How to explain — and, if possible, predict — a great power’s foreign policy is a perennial question for scholars of international politics. Although a lot of scholarly writing in international relations focuses on the broader system of states (bipolar, multipolar, open, closed, norm-driven, ideologically divided, etc), we are also interested in why Country X tends to act in one way while Country Y acts differently.
For realists, for example, a key difference is relative power. Realists tend to see all great powers as mostly alike, in the sense that all are constrained by the effects of anarchy, and what makes one great power behave differently from another is its power relative to others. Rising states tend to define their interests more expansively as their power increases, and big shifts in the balance of power typically create windows of opportunity and sometimes increase incentives for preventive war.
For others (including a few realists), geography is a key determinant of a state’s foreign policy. One sees this approach in John Mearsheimer’s distinction between “offshore balancers” (Great Britain, the United States) and land powers (e.g., Germany or Russia). Geography can also drive a nation’s desire for “defensible borders” or spheres of influence and affect the ease or difficulty of achieving that goal.
Lastly, we can also focus on individual leaders. It makes a difference when someone like Napoleon Bonaparte or Adolf Hitler or Lee Kuan Yew or Mao Zedong takes over a country, and sometimes the effects of a particular leader can override those other factors. Speaking hypothetically, if a great and powerful democracy were to elect an unqualified, ignorant, vain and insecure narcissist as its chief executive, we might expect this decision to have deleterious effects on that country’s foreign policy and international standing. Not like something like this could ever happen, of course.
These are all valid ways of thinking about foreign policy, but I want to focus on yet another way to understand why states act as they do. It is a more historical approach and centers on the impact of great wars. To give credit where it is due, my thinking on this topic has been influenced by two recent works: Austin Long’s excellent book “The Soul of Armies” and Ariane Tabatabai and Annie Tracy Samuel’s International Security article, published this summer, on “What the Iran-Iraq War Tells Us About the Future of the Iran Nuclear Deal.”
Each of these works argues that major wars have powerful and long-lasting effects on a nation’s subsequent foreign or military policy. In Long’s case, he argues that a country’s first major war tends to shape how it thinks about military organisation and doctrine for decades afterward and that the lessons of that initial war experience end up being transmitted and reproduced through the entire military training system. For their part, Tabatabai and Samuel show how the Iran-Iraq War had a profound and enduring effect on how Iran’s ruling elites perceive the outside world and how they think about different foreign-policy tools, including their approach to nuclear weapons. In each case, a particular war turns out to be a seminal event from which much subsequent behaviour follows, independent of the country’s relative power, regime type, or the character of particular leaders.
When you think about it, these insights make perfect sense. Great wars are wrenching, costly and frightening events that affect all of society; they are episodes where the future of the entire country is on the line.
If you want to understand the foreign policy of a great power, therefore (and probably lesser powers as well), a good place to start is to look at the great wars it has fought. And for most of the major powers, the last great war is still World War II. If one asks about this perspective to some contemporary powers, what might it reveal?
Winston Churchill called World War I and II the “Thirty Years’ War of the 20th Century.” Not surprisingly, these two conflicts have shaped Britain’s views on foreign and military policy ever since. As the interwar writings of B.H. Liddell Hart reveal, the carnage of World War I made the British leery of a future “continental commitment” and encouraged the policy of appeasement. After World War II bankrupted the empire, British leaders concluded that the key to future influence was nurturing a “special relationship” with the American colossus. That lesson has remained pretty much intact to this day. Geography, relative power and ideological affinities no doubt play a role here, but these two great wars are what drove that lesson home.
For Germany and Japan, the impact of World War II was very different but no less profound. The war ended disastrously for both — Germany was split in two, and Japan was firebombed and had two atom bombs dropped on cities — and each learned that unchecked militarism and/or fascism was a recipe for disaster. Not surprisingly, each has been among the most pacifist countries on the planet ever since, even in the face of challenging security environments. Even if these tendencies eventually fade (as they may now be doing in Japan), it is clear that the historical experience of that great war had a major impact on both states’ foreign and defence policy for the past 70-plus years.
One could argue that the Cold War had an equally profound impact — especially in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse — but the effects do not appear to have been as lasting. True, America’s Cold War triumph ushered in a period of heady optimism and led Americans to think that liberal democracy was the wave of the future just about everywhere, but that naive vision crashed and burned in the sands of the Middle East and the mountains of Afghanistan. None of America’s Cold War conflicts went especially well, and one of them — Vietnam — was a disaster. The Cold War was ultimately won not on a battlefield but in the marketplace and at the negotiating table, and there’s really no great martial lesson or moment of George Patton-like panache in that long struggle. The West triumphed because its economic model was superior — which allowed its citizens to amass sufficient power to protect themselves and live pretty well while doing so — and because the United States was much better at recruiting wealthy and powerful allies than the Soviet Union was.
And here’s a kicker: The next profound shaping event may not even be a war. The danger of war is ever present (even today), but perhaps some combination of nuclear deterrence, economic interdependence, good judgement, dumb luck and careful diplomacy will prevent another great-power war for another 70 years or so. If that is the case — and I hope it is — and if the long shadow of World War II eventually dissipates, then it might be some other vast collective event that shapes our perceptions of danger and our definitions of heroism, sacrifice, and even identity. If events like Hurricane Harvey become the norm rather than the exception, maybe coping with recurring natural disasters will become how states and societies define themselves and their heroes.
None of the above implies that relative power, geography, regime type or leadership is irrelevant to understanding a state’s foreign policy. But the wise analyst will remember that social memories of big collective experiences — like wars, depressions, plagues, revolutions, etc — inevitably have strong and lingering effects on how those other qualities operate. Or as William Faulkner famously put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University
The Washington Post.
