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International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War, by Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, editors
10. Conclusions: The End of the Cold War--What Have We Learned?
Richard K. Herrmann
Did the end of the Cold War undermine or confirm basic theories of international relations ? Does the failure of most theories to predict this event demonstrate the weakness of their insight into international affairs ? These are complicated questions, and it is not surprising that the authors in this book answer them differently. The questions raise subsidiary prior questions about what constitutes international relations theory, what the Cold War was, when it ended, and what the proper role of prediction is in evaluating theory. All these prior questions remain intensely controversial, and any simple and definitive answer to the larger question of how the end of the Cold War affects international relations theory would only mask the real issues being debated. Fortunately, the essays in this book do not avoid controversy and take us directly into both the debate about theory and the debate about the Cold War.
Rather than summarize the arguments in the previous essays, I plan to organize this essay around three questions. First, what have we learned about structural realism, and how does this relate to what we already knew ? Second, what was the Cold War, and when did it end ? Third, did the end of the Cold War settle the long-standing debate about Soviet foreign policy that centered on the interpretation of Soviet motivation ? I intend to devote a section of this paper to each question and then to end with some brief comments on how we might proceed from here. My theme throughout is that structural theory has important insights but they are commonplace at the level of foreign policy analysis, which is the level where most interpretations of the Cold War rest. At the foreign policy level, motivation--the key concept for interpretation--remains a variable we identify as much by assertion as by careful empirical defense. The end of the Cold War provides new information and access to more old information, but it will not solve the analytical challenge of interpretation. That challenge requires examining the political process that defines national interests in a way that leads to testable propositions. Rather than jumping to this conclusion, however, I will first look at the utility of structural theory.
Structural Theory
In 1957 and again in 1975 the former president of the American Psychological Association wrote about the two disciplines of psychology. 1 One discipline explained human action with personality theory and the features of individuals; the other explained action in terms of the environment and its effect on people. This structure-agent problem is not unique to psychology; it permeates international relations theory as well. 2 It is unlikely that the end of the Cold War is going to move this debate much past the interactionist position that Cronbach argued for in psychology.
The search for a system construct that integrates the actor and the environment is hardly new in international relations theory. 3 It requires combining two levels of systems thinking usually kept separate--that is, the international system, defined as the relationships among the great powers in the world, and the national system in which foreign policy is made. Because the focus of this book is on the end of a particular conflict and a specific set of actors, most of the essays struggle with the integration of these two levels of analysis. Along the way, structural theory is criticized heavily because it fails to provide the cross-level integration that advocates of interactionism want. The end of the Cold War has raised doubts about neorealist assumptions, predictions, and operationalizations. More needs to be said on all of these points.
Assumptions
Classic realism assumed that all states would define their interests in terms of power. This was not an empirical judgment but an axiom. For Morgenthau, it grew out of a conclusion that state motivations would be too many and too difficult to identify in any convincing manner. 4 Consequently, he assumed that whatever ends states wanted, they needed power to achieve them. This simplifying assumption allowed realists to hold the motive forces driving state behavior constant and to concentrate on variations in the distribution of power in the international system. Neorealists substituted a universal desire for security for the traditional focus on power, but within a self-help system that they assumed was anarchic, security typically depended on the acquisition of power, whether military or alliance based. 5 World system theorists, a perspective missing from this book, made a comparable simplifying assumption, treating economic gain, instead of power, as the universal motive driving state behavior. 6
If world politics worked as if all great states pursued power until they were constrained by other great states, then, as Morton Kaplan did, one could designate a series of possible power distributions and derive the dynamics for each international system. 7 But these abstract worlds would explain events only to the degree that the simplifying assumption about motivation was reasonable. How to judge this was never clear. Predictive accuracy alone was not enough. After all, people can predict consequences without understanding causes. Anyone who drives a car or operates a computer without really knowing how the machinery works can attest to this. In any case, realists did not claim that their simplifying assumption regarding motivation was an adequate description at the foreign policy level. 8 Consequently, simply demonstrating that not all states behave as if this motive were driving them or that more complex compounds of interests including many domestic as well as international concerns affect policy would not topple the theory.
Although classic realism rested fundamentally on power determinism, even as distinguished an advocate as Hans Morgenthau wrote at length about the importance of distinguishing status quo-oriented states from those that were imperialist or prestige driven. 9 Jack Snyder in this book speaks of two types of realism, aggressive and defensive, reintroducing the unit-level variation that realism was designed to avoid. Once the monocausal assumption at the foreign policy level is relaxed, however, the ability to deduce behavioral predictions at the international system level is seriously complicated, and data demands increase exponentially. To talk about the specific case of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, however, one has little choice but to cross this analytical divide.
A number of essays in this book question the monocausal assumption at the root of most structural theory. Koslowski and Kratochwil go even further and challenge assumptions about actors. At a simple level, realism can be criticized for concentrating on states. Other actors affect world affairs, and arguments for transnational players by this time are commonplace. 10 Adding international organizations, nongovernmental transnational organizations, and multinational corporations, however, does not seriously undermine the core ideas of realism. Morgenthau presented the theory of causation at a general level that could apply to most actors. What Koslowski and Kratochwil concentrate on, however, is critical. They are not simply arguing for the inclusion of other actors; they are calling into question the intellectual and political processes that affect the construction of aggregate concepts in international relations theory.
Nations are not natural categories. 11 They are not primordial entities waiting to be awakened. 12 Nor are they material categories determined in any regular way by race, religion, or ethnicity. 13 They are constructed communities shaped by leaders and politicians who often look to scholars for help in mobilization, socialization, and legitimation. 14 Academic recognition that a community is a nation thus has political implications in an era in which national self-determination commands substantial normative appeal and typically means statehood. Reexamining the political origins of what realists take to be actors not only reveals implicit assumptions about power and legitimacy but draws attention to nonmilitary conceptions of power and to causes of the Cold War's demise that are not immediately evident in the bilateral Soviet-American relationship.
For instance, an era of mass politics in the former colonial worlds of Asia and Africa empowered a series of nationalist movements in the 1950s that gave strength to the nonaligned movement in the 1960s. 15 These developments did not end the Soviet-American contest, but they did reduce its systemic effects. No longer did the East-West conflict define the agenda for the entire international system. Growing mass participation in politics, economic development, and nationalist mobilization made it increasingly costly for the superpowers to sustain control in places they felt were important to their Cold War strategies. 16 The American setbacks in Vietnam and Iran and the Soviet setbacks in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe provided dramatic evidence of this. They also highlighted the importance of regime legitimacy in power calculations.
