Reihan writes something that makes sense
No, not this post. This one:
Robert Pape is a brilliant scholar. His work on suicide terrorism is vitally important and extremely insightful. He has long been a sharp critic of the Bush administration, and that is all to the good. Unfortunately, he has just written an essay on American decline that could have been published at any point over the last sixty years.
Pape teaches in my program, though I haven’t yet taken any courses with him. I largely agree with Reihan’s analysis of Pape’s argument on American decline. I don’t know if he (Reihan) is correct about Pape’s motivations for lumping Brooks and Wohlforth in with some of the tawdrier neocons.
Brooks and Wohlforth are something of an odd pair in that they’ve made what is probably the strongest theoretical argument on behalf of the reality of U.S. unipolarity, without actually being anything like full-throated advocates of a maximalist foreign policy.
It’s true that in the course of their work they’ve made short shrift of (among others) Pape’s case for the existence and significance of “soft balancing” (briefly, if balancing proper amounts to a military alliance against the strongest state, then soft balancing defines those measures — usually economic — which fall short of military ones to check the strongest state). However, there is some irony in Pape’s straw-manning of their work, given that Brooks and Wohlforth could give a master class in the subject: they manage to look fair-minded while always presenting alternate views in a way that is most advantageous to their critique.
Part of the problem with their thesis is that, if true, then the field of IR is likely to be a pretty dull place for the next few decades. One can of course argue that unipolarity is actually highly unstable and that we can expect fireworks pretty soon (the subject of my preceptor’s dissertation — if he gets a book deal out of it, I’ll be sure to link). Or, one can argue, a la Pape, “unipolarity unischmolarity, the goddamn plane has crashed into the mountain.”
Some of this thinking, I think, has to do with the electronic noise created by the Iraq War: it was clearly a costly mistake and a strategic blunder of that magnitude has to have far-reaching effects. But, as Sporting Life would say, it ain’t necessarily so. The Iraq War, like the Boer War, could well be a foolish decision from which a great power can pretty easily recover. As overstretch goes, Iraq is no Sicily (and recall that Athens slogged on for nearly a decade after that).
All of which isn’t to say that we may not fall prey to overstretch. Just that rumors of our demise, etc. etc.