Obsolescence of Structural Realism after the Cold War

A review of Kenneth Waltz's article titled ‘Structural Realism After the Cold War’ 

It is quite disappointing that Kenneth Waltz in trying to justify the relevance of structural realism after the cold war relies majorly on case studies that formed his thinking on balance of power politics while clearly not explaining why 30 years after the end of the cold war, the world is not really in a hurry to balance America’s power. If Europe is comfortable with America’s hegemony, it has to be because it is a liberal democracy otherwise if China was in that position then Europe would be speaking a different language. However, in his attempt to convince us that the United States is a unipolar power, Waltz chooses the path of fantasy where by “what America wants, America gets” but there is a lot out there to challenge this notion. America did not win the Vietnam war despite their capabilities and after 18 years in Afghanistan, there is no path to victory, Europe has rejected Washington’s concerns over the building of an undersea pipeline that will allow Russia to increase gas exports to Germany, Britain has defied President Trump’s plea to ban Huawei from 5G network, Britons laughed off President Obama’s objection to Brexit, Italy has signed on to China’s Belt and Road initiative something I believe without Washington’s blessings, Turkey defied the US to get Russian missile system and now Kenya backed by the US are in another endless war with a non-state actor in Somalia. The picture Waltz paints of Europe waiting for instructions from Washington is neither here nor there and if wars are not solving all of our problems, should we continue fighting or think of other alternatives.

Waltz claims that the collapse of the Soviet Union had nothing to do with democracy but does not tell us why countries in eastern Europe that left the Soviet bloc quickly embraced capitalism and democracy. America was going into wars during the cold war just as they are doing today hence this deterrence thing is over glorified. Waltz pretends that the Cuban Missile Crisis did not happen yet it was the UN Secretary General U Thant who helped broker a deal when the US blocked USSR’s ships from delivering missiles to Cuba. He further argues that states will ensure that they avoid over dependence on other states because they cannot trust them yet despite the world learning this the hard way during the oil crisis in the 1970s, nothing much has changed. Saudi Arabia can afford to misbehave including killing a journalist in their consulate because they have invested heavily in the west and the world cannot afford to do away with their oil now that Iran is under sanctions. The outbreak of the corona virus is another show of complex interdependence in that despite the possibility of their citizenry being wiped out, states were not quick to close their borders and even where there are closures, the flow of goods or trade is allowed. If it is difficult to close our borders to trade despite a threatening virus, why would we want to close them with a war? The US-China trade war has exposed how multinational corporations can bypass and influence state actions. When Trump imposed tariffs on China, they responded in kind but US companies like Tesla and Apple directly negotiated with China to cut the tariffs by half which they did. Trump threatened to pull out of NAFTA but he ended up renegotiating the deal with few improvements because Mexico and Canada went tit-for-tat with tariffs. If this is not complex interdependence, then I do not know the kind of dependence Waltz wants.   

The Warsaw Pact was signed in response to the formation of NATO but we know its failure had to with America’s soft power and not that the Soviet was deprived of nuclear weapons. If NATO has changed from its original purpose, it is because life does not begin and end with military security. Other issues can be of concern to States and today’s problems have moved from interstate wars to terrorism and cyber-attacks. Russia has been accused of interfering in the U.S elections, Brexit elections and French elections through electronic propaganda. NATO is in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban, France has asked for the help of NATO in its war on terror in West Africa and Turkey has done the same as it pursues terrorists in northern Syria.  Terrorism is now more of a problem than balance of power politics that seem to be Waltz’s obsession and NATO has simply adjusted to the threats of the present. If the US was not troubled by France exiting NATO, then you cannot rule out that they did not consider them a threat since they are a liberal democracy and that is why defense budgets have not gone up because Britain has left the European Union. As far as international law is concerned, do we have laws because they cannot be broken or that if you do so then there are consequences? The International Criminal Court has given a go ahead to the ICC Prosecutor to investigate alleged war crimes of US soldiers in Afghanistan and could this be one of the reasons they have opted for a peace deal with a non-state actor? Your guess is as good as mine.

As Waltz celebrates the economic power of Germany, Japan and China and advising them to develop their military capabilities, he forgets to tell us that the three are highly dependent on the American market and they would not want to destabilize that with power wars. Developing weapons does not create deterrence, having them can result into wars as was the case with the arms race being one of the causes of the first world war. Trump once retorted, “Why should we have nuclear weapons if we cannot use them?” It is also a contradiction to advise Japan to get nuclear weapons in addition to their economic strength because they cannot rely on or trust U.S protection forever but at the same indicating that Europe is ‘weak’ yet they have strong economies and nuclear weapons. Both France and Britain have nuclear weapons, if that is good enough then why is Europe still interested in US protection? At the same time, nuclear weapons give advantage to states with large territorial sizes for instance even if Rwanda became a nuclear powerhouse, they will disappear faster from the world map in a nuclear war with America because of her small size. Needless to say, nuclear weapons did not help the US in Vietnam and they are not helping in Afghanistan.

It has been 30 years since the end of the cold war and this is too long a period already for us to be sitting there and not filling in the gaps that Waltz pretends do not exist and worse still telling us to wait for some future time to come when the so called unipolar system would be no more. Is structural realism still relevant today, may be yes but to help us push our case for transnational relations, institutionalism and complex interdependence. Does structural realism have all the answers after the cold war, absolutely no.