Nationalism played a role in these cases, as did the norm of self-determination. In the case of Vietnam, however, the issue was not simply the realization of independence free of foreign influence--which, after all, is impossible in a highly interdependent world. What was at stake was the very definition of the state and what nation it represented. The Cold War constrained the process of decolonization, often resting statehood and self-determination on principles of territoriality and stability as much as on political identity. Nations could be built within the states, or so the assumption went.
If states are taken as the analytical unit, the end of the Cold War unleashed a new period in which the principle of national identity can compete successfully with territoriality as a basis for statehood. No doubt this will be associated with horrible bloodshed and human dislocations, as in the Caucasus, Yugoslavia, and Kashmir. If instead the focus is on the political processes that lead to national identity and state legitimacy, then the pressures for legitimate government--however violently expressed--and shifting international norms may be seen as important causes leading to the end of the Cold War, not simply as consequences resulting from it. Moreover, the focus should broaden to include cases in which these processes strengthened states or led to peaceful unification (e.g., in Germany and for a while in Yemen) or peaceful separation (e.g., in Ukraine and Slovakia). Along the way, analysis of the violence, its causes and cures, will also be affected, highlighting the political significance of the theoretical assumptions.
Besides power and states, a third assumption important in neorealism is the lack of system governance, that is, the condition of anarchy. 17 In a self-help world, in which actors are motivated by desires for survival, neorealists claim that a security dilemma among the great powers is likely and that cooperation will be difficult to achieve. 18 Although critics of neorealism challenge the strict logical character of this deduction and argue for a more complex conceptualization, most realist-based analyses accept it as a working assumption. 19 Of course, within this realist framework, should a third party emerge as a new challenger to both bipolar great powers, then a modus vivendi or superpower condominium could easily be anticipated and cooperation achieved. More difficult to deduce from the anarchy assumption, however, is the possibility that the security dilemma could be overcome by the great powers redefining the threat they posed to each other with little change evident in their material abilities to threaten one another. As in the case of motivation, the complexity of the Cold War case once again highlights the costs associated with accepting the simplifying assumptions of structural realism--in this case, the assumption about the environment.
Predictions
Abstract models of the international system are not true or false. They are merely more or less accurate representations of some part of world politics. 20 Hedley Bull argued that none of the most common models was sufficient by itself because parts of world politics reflected all three elements represented by Hobbesian, Kantian, and Grotian perspectives. 21 For Bull, it was not so much that structural realism was wrong; the problem was that during the Cold War the reality of Soviet-American relations was much more complicated and simple realist perspectives did not capture nearly enough to be very useful. Soviet-American relations, even in the toughest days, included elements of transnational and cooperative behavior that were not captured in the stark assumptions of anarchy and self-help. 22 If the test of a model's utility and importance as a scientific (as distinct from mathematical) representation rests on measures of its empirical accuracy, then one typical way to determine this is by its predictive power.
While philosophers of science disagree about the exact relationship between prediction and theory testing, 23 fairness demands examination of a theory's predictive power with regard to the phenomenon it claims to explain. For example, although the Cold War affected international relations theory in the United States in many ways and may have even promoted the popularity of realist simplifications, it is not fair to dismiss realism because it failed to predict a change in Soviet foreign policy. It is not a theory of foreign policy. On the other hand, realism should be expected to predict the systemic effects of the change in the great-power relationship. This, after all, was the subject realists discussed at length. Some, like Morton Kaplan, even worked out specific transformation rules to describe the change likely in each system. 24
Previous scholarship testing realism typically began with the balance--or concentration--of power, polarity, or perhaps great-power alliances and from these independent variables predicted peace, war, the likelihood of war, types of war, stability in alliances, or the likelihood that regional wars would escalate to great-power war. 25 At times, intervening variables such as abundance of resources in the system are added to modify the prediction of polarity alone. 26 The diversity in independent and dependent variables and the differences in the way they are operationalized make the large literature on structural factors and war difficult to summarize in a brief article. What is important to note here is that this research relates systemic characteristics like polarity to peace, war, and stability among great powers. The theory does not question where polarity comes from but aims to explain what its consequences are. It could not predict the end of the Cold War, understood as loose bipolarity, 27 but it may be able to predict the systemic consequences of this transformation in great-power relations. The period of change in great-power relationships is too close--if not still in progress--for us to know whether the realist predictions in this regard will hold or not. 28
When the Cold War is seen as a case of great-power rivalry, comparable to other historical cases that have frequently been used in the examination of realist theory, it also is not fair to concentrate only on the beginning and end of the contest. The appropriate test of realism may not be the end of the Cold War but rather the "long peace," as John Gaddis calls the nearly forty years of stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union. 29 Still, this stability is overdetermined, and with so little variation in Soviet-American relations, it is difficult to identify the effects of various plausible causal factors. Lebow, however, raises important questions about the relationship between polarity and stability in the Cold War. 30 He does so not by challenging the stalemate from the 1950s to 1980s but by arguing that essential stability also prevailed in the 1940s before bipolarity, as he measures it, was established. The argument will gain strength, if the post-Cold War world evolves into a clearly multipolar world, and stability among the great powers persists.
Operational Indicators
For the past twenty years, scholars and politicians alike have been anticipating the advent of a multipolar world. 31 Many considered that the Cold War international system evolved into loose bipolarity in the 1960s and showed signs of multipolarity in the 1970s. Of course, consensus never existed on this point, not even among American scholars, much less among observers from around the world. Different conceptions and operational measures of power greatly complicate efforts to evaluate the predictive utility of structural theories. It is difficult to decide when to attribute error to measurement problems, when to theoretical shortcomings. Several essays in this book address the problems of an underspecified theory but only begin to wrestle with the task of operationally measuring relative power.
Hans Morgenthau, like most realists, described in some detail the various components of national power. His picture was multidimensional and complicated, including material, psychological, and social aspects of power. 32 As Morgenthau conceives it, power is more than simply the military and financial instruments of influence; it also involves the government's ability to mobilize support and sustain morale. Moreover, power includes the leverage derived from intelligent diplomacy and covert information gathered about the objectives and calculations of other players in the bargaining context. Few scholars have tried to measure all these aspects of power. 33 Some concentrate on the material resource base and parts of the military instrument base. 34 A few have tried to factor in a general notion of domestic support and strategic leverage that might accrue from the type of decision-making process or the wisdom of the military planning. 35 These efforts are less likely to include as many countries in the sample and have a far more difficult time defending the validity of their measures. Constructing a formula for aggregating across the various dimensions and sources of power and arriving at a composite relative score is more difficult still.
