. Thus, although the 2015 US
National Security Strategy clearly states that ‘the United States will use military force,
unilaterally if necessary, when our enduring interests demand it’, the use force is also
employed – albeit with a higher threshold – ‘when our interests are not directly threat-
ened’.105 ‘In such cases’, the document continues, the United States ‘will seek to mobi-
lise allies and partners to share the burden and achieve lasting outcomes’.106 This
mobilisation of ‘allies and partners to share the burden’ gave the US approach in Libya
the name ‘leading from behind’.107
Thus, although the ideological classification of the president remains elusive, critics
as well as proponents of Obama’s approach commonly agree that the use of force in his
era was much more restrained, in comparison to his predecessors.108 Indeed, the Obama
administration in Libya did not only seek partners and allies to share the burden when
Bush failed to do so in Iraq, but also made sure the use of force proceeded after a United
Nations (UN) mandate, when Clinton failed to do so in Kosovo. Such restraint is
12 International Relations 00(0)

understandable after the fiasco in Iraq. A ‘restrained’ use of military force is nevertheless
a military force used. As Andreas Krieg reminds us, ‘against the strategic backdrop’
resulting from the legacy of the Bush era, the Obama administration switched to ‘wars
by surrogates’.109 In the words of the US national security strategy cited above this
means, generally speaking, to ‘mobilise allies and partners to share the burden’. It also
means avoiding boots on the ground – the via media between war and peace or, to be
more precise, the strategic solution to ‘grey wars’. As Clinton explains in his memoirs,
110 and as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair reaffirms in his,111 it conditioned US

intervention in Kosovo 12 years earlier. But as the use of force was employed in Libya,
where no US vital interests were at stake, what were, then, its consequences for US
objectives and international peace and security?
Libya, in Florence Gaub’s words, became a ‘recipe for disaster’.112 Rather than bringing
Libya closer to democratic rule, US foreign policy turned the country into a battleground
of different factions. As Alan Kuperman argues, ‘immediately after taking power, the
rebels perpetrated scores of reprisal killings, in addition to torturing, beating, and arbitrary
detaining thousands of suspected Qaddafi supporters’.113 In addition to US moral and polit-
ical objectives, the consequences for international peace and security were equally unten-
able. As it became later clear from the UNSC meeting records, despite the 1970 and 1973
resolutions, other major powers such as Russia and China saw US-led actions in Libya as
violating the mandate by seeking to overthrow Gadhafi.114 Thus, Russian foreign minister
Sergei Lavrov argued later that Russia ‘would never allow [in Syria] the Security Council
to authorize anything similar to what happened in Libya’.115 US-led actions in Libya – fol-
lowing previous actions in Kosovo and Iraq, in other words, finally turned a militarily
unipolar world into one that is politically bipolar. The results of these divisions among the
major powers can be seen today in Syria with consequences such as the refugee crisis that
are beyond the Middle East. Once again it was empirically demonstrated that the R2P is
itself a political concept that, in an event such as in Syria today, depends not only on the
political will but also interpretations, of the major powers to be used.116
Critics reject any such causal links between Libya and Syria because the latter’s ‘geo-
political situation’ is more complicated.117 As it stands, the empirical fact that Assad is a
Russian ally, whereas Gadhafi lacked friends in the region and among the major powers
is out of question.118 But the conclusion that Russia would not cooperate with the West
for the benefit of the Syrian people does not follow from this. As far as the empirical
facts are concerned, when the evidence was shown for the use of chemical weapons in
Syria, Russia and China in effect cooperated in the UNSC.119 This shows that, in spite –
or perhaps because – of their geopolitical interests, Russia and China are ready to coop-
erate with the United States. Russian and Chinese concerns, as Kirsten Ainley recently
argued, ‘are based on some fairly widely shared beliefs about P3 abuses of R2P and the
ICC’.120 In other words, the problem is a unipole that is ideologically driven and uses
military force with the sole aim to pursue regime change. ‘By blurring the line between
humanitarian intervention and forcible regime change’ as Samuel Charap argues,
‘Western governments bear the responsibility for finding other means of ending the
unfolding [Syrian] tragedy’.121
Despite this, Libya received a high rate of approval among academics and practitioners.122
The distinction between human rights as a legitimating norm and its interpretation that
Karkour 13

involved regime change, and hence winners and losers in a conflict of interests were again
blurred. Irrationality came to play its role here to blur this distinction through identifying the
national interest with the abstract norms as accepted a priori rather than the assessment of the
empirical reality of conflicting interests within Libya and among the major powers. Therefore,
US foreign policy turned its sole purpose into a quest to defend human rights as an inviolable
norm and rendered the use of ‘surrogate warfare’ the sole strategy to defend this norm. Reality
was eventually sobering. As Jamie Gaskarth explained:

The problem that arose during the intervention [in Libya] was that substantial support did
appear to exist for Gaddafi in the Western half of Libya. Representing this as a war between
Gaddafi’s immediate family and the wider population was belied by events on the ground, and
NATO’s air support was crucial in achieving victory for the opposition.123

Akin to post–Milosevic Kosovo, in post–Gadhafi Libya former regime supporters –

the victimisers – became the victims.124 For once Gadhafi was defeated, it became clear
that his opponents’ aim was not the creation of an inclusionary democracy, many of
whom later swore allegiance to the IS.125 Thus, the United States came face to face with
Morgenthau’s conclusion about evil in political action, with the moral paradoxes in
Libya unresolved to this day. Can the United States interfere in Libya today to protect
human rights? This proves too self-contradictory, for then it will have to fight those
whom it armed in the first place. Irrationality in US foreign policy, that is, the quest to
defend inviolable ideals as accepted a priori, in the absence of a prudent evaluation of the
empirical reality of conflicting interests, therefore, failed to advance US objectives and
antagonised the other major powers both of which contributed to the unpeacefulness of
the unipolar order.

Conclusion
It was the contention of this article that there was an elephant in the room that only the
few, if any, bothered to explain. This consisted of the unpeacefulness of the post–Cold
War unipolar order to which this article provided a non-deterministic explanation. The
explanation drew on Morgenthau’s late mention of a growing ‘coherent system of irra-
tionality’ in US foreign policy. In contrast to a rational foreign policy that evaluates the
empirical facts to distinguish essential and desirable interests, on one hand, and desir-
able and possible interests, on the other, this article argued that post–Cold War US for-
eign policy decisions were irrational in that they reinterpreted reality to fit a simplistic
picture accepted by US policymakers a priori, and sought the use of military force as the
sole strategy to impose the inviolability of the ideals entailed in this picture. The meth-
ods employed to defend the case for irrationality in post–Cold War US foreign policy
included the use of false historical analogies and the misuse of intelligence. Both meth-
ods served the same purpose: heightening the security threat and attempting to rational-
ise the irrational. Thus, the reader could find a pattern where the enemy – whether
Milosevic, Saddam or Qaddafi – was standardised to fit the ‘ideal type’: Hitler. This
branding of the enemy and throwing him in one recognised basket is characteristic of an
irrational foreign policy. For it compels foreign policy to base its decisions on the a
14 International Relations 00(0)

priori categorisation, rather than the prudent investigation of the empirical facts in each
context.
Was Syria different under Obama? This article argued that Obama’s strategy, namely,
his use of ‘surrogate warfare’ through arming allies and bombing from the sky only gave
the impression that his administration was more realistic than his predecessors. As a mat-
ter of fact, the Obama administration in Syria was only facing the culmination of a for-
eign policy dominated by irrational thinking. For the idea, which Monteiro implied at the
start of this article, namely, that the decision is either war or inaction is itself part of an
irrational thinking in US foreign policy. It seeks war because it requires an absolute yes
answer to inviolable ideals. It faces inaction when reality fails to provide such a clear
answer. Once these extreme positions give way to rationality, a third choice becomes
available. This choice is diplomacy – the key component of a successful Morgenthauian
realism in foreign policy. And it was missing in Syria because US foreign policy defined
its mission in terms of the inviolable, in turn refusing to allow room for conflicting inter-
ests in the political.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
   1. As Robert Jervis argues that a unipolar order is different from an order based on empire
in that it leaves the legal sovereignty of the various nation states intact. See Robert Jervis,
‘Unipolarity: A Structural Perspective’, World Politics, 61(1), 2009, pp. 190–1. Although it
is in this differentiation of nation states as legal sovereigns that the unipolar order makes
sense as a concept, it is in the material and ideational inequality between one superpower
and the rest of the nation states that renders the order unipolar.
   2. Charles Krauthammer, ‘The Unipolar Moment’, Foreign Affairs, 70(1), 1990–1991,
p. 24.
   3. Kenneth Waltz, ‘The Emerging Structure of International Politics’, International Security,
18(2), 1993, p. 50.
   4. William Wohlforth, ‘The Stability of a Unipolar World’, International Security, 24(1), 1999,
pp. 5–41.
   5. Adam Roberts, ‘International Relations after the Cold War’, International Affairs, 84(2),
2008, pp. 335–50; Steve Smith, ‘The End of the Unipolar Moment? September 11 and the
Future of World Order’, International Relations, 16(2), 2002, pp. 171–83.
   6. Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong, The End of Influence: What Happens When
Other Countries Have the Money (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
  7. Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World and the Rise of the Rest (London: Penguin
Books, 2009).
   8. Christopher Layne, ‘The Waning of US Hegemony – Myth or Reality? A Review Essay’,
International Security, 34(1), 2009, pp. 147–72.
Karkour 15