All these problems inherent in measuring power have received a great deal of attention (with no terrific solutions forthcoming as yet). A more complicated and theoretically troublesome dilemma, however, has received less attention than it deserves. It derives from the relationship between power and motivation. One cannot test how powerful a state is unless one knows how hard it is trying to exert influence. Hedley Bull described the problem this way:
| The idea that if one state challenges the balance of power, other states are bound to seek to prevent it, assumes that all states seek to maximize their relative power position. This is not the case. States are constantly in the position of having to choose between devoting their resources and energies to maintaining or extending their international power position, and devoting these resources and energies to other ends. . . . Some states which have the potential for playing a major role . . . prefer to play a relatively minor one. 36 |
If the exertion of power is a variable, then measuring power requires a prior assumption about exertion, which involves returning to the domain of motivation. James March recognized this problem in structural power theories and suggested that "force activation" models were necessary to make power analysis a more useful enterprise. 37 Unfortunately, he did not explain how to determine the level of exertion or motivational intensity. At times of total war, it may be reasonable to make the assumption of maximum exertion that realist theory is based on. At other moments, however, that assumption is misleading and interferes with the accurate measurement of power. During the Cold War, for instance, neither superpower ever used all the instruments it had available to compete in projecting influence, and assumptions that they did inject political, almost ideological, assumptions into the empirical evaluation of relative capability. A brief look at the Persian Gulf illustrates the point.
The importance of oil to the Western world and the Persian Gulf's role in supplying this oil make the Gulf a key strategic zone in the international system. If the Cold War can be represented as a loose bipolar system operating on anything like the rules spelled out by Kaplan and Waltz, then both the Soviet Union and the United States should have competed actively for control over this area. 38 In fact, the United States did devote substantial effort to this task. 39 Soviet behavior, however, is more puzzling. Why, for instance, did it remain so passive in 1953 when the United States participated in a coup in Iran ? The United States would not have behaved similarly had Moscow been implicated in such activities in Mexico--or Iran, for that matter. Yet, far from interfering, Moscow developed a reasonably positive relationship with the Shah and did very little to actively assert its influence in the Gulf, despite the close U.S.-Iranian relationship in the 1960s and 1970s. 40
Many Americans may object to this description of Soviet behavior in the Gulf. They remember a Soviet Union that was aggressively trying to court Iraq, interfere in Dohfar, and promote the Tudeh party in Iran. 41 They may also see the U.S. nuclear deterrent as relevant and conclude that Moscow was doing everything it could to compete in the Gulf; it simply was weaker than the United States in this theater. 42 The problem is that this interpretation rests as much on assumptions about Soviet motives as it does on Soviet capabilities. After all, Iran shares a sixteen hundred mile border with the ussr. Moscow had twenty-five divisions north of Iran that could have been fleshed out to combat ready strength. It had sixty more divisions in the European areas of the ussr and thousands of combat aircraft nearby or easy to mobilize into the theater. 43 To respond to any Soviet movement, the United States would need to project force halfway around the world, since it had little conventional capability in place. 44 The Shah, of course, did have a large military force, but much of it was deployed to the south of Iran, and the Shah developed quite good relations with Moscow, giving little indication that he intended to fight the Soviet Union.
My point here is not to rewrite the history of the Cold War in the Gulf but rather to highlight the interdependent nature of estimates of power and assumptions about motivations. Americans who assume that Moscow was highly expansionist and opportunistic would attribute Soviet passivity in the Gulf to its lack of capability and to successful American deterrence. They might not look as hard at the empirical evidence concerning Soviet capability. After all, if Moscow was seen to have the capability to do more and was not actively doing it, then this would challenge the basic perception of an expansionist and opportunistic adversary. Important psychological processes protect and inhibit change in people's fundamental perceptions of adversaries. 45 In this case, the central beliefs are not just related to assumptions about a structural theory of world politics but to fundamental political disputes over what the Cold War was.
What Was the Cold War ?
Ironically, Hans Morgenthau did not see the Cold War in terms of a bipolar balance of power; rather, he saw it as proof that a balance-of-power system was no longer possible. 46 The rise of mass politics and democracy had swept away the transnational aristocracy that had provided the common norms necessary for a balance-of-power system to work. 47 Morgenthau concluded that in the modern era a balance of power was uncertain, unreal, and inadequate, more often a part of a state's ideological justification of aggression than a serious characteristic of the system. For Morgenthau, the Cold War was explained in terms of nationalistic universalism--perhaps the most interesting idea in his most famous work and one that has attracted surprisingly little attention. 48
The Cold War, according to Morgenthau, was a crusade. Two states, each promoting its own national ideological moral code as universally valid for the world, were locked in a battle to the death. Almost everything about the struggle violated the principles of a balance-of-power system. The great states were willing to invest heavily in geostrategically insignificant theaters in the name of the ideological crusade. Realpolitik considerations were set aside, and the struggle pursued at high costs in Third World areas that, because of the psychological basis of the crusade, had symbolic value, though marginal intrinsic strategic importance. 49 The battle for a way of life also meant that compromise and a modus vivendi were unlikely until one of the two major players was eliminated from the system. Kenneth Oye, in this book, returns to the ideological factor as a key cause driving the Cold War but tries to preserve a realist perspective just the same.
It is interesting that for the most part the controversy over what the Cold War was is not central to this book. A bipolar security dilemma and balance of power seem to be assumed by most authors. Yet Morgenthau was not alone in proposing an alternative conception of the Cold War. Some historians, for instance, emphasized the U.S. role in Europe, the containment of Germany and Japan, the extension of Western commercial influence into the Third World periphery, and Washington's domestic transformation into an outward-looking global military power as just as central to the Cold War as the bilateral Soviet-American relationship. 50 In these other conceptions, it was not simply a struggle for relative power or ideology that sustained the set of conflicts that we call the Cold War; material economic interests and domestic vested interests played an important role as well. The United States was not seen as consistently promoting a democratic way of life, particularly in the Third World. Nor was the Soviet Union seen as spreading socialism in any pure way. More often, the superpowers were described as making alliances for economic and material gain, putting whatever ideological face on it that made sense for domestic consumption and international propaganda.
In the power transition theory of A. F. K. Organski, the international system was not assumed to be anarchical; rather, it was described as hierarchical. 51 Rules similar to those constraining domestic politics were assumed also to constrain international politics, and nations were thought to pursue net gain, not power. In this theory, the Cold War was a struggle between a dominant power, allied to other satiated states, and an unsatisfied nation (i.e., the Soviet Union) that challenged the existing hierarchy. The relative power of the actors was not an independent variable; it was an intervening variable dependent on domestic development processes. Organski's central theoretical focus was on the level and types of production, fertility and mortality rates, political mobilization by the government, and social mobilization of populations. 52
World systems theory provided yet another conception of the Cold War. Here, as in power transition theory, system hierarchy not anarchy was assumed, and attention focused primarily on the political economy of production and economic growth. 53 The Cold War in this scheme could be seen as a struggle between a hegemonic country (i.e., the United States) expanding the reach of world capitalism and an economic revolutionary Soviet Union. For many in this tradition, the revolutionary nature of the Soviet Union was somewhat in doubt. Immanuel Wallerstein, for instance, described it as a supermercantilist country as much as a revolutionary force challenging the essential logic of capital accumulation and production. 54 He, and Christopher Chase-Dunn, would cite what most authors in this book take to be the end of the Cold War as evidence of continuity, not change, in the system. 55 The hegemony of the dominant mode of production was reaffirmed, and the socialist mercantilists persuaded to accept assimilation, an outcome to which they had been resigning themselves for some time.
Recognizing that the Cold War is not an event with obvious char acteristics but rather a historical representation constructed by scholars draws attention not only to the question of what it was but also to the question of when it ended. It is odd that while the debate over when the Cold War started and who started it still rages, the collective judgment evident in this book is that when it ended is obvious. If the Cold War was the ideological struggle that Morgenthau and Oye describe, then perhaps it did end with the renunciation of communism in the Soviet Union and the ussr's collapse. But one wonders then what to make of Malenkov and Khrushchev and the important ideological revisions of the late 1950s. 56 Was Moscow really crusading for communist ideology during the Brezhnev years of stagnation ? Was this why it aligned with Nasser in the 1960s, Saddam Hussein in the 1970s, and broke with China ? 57
Perhaps the ideological zeal of the Cold War did decline with the death of Stalin. After that, more dogmatic leaders on both sides kept up some of the rhetoric, but the language of peaceful coexistence gained ground, as did a policy of stalemate and stabilized deterrence. 58 Maybe after the mid-1950s the Cold War was more clearly a struggle for power between a status quo-oriented United States and the revisionist-minded Soviet Union. 59 In this conception, however, it is not entirely clear just how revisionist the Soviet Union was and when it stopped being so. After all, the modus vivendi worked out with Willy Brandt in the early 1970s and codified in the Helsinki Final Act established a political-territorial status quo that Moscow seemed to accept and in fact, demanded and protected with vigor.
Moscow's efforts in Vietnam also gave way to its interest in détente. Both Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger expected a much more vigorous Russian response to U.S. policy in Vietnam in the spring and fall of 1972. 60 Certainly, Moscow's exit from Egypt in the same year hardly seemed like committed revisionist behavior. Perhaps the Cold War, in terms of a revisionist Soviet Union, ended in the late 1960s, only to be revived by a series of regional conflicts in the late 1970s that Americans read, often wrongly, as Soviet inspired. Despite another decade of competition in places like Angola and Cambodia, in the 1990s the United States agreed to deal and work with previously unacceptable Soviet allies like the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (mpla) and Hun Sen. In Iran, meanwhile, the Islamic revolutionaries, who have said all along that they are a third force and not agents of the bipolar system, still reign, and revolutionary Iran never fell under Soviet control as Cold War-minded Americans feared it might.
The purpose here is not to suggest that the events of 1989-1990 were not dramatic; without question, they were more dramatic than the history of previous decades. The point is that these events were part of a process of change that already boasted many important benchmarks. Détente did not die in Europe, even if it did take a nosedive in the United States during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. Cautious and sometimes cooperative behavior in the Third World was not unheard of before Gorbachev. 61 And Gorbachev did not follow Stalin in Moscow, but Brezhnev. It is understandable why Gorbachev presented his reforms in contrast to Stalinism, maximizing the distinctions, but the comparison greatly oversimplifies the history of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. More care in reconstructing the history, and the debates about it, is necessary before recent events can serve as convincing evidence in a consideration of international relations theory.
Was the Cold War a struggle between two active, ideologically messianic states, as Morgenthau described ? Was it a period of active American expansion and Soviet response, or, on the other hand, Soviet challenge and American defense ? And what were the protagonists defending ? Their security, economic self-interest, and mode of production ? Their sense of grandeur ? Or all three and more ? These are the kinds of questions that have fueled the debate over the Cold War for nearly fifty years. They have not been solved in this book, and, at root, they turn on the question of national motivation. The structural realist effort to avoid the question by assumption simply pushed the issue into the realm of ideology and assertion. How far we have come in addressing the question theoretically and empirically is the next subject to explore.
What Were Soviet Motives?
Traditional realists did not avoid the motivational question because they thought it was unimportant; they tried to sidestep it because they thought it was impossible to answer. In foreign affairs, a particular motive may produce many different types of behavior, depending on the circumstances, just as the same action can be caused by various motives. Many of the essays in this book have pointed out the limitations of structural realism, but few have showed how to move to the next level of causal regression with empirical rigor. It is easier to recognize the need to understand domestic processes and the political construction of national interest than it is to figure out how to study them. The Cold War, of course, involved assumptions about both Soviet and American motives; for the sake of brevity, I will look only at the debate over Soviet motives here. Unfortunately, despite the labor-intensive efforts of many scholars, little consensus was ever achieved on the subject, and not much more is likely in the post-Cold War period.
Over twenty years ago, William Gamson and Andre Modigliani tried to devise a strategy for testing rival theories of the Cold War. 62 They identified six major interpretations, all of which included a central judgment about Soviet intentions. Moscow was either destructionist, interested in destroying the values and social system embodied in the United States and Western Europe; expansionist, seeking to expand its control through the achievement of specific political goals; or consolidationist, interested in maintaining the status quo. William Welch, at roughly the same time, examined the competing American academic views of Soviet foreign policy and developed a comparable scale on which to portray the very diverse set of American opinions. 63 Whether the Soviet Union was seen as revisionist or as defending the status quo became a central divide in American strategic analysis and sat at the bedrock of competing policy advice. Some scholars, frustrated by the inability to settle the dispute, tried to get around it by concentrating on Soviet behavior instead, simply trying to decide if Soviet behavior was confrontational, competitive, opportunistic, or cooperative. 64 Unfortunately, this sort of description only begged the strategic question of why the Soviet Union behaved as it did, which remained the critical question underpinning advice on what Washington should do to affect Moscow's behavior.