   9. Paul K. MacDonald and Joseph M. Parent, ‘Graceful Decline? The Surprising Success of
Great Power Retrenchment’, International Security, 35(4), 2011, pp. 7–44.
  10. Randall L. Schweller and Xiaoyu Pu, ‘After Unipolarity: China’s Visions of International
Order in an Era of U.S. Decline’, International Security, 36(1), 2011, pp. 41–72.
  11. Sevasti-Eleni Vezirgiannidou, ‘The United States and Rising Powers in a Post-Hegemonic
Global Order’, International Affairs, 89(3), 2013, pp. 635–51.
  12. Richard N. Haass, ‘The Age of Nonpolarity: What Will Follow US Dominance’, Foreign
Affairs, 87(3), 2008, pp. 44–56.
  13. See, for example, Michael Cox, ‘Power Shifts, Economic Change and the Decline
of the West?’ International Relations, 26(4), 2012, pp. 369–88; Stephen Brooks and
William Wolhforth, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in the Twenty-First Century:
China’s Rise and the Fate of America’s Global Position’, International Security,
40(3), 2015, pp. 7–53; Stephen Brooks and William Wolhforth, ‘The Once and Future
Superpower: Why China Won’t Overtake the United States’, Foreign Affairs, 95(3),
2016, pp. 91–104.
  14. Nuno Monteiro, ‘Unrest Assured: Why Unipolarity is Not Peaceful’, International Security,
36(3), 2011, p. 12.
  15. Robert Jervis presents an underdeveloped, but equally deterministic explanation in this regard
when attributes the cause of wars under unipolarity, partly, to unipolarity itself, namely, the
fact that the United States is a Superpower. Here, Jervis disagrees with Morgenthau’s notion
of the national interest because ‘the interests a country defines as extremely important if
not vital tend to expand as its power does’. Jervis then argues that in the absence of Soviet
deterrence, unipolarity created new opportunities for the United States to spread its demo-
cratic values and increased the visibility (and occurrence) of new threats (such as terrorism)
leading to its revisionist behaviour. See Robert Jervis, ‘Force in Our Times’, International
Relations, 25(4), 2011, pp. 409–12.
 16. Ken Booth, ‘The Kosovo Tragedy: Epilogue to Another ‘Low and Dishonest Decade’,
Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies, 27(1), 2000, pp. 5–18.
  17. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New
York: Alfred Knopf, 1978 [1948]), p. 7.
 18. On this literature, see, for example, William Bain, ‘Deconfusing Morgenthau: Moral
Inquiry and Classical Realism Reconsidered’, Review of International Studies, 23(3), 2000,
pp. 445–64; Hartmut Behr and Felix Rösch, ‘Introduction’, in Hans J. Morgenthau (ed.)
The Concept of the Political, trans. by Maeva Vidal (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012), pp. 3–79; Murielle Cozette, ‘Reclaiming the Critical Dimension in Realism: Hans
J. Morgenthau on the Ethics of Scholarship’, Review of International Studies, 34(1), 2008,
pp. 5–27; William E. Scheuerman, ‘Was Morgenthau a Realist? Revisiting Scientific Man
Vs. Power Politics’, Constellations, 14(4), 2007, pp. 506–30; Michael C. Williams, ‘Why
Ideas Matter in International Relations: Hans Morgenthau, Classical Realism and the Moral
Construction of Power Politics’, International Organization, 58(4), 2004, pp. 633–65;
Benjamin Wong, ‘Hans Morgenthau’s anti-Machiavellian Machiavellianism’, Millennium:
Journal of International Studies, 29(2), 2000, pp. 389–409.
  19. Hans J. Morgenthau, Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade 1960–70 (London: Praeger
Publishers, 1970).
 20. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, p. 7.
  21. The exception can be found in David Fromkin, ‘Remembering Hans Morgenthau’, World
Policy Journal, 10(3), 1993, pp. 81–8. Although Fromkin raises the importance of irration-
ality, he does so to explain how it might invalidate Morgenthau’s work. The aim here, by
contrast, is to develop it.
16 International Relations 00(0)