Robert Jervis reached the sobering conclusion that despite the mountains of literature written on the Soviet Union, few analysts were persuaded by anyone else's arguments about Soviet motives. Alexander George concluded that helping to adjudicate between these different descriptions of the adversary's intentions was the most pressing task of policy relevant foreign policy level theory. Unfortunately, he did not tell us how to do this and the obstacles to it were substantial. 65
For instance, many of the claims were nonfalsifiable. 66 If one was convinced that Nathan Leites was right and the Bolshevik operational code included a notion of pressing ahead until encountering solid resistance, then Moscow's aggressive behavior would confirm expectations, and its restraint would be attributed to American strength. 67 Typically, as was the case in the Persian Gulf example discussed earlier, the empirical situation was sufficiently unclear that some argument for American strength was possible even if complicated. Defensive interpretations were equally invulnerable, rarely spelling out what sort of behavior could not be attributed to some sort of perceived provocation. In the Cold War, after all, the whole world was seen as part of the competitive theater, and Moscow may have believed that actions possibly entirely independent of U.S. decision making were orchestrated in Washington. Certainly, many Americans attributed regional events beyond Moscow's control to Soviet foreign policy.
Furthermore, many of the motives that scholars ascribed to Moscow as causal factors were not mutually exclusive. The Soviet Union could have maintained the Warsaw Pact for ideological, defensive, and expansionist reasons all at once. Moreover, the maintenance of the alliance could have served the vested interests of the military and the party bureaucracy and even the domestic coalitional needs and intra-Politburo bargaining of individual leaders. It is difficult to imagine controlling in a rigorous research design the many degrees of freedom introduced by so many possible causal motives. Perhaps if scholars could have penetrated the decision-making process more adequately, convincing differentiations of the relative importance of one motive over others could have been established. Most efforts to penetrate the process, however, involved so much conjecture and controversial Kremlinology that the prior theory about what was motivating Moscow may have guided the description of the decision-making process more than did any objective examination of the competing propositions about Soviet motivation. 68
Because the various interpretations of Soviet policy were typically nonfalsifiable, they can easily explain the end of the Cold War, although they could never have predicted its timing. Theories that emphasized the expansionist interests of Moscow argued that vigilant containment would eventually force Soviet leaders to face their overextension, give up their practice of securing domestic legitimacy from foreign adventure, and attend to domestic demands and inward-looking priorities. 69 Scholars that described Soviet policy as opportunistic and theoretically attributed its behavior to bureaucratic, party, and military vested interests also can explain the change. Since the early 1970s this perspective had argued that Moscow faced the choice of petrification or pluralism. 70 Economic modernization would force change as the realities of production in an advanced industrial high-technology system produced not only new technical pressures but also a new elite that over time would represent new vested interests. 71 Defensive and status quo theories of Soviet foreign policy can explain the change, too. They attributed past Soviet policy to the excessive security fears of Soviet leaders and to the geopolitical pressures these leaders rightly or wrongly felt. 72 If new Soviet leaders did not share these fundamental assumptions about the nature of the external threat, profound change would follow.
While any of the competing perspectives can explain the change, none anticipated that Gorbachev would unleash dramatic change in the late 1980s. However, scholars can look backward and find antecedent causes and confirmatory evidence to bolster their prior interpretations. Hawks can point to Reagan's foreign policy and conclude that it tipped the scales in Moscow and forced a reconsideration of power. They are likely to downplay or ignore the effects of détente in Europe, which never really waned despite the American policy of the 1980s. They also may overlook the security-minded elite in Moscow that never agreed with Gorbachev's policy, describing it as a foolish and unnecessary retreat. Modernization theorists, meanwhile, can describe the emergence of a new elite and the pressures of the technical age but pay less attention to the Chinese experience and that of the Asian tigers, where economic and political change were not so deterministically connected. Moreover, in Iran, a profoundly different value system came to prevail--as it could have in Russia--setting aside the drive to economic growth. Finally, the doves can concentrate on Gorbachev's new thinking and show that it represented a recognition of the security dilemma, a sense that past Soviet leaders were too preoccupied with security, and a test of a disengagement strategy. As Ned Lebow points out, however, they did not expect a leader to emerge in Moscow who was more confident of Soviet security and more willing to test American intentions while the United States was developing sdi, accelerating the arms race, and through the Reagan Doctrine arming anti-Soviet insurgencies in the Third World.
The critical theoretical problem with all the motivational theories is that they cannot specify the relative effect of various motives that are not mutually exclusive, and thus they cannot make a concrete prediction. They can explain post hoc, but in doing so, they eliminate the contingencies that actually confront their predictions. In other words, a hawk, after the fact, can know that a U.S. policy of strength had more effect in convincing Soviet leaders of their overextension than the European détente policy did in undermining the credibility of the American policy and convincing Soviet leaders that they should persevere. Before the fact, however, they could not tell which trend would prevail. The deterministic-sounding modernization theories also hide the real level of contingency in their predictions. After the fact, it is possible to conclude that the new vested interests of the technical elite overtook elements in the older ruling coalition, but before the fact, it was hard to forecast what form the new demands would take, or whether those demands would prevail, produce more efficient corporatism, or simply be defeated domestically. Looking at the uncertainty surrounding the survival and success of Yeltsin's policies in Russia reinforces the point. We recognize contingency in the future but forget that it also existed in the past. The result is that our reconstruction of the past often leaves contingency out; we simply search for the likely antecedent causes that correlate with what happened, not with what might have happened and even seemed likely at one time. 73
Not only do the motivational theories confront problems of nonfalsifiability, the difficulty of specifying what actions motives will and will not produce, and the understandable psychological biases involved in reading the past, they also must deal with the implications of the cognitive revolution in the social sciences. The key point here is to recognize that the perception of the situation that the subjects--in this case, Soviet leaders--have may not be the same as that of the scholar doing the analysis. 74 Both Lebow and Stein in this book, for instance, feel that the learning they ascribe to Soviet leaders was motivated by domestic priorities and needs more than by external stimuli. Yet this depends critically on what external stimuli they think the Soviet elite saw. Perhaps the Soviet decision to withdraw from Afghanistan will make the point concrete.
For Americans operating in a strictly bipolar mind-set, the only stimulus Soviet leaders could have picked up from U.S. diplomacy in the early 1980s was increased hostility. 75 The Reagan administration was not pursuing détente but revived containment. For scholars looking at potential stimuli in the regional context, the situation was different. Moscow had intervened in Afghanistan to ensure that a pro-Soviet government would rule in Kabul. 76 In Cold War terms, it feared that Washington would make a comeback after the fall of the Shah and move through Pakistan into Afghanistan. Motivated by this East-West simplification and misled by imperial images of a backward Afghanistan that would be easy to subdue, Brezhnev intervened. 77
Nothing went as planned. Babrak Karmal did not gain legitima cy; instead, by the way he had come to power, he lost it forever. The mujahideen resistance increased as did Soviet casualties. Washington did not make a comeback in Iran; to the contrary, the Islamic Republic remained intensely hostile. American efforts to court Iran in the mid-1980s seemed more comical than truly threatening. As the costs escalated, the perceived threat of an American presence in the area looked ever more remote, not because of Reagan but because of the rise of regional powers and especially because of the rise of political Islam.
Just as the war in Vietnam convinced many Americans that the Soviet threat was exaggerated, the war in Afghanistan seemed to have a comparable effect in Moscow. 78 This happened not because it demonstrated a lack of American, competitiveness but because it brought to light regional realities and high costs that shattered the simple metaphors of the Cold War and undermined the domestic willingness to defend symbolic, as distinct from intrinsic, interests. The idea that the Americans would encircle the Soviet Union by controlling Kabul seemed increasingly fanciful as the realities of the Afghan scene sunk in. Moreover, as the political power of populist Islam grew, killing Muslims by the thousands in Afghanistan was hardly the way to close off Washington's options in the area. Not surprisingly, in February 1989, as the last Soviet soldier left Afghan-istan, Soviet foreign minister Shevardnadze launched a major tour of the Middle East, courting Arab and Islamic favor and finally arriving in Tehran, where he was the first foreign minister ever received by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
The learning in Soviet foreign policy may not only be attributed to stimuli Americans miss, but it may also be the result of the reformulation of the problem. In the 1960s, William Fulbright and George Kennan, both hawks in the late 1940s and early 1950s, had changed their minds about the Soviet Union. They did not argue that Moscow was a passive and idealistically motivated state; no, they continued to argue that it was highly aggressive and capable of brutal action. What had changed dramatically in their thinking was their explanation for Moscow's aggressiveness. Abandoning the notion that Moscow was primarily driven by messianic revisionist interests, they argued instead that it was motivated by defensive concerns about its security. With this reformulation of what was causing the problem, fundamentally different strategic opinions appeared sensible to them. 79
A similar transformation could have occurred in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev and the advisers he empowered may have still read the United States as highly aggressive and dangerous but concluded that the reason for this aggressiveness was a deep-seated American fear of communism and the Soviet Union. They could have come to this view, or at least to the view that the proposition ought to be tested, over a long period, as did the Americans who came to doubt the expansionist interpretation of Soviet behavior. The shift may have had little to do with the foreign policy behavior of the United States but a lot to do with a better understanding of domestic American politics. In this regard, the academic experts that Risse-Kappen discusses in this book may have played a role. Just how important a role, however, is difficult to determine.
While communication between Soviet and American academics increased in the 1970s and 1980s, so did many other potential causal variables. Moreover, many of the ideas exchanged on arms control and confidence building came as much from Moscow as they did from Washington. In fact, for most of the Cold War, leading politicians in Washington assumed that the notion of peaceful coexistence and many of the ideas discussed in the European-led forums Risse-Kappen mentions originated in Moscow and were part of a propaganda strategy designed to subvert Western resolve. Maybe the importance of these meetings lay less in establishing channels through which technical ideas could flow than in providing forums in which those involved could get a better understanding of the motive forces and domestic constraints facing leaders on the other side. Unfortunately, without better information about the decision-making process in Moscow, it will remain hard to defend the causal claim or weigh its relative impact.
International Relations Theory After the Cold War
In some ways the traditional dilemma in international relations research persists, and looking at the end of the Cold War only illustrates the problem. Analysis at the structural level is underspecified and relies too heavily on auxiliary assumptions that are not empirically defended. 80 Meanwhile, analysis at the foreign policy level, facing vexing problems of inference with regard to motivation and contingency, retreats to a study of the decision-making process that is nearly impossible to do with convincing evidence. Largely, there still remain two disciplines of international relations, to use Cronbach's concept. We have not succeeded in constructing interactionist theories, nor have we overcome the difficult data demands. More attention to both objectives is needed now.
For neorealists, the gravitation toward a balance-of-threat theo ry as distinct from a balance-of-power theory leads into the realm of foreign policy analysis. 81 As soon as the interest in relative, rather than absolute, gains is treated as a variable, realists introduce the motivational distinction with which foreign policy analysts begin. 82 But where should the causal regression end ? Should we try to unpack the decisional process and decipher the psychological roots of perception and the socioeconomic-political determinants of the perceptions that prevail ?
Surely these questions are important, but are they manageable, and do we need to answer them as part of the analysis of international relations ? At this point, a middle ground may be more practical. After all, the cognitive revolution in psychology has been driven by the difficulty of predicting how a subject will see and interpret a stimulus. If the causal problem is too tough to crack in the controlled environment of the laboratory, can we really hope to deal with it in the natural setting ? And if we cannot know with confidence how specific officials in the United States government feel about particular policies and interact with one another inside an administration, can we really hope to penetrate the decision-making processes of other states ?
What does seem possible is the identification of important elites and their perceptions of the world. We can speculate about why they hold various views but leave that question somewhat open. How these elites interact with each other inside the decision-making process of the government may be impossible to track with confidence, but with the help of area experts, international relations scholars can identify the constellation of elites in a country and which ones prevail. This would take the identification of key leaders, their perceptions, and their relative influence as variables requiring empirical evidence. Rather than trying to predict these factors from modernization theories or the like or defining them by assumption, we could try to operationalize them and with a reintegration of the area specialist into international relations theory begin our studies with a concrete evidential foundation.
If we began with elite perceptions and the constellation of elite views in a country, we would then have a basis for making inferences about the interests in that society that foreign policy is likely to reflect. A rank ordering of these interests could guide our judgments about motivation at the state level of analysis. If this sort of analysis were done for two or three states simultaneously, we could speculate on the interaction patterns among them. The international system would thus be operationally defined not only by the distribution of material power bases among the great powers but also by the distribution of interests and aims. This, of course, would plunge theorists back into the interpretative debates that were at the heart of the Cold War but do so in a way that required them to address issues directly rather than implicitly.