  22. Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man versus Power Politics (London: Phoenix Books, 1965
[1946]); on the importance of morality in Morgenthau, see also William Bain, ‘Deconfusing
Morgenthau’; Benjamin Mollov, ‘Jewry’s Prophetic Challenge to Soviet and Other
Totalitarian Regimes According to Hans J. Morgenthau’, Journal of Church and State, 39,
1997, pp. 561–75; A. J. H. Murray, ‘The Moral Politics of Hans Morgenthau’, The Review
of Politics, 58(1), 1996, pp. 81-107.
  23. Parts of this book were also published in Hans J. Morgenthau, ‘The Evil of Politics and the
Ethics of Evil’, Ethics, 56(1), 1945, pp. 1–18.
  24. Morgenthau, ‘The Evil of Politics’, p. 11.
 25. Morgenthau, Scientific Man, p. 196; Morgenthau, ‘The Evil of Politics’, p. 15.
 26. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics in the Twentieth Century: The Restoration of American
Politics, vol. 3 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1962), p. 15; on this point, see also
Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003); Sean Molloy, ‘Aristotle, Epicurus, Morgenthau and the
Political Ethics of the Lesser Evil’, Journal of International Political Theory, 5(1), 2009,
pp. 94–112.
  27. Robert Schuett, ‘Freudian Roots of Political Realism: the Importance of Sigmund Freud
to Hans J. Morgenthau’s Theory of International Power Politics’, History of the Human
Sciences, 24(4), 2007, p. 67; see also Robert Schuett, Political Realism, Freud and Human
Nature in International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Morgenthau,
Scientific Man, chapter 7.
  28. Schuett, ‘Freudian Roots of Political Realism’, p. 58; Emphasis in Original.
  29. Schuett, ‘Freudian Roots of Political Realism’, p. 60.
  30. Felix Rösch, ‘Pouvoir, Puissance, and Politics: Hans Morgenthau’s Dualistic Concept of
Power?’ Review of International Studies, 40(2), 2014, p. 4.
 31. Morgenthau, Scientific Man, p. 193.
 32. Hans J. Morgenthau, Science: Servant or Master? (New York: New American Library,
1972), p. 31.
  33. Morgenthau, Science, p. 31.
  34. Schuett, ‘Freudian Roots of Political Realism’, p. 63.
 35. Morgenthau, Politics in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, p. 60.
  36. Rösch, ‘Pouvoir, Puissance, and Politics’, p. 6.
 37. Rösch, ‘Pouvoir, Puissance, and Politics’, p. 6; on this point, see also Hartmut Behr,
‘Scientific Man vs. Power Politics: A Pamphlet and Its Author between Two Academic
Cultures’, Ethics & International Affairs, 30(1), 2016, pp. 33–8; Behr and Rösch,
‘Introduction’.
 38. Morgenthau, Politics in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, p. 106–7, see also Hans Morgenthau,
Dilemmas of Politics (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1958), p. 81–2.
  39. Harmut Behr, ‘Security, Politics and Public Discourse: A Morgenthauian Approach’ in Mark
Bevir, Oliver Daddow and Ian Hall (eds) Interpreting Global Security (London: Routledge,
2013), p. 168.
  40. See ‘The State of Political Science’ in Morgenthau, Politics in the Twentieth Century, vol.
1, pp. 16–35; Cozette, ‘Reclaiming the Critical Dimension in Realism’.
  41. Jonathan Kirshner, ‘The Economic Sins of Modern IR Theory and the Classical Realist
Alternative’, World Politics, 67(1), 2015, p. 162.
  42. Rösch, ‘Pouvoir, Puissance, and Politics’, p. 12; on this point, see also Vassilios Paipais
‘Between Politics and the Political: Reading Hans J. Morgenthau’s Double Critique of
Depoliticisation’, Millennium, 42(2), 2014, pp. 354–75.
  43. Rösch, ‘Pouvoir, Puissance, and Politics’, p. 14.
Karkour 17