Predicting the end of the Cold War is not a fair test of international relations theory. Neither international relations theory nor the Cold War is easy to define as a single entity. Moreover, much of the theorizing about international affairs tried to avoid the main controversies that were in dispute with regard to the Cold War. Questions about polarity and war took precedence over the questions about Soviet and American motives. Perhaps the most troubling shortcoming of international relations theory is not its failure to predict system change but rather its irrelevance to the interpretative controversies that drove strategic choices. Hans Morgenthau left his realist theory behind as he analyzed the Cold War. Many others did likewise, simply asserting what the motives of the actors were and then operating as if their theory rather than their motivational assumptions led to strategic implications. If science is an enterprise driven by problem solving, then addressing this shortcoming is the task we need to attend to now.
Note 1: See L. J. Cronbach, "The Two Disciplines of Scientific Psychology," American Psychologist 12 (November 1957): 671-84, and idem, "Beyond the Two Disciplines of Scientific Psychology," American Psychologist 30 (February 1975): 116-27. Back.
Note 2: See Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics," International Organization 46 (spring 1992): 391-425, and Walter Carlsnaes, "The Agency-Structure Problem in Foreign Policy Analysis," International Studies Quarterly 36 (September 1992): 245-70. Back.
Note 3: See Morton Kaplan, System and Process in International Relations (Huntington, N.Y.: Krieger, 1975); Richard Mansbach and John Vasquez, In Search of Theory: A New Paradigm for Global Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); and James Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Back.
Note 4: Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 5th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1973), pp. 5-10. Back.
Note 5: See Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979); and Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985). Back.
Note 6: See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of the World-Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and Christopher Chase- Dunn, Global Formations: Structures of the World-Economy (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Back.
Note 7: See Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics, pp. 21-53. Back.
Note 8: See Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 71-73. Back.
Note 9: See Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, pp. 64-72. Back.
Note 10: See Robert O. Keohane and Joseph Nye, Jr., eds., Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); and Robert O. Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977). Back.
Note 11: See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, 1991); John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982); and Anthony Smith, Theories of Nationalism (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). Back.
Note 12: See Anderson, Imagined Communities; and Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). Back.
Note 13: See Ernst Haas, "What Is Nationalism and Why Should We Study It ?" International Organization 40 (summer 1986): 707-44; Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; and Breuilly, Nationalism and the State. Back.
Note 14: See Breuilly, Nationalism and the State. See also Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality, 2d ed. (Cambridge: mit Press, 1966). Back.
Note 15: See Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation (Boston: Beacon, 1960). Back.
Note 16: For more on this argument, see Richard Cottam, Iran and the United States: A Cold War Case Study (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1988). Back.
Note 17: See Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 88-93. Back.
Note 18: Ibid., pp. 186-87. Back.
Note 19: Two such critical views are Robert Jervis, "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma," World Politics 30 (January 1978): 167-214; and Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It." Back.
Note 20: See F. S. C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and Humanities (New York: World, 1959). Back.
Note 21: Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University, 1977), p. 41. Back.
Note 23: See S. Toulmin, Foresight and Understanding: An Enquiry into the Aims of Science (New York: Harper, 1961). Back.
Note 24: Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics, p. 9. For an example of the transformation rules in bipolar systems, see ibid., pp. 27-36, and 39-43. Back.
Note 25: For testing focusing on the balance of power, see, e.g., Edward D. Mansfield, "The Concentration of Capabilities and the Onset of War," Journal of Conflict Resolution 36 (March 1992): 3-24; and J. D. Singer, S. Bremer, and J. Stucky, "Capability Distribution, Uncertainty, and Major Power Wars, 1920-1965," in Peace, War, and Numbers, ed. B. Russett (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1972), pp. 19-48. For testing focusing on polarity, see Waltz, Theory of International Politics; < a name="281"> Richard N. Rosecrance, "Bipolarity, Multipolarity, and the Future," Journal of Conflict Resolution 10 (September 1966): 314-27; and Manus Midlarsky, The Onset of World War (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988). Also see B. Most and H. Starr, "Polarity, Preponderance, and Power Parity, in the Generation of International Conflict," International Interactions 13 (May 1987): 225-62. For testing focusing on great-power alliances, see Jack Levy, "Alliance Formation and War Behavior," Journal of Conflict Resolution 25 (1981): 581-614; and idem, War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495-1975 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983). For predictions of peace, war, the likelihood of war, and types of war, see J. A. Vasquez, "Capability, Types of War, Peace," Western Political Quarterly 39 (June 1987): 313-27. For a good summary, see Jack Levy, "The Causes of War: A Review of Theories and Evidence," in Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War, ed. Philip E. Tetlock, Jo L. Husbands, Robert Jervis, Paul C. Stern, and Charles Tilly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 1:209-333. Back.
Note 26: See Manus Midlarsky, "Polarity and International Stability," American Political Science Review 87 (March 1993): 173-77. Back.
Note 27: See Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics, pp. 36-43. Back.
Note 28: See John J. Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War," International Security 15 (summer 1990): 5-56. Back.
Note 29: John Gaddis, "The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System," International Security 10 (spring 1986): 99-142. Back.
Note 30: Others have noted the lack of this relationship in other eras as well. See, e.g., Ted Hopf, "Polarity, the Offense-Defense Balance, and War," American Political Science Review 85 (June 1991): 475-93. Back.
Note 31: See, e.g., Richard Nixon, United States Foreign Policy for the 1970's: Building for Peace (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). Back.
Note 32: Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, pp. 103-64. Back.
Note 33: One effort is Richard Cottam and Gerald Gallucci, The Rehabilitation of Power in International Relations (Pittsburgh: University Center for International Studies, 1978). Back.
Note 34: Klaus Knorr, The Power of Nations: The Political Economy of International Relations (New York: Basic, 1975); J. D. Singer, The Correlates of War, II: Testing Some Realpolitik Models (New York: Free Press, 1980). Back.
Note 35: Ray Cline, World Power Assessment (Washington, D.C.: csis, 1975); and Cottam and Gallucci, The Rehabilitation of Power in International Relations. Back.
Note 36: Bull, Anarchical Society, pp. 111-12. Back.
Note 37: James March, "The Power of Power," in Varieties of Political Theory, ed. David Easton (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 39-70. Back.
Note 38: See Kaplan, System and Process in International Relations, pp. 36-43; and Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 161-93. Back.
Note 39: See James Bill, The Eagle and the Lion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); and Mark Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah: Building a Client State in Iran (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Back.
Note 40: See Richard K. Herrmann, "The Role of Iran in Soviet Perceptions and Policy, 1946-1988," in Neither East Nor West, ed. Nikki Keddie and Mark Gasiorowski (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 63-99. Back.