 44. Morgenthau, Politics in the Twentieth Century, vol. 3, p. 202.

  45.
Behr, ‘Security, Politics and Public Discourse’, p. 165.
 46. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, p. 11.
  47.
Behr, ‘Security, Politics and Public Discourse’, p. 172.
 48. Morgenthau, Scientific Man, p. 203; Morgenthau, ‘The Evil of Politics’, p. 18.
  49.
Molloy, ‘Aristotle, Epicurus, Morgenthau’.
 50. Morgenthau, Politics in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, p. 111.
 51. Morgenthau, Politics in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, p. 112.
52. See Hans J. Morgenthau, A New Foreign Policy For the United States (London: Pall Mall
Press, 1969).
53. Morgenthau, A New Foreign Policy, p. 10.
54. Morgenthau, A New Foreign policy, p. 10; see also Jennifer W. See ‘A Prophet without
Honor: Hans Morgenthau and the War in Vietnam, 1955–1965’, Pacific Historical Review,
70(3), 2001, p. 424.
55. On this point, see also Douglas B. Klusmeyer, ‘Death of the Statesman as Tragic Hero: Hans
Morgenthau on the Vietnam War’, Ethics & International Affairs, 30(1), 2016, p. 64.
56. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, p. 7–8; Emphasis in Original.
57. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, p. 8.
58. Morgenthau, A New Foreign Policy, p. 156.
59. For more on the impact of the violation of sovereignty on the international order, see also
Robert Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000).
60. Anthony Lake, ‘From Containment to Enlargement’, 21 September 1993, available at:
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/lakedoc.html (accessed 22 September 2016); see
also Douglas Brinkley, ‘Democratic Enlargement: The Clinton Doctrine’, Foreign Policy,
1997, pp. 110–27.
61. Richard N. Haass, ‘Fatal Distraction: Bill Clinton’s Foreign Policy’, Foreign Policy, 108,
1997, pp. 112–23.
62. The National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (Washington, DC: The
White House, 1994), p. 10.
63. William Hyland, ‘A Mediocre Record’, Foreign Policy, 101, 1995–1996, pp. 69–74; Robert
Zoellick, ‘The Reluctant Wilsonian: President Clinton and Foreign Policy’, SAIS Review,
14(2), 1994, pp. 1–14.
64. A National Security Strategy for a New Century (Washington, DC: The White House, 1999),
pp. 1–2.
65. John Gaddis, ‘Order versus Justice: An American Foreign Policy Dilemma’, in Rosemary
Foot, John Gaddis and Andrew Hurrell (eds), Order and Justice in International Relations
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 167.
66. See, for example, John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars (London: Simon & Schuster, 2003), p. 61;
Henry Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st
Century (London: Simon & Schuster, 2001), pp. 262–70.
67. Jean Elshtain, ‘Just War and Humanitarian Intervention’, American Society of International
Law, 95, 2001, p. 9.
68. See, for example, Adrian Gallagher, ‘A Clash of Responsibilities: Engaging with Realist
Critiques of the R2P’, Global Responsibility to Protect, 4(3), 2012, pp. 334–57.
69. Vladimir Putin, ‘Address by President of the Russian Federation’, 18 March 2014, available
at: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20603 (accessed 28 September 2016).
70. Daniel Treisman, ‘Why Putin Took Crimea: The Gambler in the Kremlin’, Foreign Affairs,
May/June 2016, pp. 47–54.
18 International Relations 00(0)

71. Ted Hopf, ‘“Crimea Is Ours”: A Discursive History’, International Relations, 30(2), 2016,
p. 244.
72. See, for example, Alex Bellamy, Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2006); Jurgen Habermas, ‘Bestiality and Humanity: a War on the Border between Law and
Morality’, Constellations, 6(3), 1999, pp. 263–72.
73. William Clinton, ‘Statement on Kosovo’, 24 March 1999, Available at: http://edition.cnn.
com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/25/clinton.transcript/ (accessed 5 August 2017).
74. Namely, ‘that states are always able to create a legitimacy convenient to themselves’ as cited
in Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010 [2000]), p. 6.
75. Inter alia, see Barry Buzan, From International Society to World Society? English School
Theory and the Social Structure of Globalisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006); Ian Clark, Legitimacy in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005).
76. Wheeler, Saving Strangers, p. 7; constructivist arguments on the legitimacy of the use
of force also accept this argument. See, for example, Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of
Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (New York: Cornell University
Press, 2003); Martha Finnemore, ‘Fights about Rules: The Role of Efficacy and Power in
Changing Multilateralism’, Review of International Studies, 31(S1), 2005, pp. 187–206. It
is on the basis of this definition, moreover, that proponents of the R2P could assert Russia’s
misuse of the norm to intervene in Georgia. On this point, see, for example, Gareth Evans,
‘Russia, Georgia and the Responsibility to Protect’, Amsterdam Law Forum, 1(2), 2009,
pp. 25–8.
77. See Quentin Skinner, ‘Motives, Intentions, and the Interpretation of Texts’, New Literary
History, 3(2), 1972, pp. 393–408.
78. See Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), chapter 2.
79. Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, p. 47.
80. On this point, see Charles Ziegler, ‘Russia on the Rebound: Using and Misusing the
Responsibility to Protect’, International Relations, 30(3), 2016, pp. 346–61.
81. Timothy Waters, ‘The Spear Point and the Ground beneath: Territorial Constraints on the
Logic of Responsibility to Protect’, International Relations, 30(3), 2016, pp. 314–27.
82. Gallagher, ‘A Clash of Responsibilities’; Gareth Evans, ‘The Responsibility to Protect:
An Idea Whose Time Has Come? … and Gone?’ International Relations, 22(3), 2008, pp.
283–98.
83. Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? p. 270.
84. Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? p. 263.
85. Morgenthau, A New Foreign Policy, p. 145.
86. It heightens the security threat by bringing the conflict ‘closer to home’ both geographi-
cally and historically, as Paul Chilton argues in Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and
Practice (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 149.
87. Chris Brown, ‘The Fall of the Towers and International Order’, International Relations,
16(2), 2002, pp. 263–7.
88. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: The
White House, 2002), p. 6.
89. Brian Schmidt and Michael C. Williams, ‘The Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War:
Neoconservatives versus Realists’, Security Studies, 17(2), 2008, pp. 191–220.
90. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), p. 239.
Karkour 19