Note 41: Robert Freeman, "Gorbachev, Iran and the Iran-Iraq War," in Neither East Nor West, ed. Nikki Keddie and Mark Gasiorowski (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 115-44. Back.
Note 42: Dennis Ross, "The Soviet Union and the Persian Gulf," in Soviet International Behavior and U.S. Policy Options, ed. Dan Caldwell (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1985), pp. 159-86; and Joshua Epstein, Strategy and Force Planning: The Case of the Persian Gulf (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1987). Back.
Note 43: International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance, 1983-1984 (London: Brassey, 1983). Back.
Note 44: Thomas McNaughter, Arms and Oil: U.S. Military Strategy and the Persian Gulf (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1985). Back.
Note 45: Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 117-318; and Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor, Social Cognition (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1984), pp. 139-83. Back.
Note 46: Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, pp. 202-21. Back.
Note 47: Ibid., pp. 241-56. Back.
Note 48: Ibid., pp. 349-59. Back.
Note 49: Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 174-225; Bruce Cummings, "The Wicked Witch of the West Is Dead; Long Live the Wicked Witch of the East," in The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications, ed. Michael Hogan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 87-102, esp. p. 98. Back.
Note 50: Walter LaFeber, "An End to Which Cold War ?" in The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications, ed. Michael Hogan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 13-20; Cummings, "The Wicked Witch of the West Is Dead"; Melvin Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); and Daniel Yergen, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977). Back.
Note 51: A. F. K. Organski, World Politics, 2d ed. (New York: Knopf, 1967); A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); idem, "The Power Transition: A Retrospective and Prospective Evaluation," in Handbook of War Studies, ed. Manus Midlarsky (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 171-94. Back.
Note 52: Organski and Kugler, The War Ledger. Back.
Note 53: Wallerstein, The Politics of the World-Economy. Back.
Note 54: Ibid., pp. 86-96. Back.
Note 55: Christopher Chase-Dunn, Global Formation: Structures of the World-Economy (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Back.
Note 56: William Zimmerman, Soviet Perspectives on International Relations, 1956-1967 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). Back.
Note 57: For a view of Soviet foreign policy that does not stress ideology, see Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1985). Back.
Note 59: Adam Ulam, Dangerous Relations: The Soviet Union in World Politics, 1970-1982 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Back.
Note 60: Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), pp. 1117-20, 1144-45, 1151-56. Back.
Note 61: See Richard K. Herrmann, "Soviet Behavior in Regional Conflicts," World Politics 44 (April 1992): 432-65. Back.
Note 62: William Gamson and Andre Modigliani, Untangling the Cold War: A Strategy for Testing Rival Theories (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971). Back.
Note 63: William Welch, American Images of Soviet Foreign Policy: An Inquiry into Recent Appraisals from the Academic Community (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). Back.
Note 64: See, e.g., Joshua Goldstein and John Freeman, Three-Way Street: Strategic Reciprocity in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); and George Breslauer, "Soviet Policy in the Middle East, 1967-1972: Unalterable Antagonism or Collaborative Cooperation ?" in Managing U.S.-Soviet Rivalry: Problems of Crisis Prevention, ed. Alexander George (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1983), pp. 65-106. Back.
Note 65: Robert Jervis, "Beliefs About Soviet Behavior," in Containment, Soviet Behavior, and Grand Strategy, ed. R. Osgood (Berkeley: University of California Institute of International Studies, 1981), pp. 56-59; and Alexander George, Presidential Decision-Making in Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1980), p. 242. Back.
Note 66: For more on this argument, see Herrmann, Perceptions and Behavior in Soviet Foreign Policy, pp. 22-49. Back.
Note 67: Nathan Leites, The Operational Code of the Politburo (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951). Back.
Note 68: Harry Gelman, The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Détente (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Robert Slusser, The Berlin Crisis of 1961: Soviet-American Relations and the Struggle for Power in the Kremlin, June-November 1961 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); and Richard Anderson, "Why Competitive Politics Inhibits Learning in Soviet Foreign Policy," in Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy, ed. George W. Breslauer and Philip E. Tetlock (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991). Back.
Note 69: Ulam, Dangerous Relations. Back.
Note 70: Jerry Hough, The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 19-48. Back.
Note 71: Seweryn Bialer, The Soviet Paradox: External Expansion, Internal Decline (New York: Knopf, 1986); and idem, Stalin's Successors: Leadership, Stability, and Change in the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Back.
Note 72: Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation. Back.
Note 73: Robyn Dawes, "Prediction of the Future Versus an Understanding of the Past: A Basic Asymmetry," American Journal of Psychology 106 (spring 1993): 1-24. Back.
Note 74: H. Gardner, The Mind's New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution (New York: Basic, 1985). Back.
Note 75: For instance, see Sarah Mendelson, "Internal Battles and External Wars: Politics, Learning, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghan-istan," World Politics 45 (April 1993): 327-60. Back.
Note 76: Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, pp. 887-965. Back.
Note 77: Richard K. Herrmann, "The Soviet Decision to Withdraw from Afghanistan: Changing Strategic and Regional Images." In Dominoes and Bandwagons: Strategic Beliefs and Great Power Competition in the Eurasian Rimland, ed. Robert Jervis and Jack Snyder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 220-49. Back.
Note 78: Ole Holsti and James Rosenau, American Leadership in World Affairs: Vietnam and the Breakdown of Consensus (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1984). Back.
Note 79: See, e.g., George Kennan, Russia, the Atom and the West (New York: Harper, 1958); idem, The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977); and idem, The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1982); William J. Fulbright, Prospects for the West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963); idem, The Arrogance of Power (New York: Random House, 1966); and idem, The Crippled Giant: American Foreign Policy and Its Domestic Consequences (New York: Random House, 1972). In "The Search for Accommodation: Gorbachev in Comparative Perspective," the seventh essay in this book, Ned Lebow spells out the very aggressive scenario he expected highly insecure states to adopt under pressure. Back.
Note 80: Herbert Simon, "Human Nature in Politics: The Dialogue of Psychology with Political Science," American Political Science Review 79 (June 1985): 293-304. Back.
Note 81: Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 262-86. Back.
Note 82: See, e.g., Waltz, Theory of International Relations, p. 105; Joseph Grieco, Cooperation Among Nations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 40-50; and Robert O. Keohane, "Institutionalist Theory and the Realist Challenge After the Cold War," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September 3-6, 1992, pp. 10-17. Back.
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