91. Condoleezza Rice, ‘Promoting the National Interest’, Foreign Affairs, 79(1), 2000, pp.
45–62.
92. The evidence that sustains these claims is found in Mearsheimer and Walt’s detailed book
The Israeli Lobby. It is neither possible (due to space) nor necessary to repeat their empirical
analysis here.
93. In his memoirs, Bush also emphasised the importance of these attacks in his decision to
invade Iraq. See George W. Bush, Decision Points (London: Virgin Books, 2010), p. 224.
94. On the Carl Schmitt’s argument, see The Concept of the Political, trans. by George Schwab
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007 [1927]).
95. Madeleine Albright, Madame Secretary: A Memoir (New York: Random Press, 2003), p.
590.
96. Robin Cook, ‘Resignation Speech’, reprinted in Robin Cook, The Point of Departure:
Diaries From the Front Bench (London: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 379.
97. Roberts, ‘International Relations’.
98. Hopf, ‘Crimea is Ours’.
99. Gareth Stanfield, ‘Explaining the Aims, Rise, and Impact of the Islamic State in Iraq and Al
Sham’, The Middle East Journal, 70(1), 2016, pp.146–51.
100. Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israeli Lobby, pp. 250–3.
101. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival? America’s Quest for Global Dominance (London:
Penguin Books, 2003), p. 18.
102. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, p. 7.
103. For more on this, see Nicolas Bouchet, ‘Barak Obama’s Democracy Promotion at Midterm’,
The International Journal of Human Rights, 15(4), 2011, p. 574.
104. National Security Strategy (Washington, DC: The White House, 2010).
105. National Security Strategy (Washington, DC: The White House, 2015), p. 8.
106. National Security Strategy, p. 8.
107. See Simon Chesterman, ‘“Leading from behind”: The Responsibility to Protect, the
Obama Doctrine, and Humanitarian Intervention after Libya’, Ethics and International
Affairs, 25(3), 2011, pp. 279–85; leading, also, The Economist to refer to ‘the birth of an
Obama Doctrine’ on 28 March 2011. Available at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexing-
ton/2011/03/libya_4 (accessed 28 September 2016).
108. See full review in Adam Quinn, ‘The Art of Declining Politely: Obama’s Prudent Presidency
and the Waning of American Power’, International Affairs, 87(4), 2011, pp. 813–4.
109. Andreas Krieg, ‘Externalising the burden of war: The Obama Doctrine and US Foreign
Policy in the Middle East’, International Affairs, 92(1), 2016, pp. 97–113.
110. See William Clinton, My Life (London: Arrow Books, 2005), p. 581.
111. Bill and I agreed to take military action through NATO in a series of air strikes At the begin-
ning, and despite my intense misgivings, it was stated unequivocally that there would be no
ground troops. Without that statement, there would have been no air action, so I thought it
worth agreeing to. (Cited in Tony Blair, A Journey (London: Hutchinson, 2010), p. 235)
112. Florence Gaub, ‘A Libyan Recipe for Disaster’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy
56(1), 2014, pp. 101–20.
113. Alan Kuperman, ‘Obama’s Libya Debacle: How a Well-Meaning Intervention Ended in
Failure’, Foreign Affairs, 94(2), 2015, pp. 67–8.
114. See Justin Morris, ‘Libya and Syria: R2P and the Spectre of the Swinging Pendulum’,
International Affairs, 89(5), 2013, pp. 1265–83.
115. Cited in Kuperman, ‘Obama’s Libya Debacle’, p. 75.
116. On this point, see also Charles Cater and David Malone, ‘The Origins and Evolution of
Responsibility to Protect at the UN’, International Relations, 30(3), 2016, pp. 278–97.
20 International Relations 00(0)

117. Jason Ralph, ‘The Liberal State in International Society: Interpreting Recent British Foreign
Policy’, International Relations, 28(1), 2014, pp. 3–24, p. 16.
118. Alex Bellamy, ‘Libya and the Responsibility to Protect: The Exception and the Norm’,
Ethics and International Affairs, 25(3), 2011, pp. 263–9.
119. United Nations Security Council, S/RES/2118, New York, 27 September 2013.
120. Kirsten Ainley, ‘The Responsibility to Protect and the International Criminal Court:
Counteracting the Crisis’, International Affairs, 91(1), 2015, pp. 37–54.
121. Samuel Charap, ‘Russia, Syria and the Doctrine of Intervention’, Survival: Global Politics
and Strategy, 55(1), 2013, p. 40.
122. For example, see Ivo Daadler and James Stavridis, ‘NATO’s Victory in Libya: The Right
Way to Run an Intervention’, Foreign Affairs, 91(2), 2012, pp. 2–7; Dirk Vandewalle ‘After
Qaddafi: The Surprising Success of the New Libya’, Foreign Affairs, 91(6), 2012, pp. 8–15;
James Pattison, ‘The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention in Libya’, Ethics & International
Affairs, 25(3), 2011, pp. 271–7.
123. Jamie Gaskarth, British Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), p. 111.
124. See also Gaub, ‘A Libyan Recipe for Disaster’.
125. Jason Pack and Haley Cook, ‘The July 2012 Libyan Election and the Origin of Post-Qadhafi
Appeasement’, The Middle East Journal, 69(2), 2015, pp. 171–98.

Author biography
Haro L Karkour teaches at the University of Leicester. His research interests include classical real-
ism, post–Cold War US foreign policy, the emerging world order, and the disciplinary history of
International Relations (IR).