Response to Trachtenberg

Abstract

November/December 2006 Historically Speaking 15 knowledge or foresight play in making policy. They require, in short, a kind of empathy with policy makers that the academic world, increasingly detached from the world of practice, does not prize. Half a century ago that empathy often derived from some experience of the rough world outside—be it as soldier, journalist, practitioner, or simply a close and engaged observer—that earlier generations had and valued, but which diis one seems to lack. To be sure, one might claim that the logic of international relations is so powerful that individual choices and peculiarities do not matter—but if that is the case, the cocktail party chatter and lunchtime conversation of the academic world should reflect the fact. Trachtenberg is an outstanding example of a scholar who, by controlling his own political beliefs and passions, enables otiiers to understand the perplexing choices made by fallible, partly informed, and pressured governmental officials. But without claiming to understand him better than he does himself, it seems to me that his success in so doing stems from his great stock of good sense, his admirable intellectual detachment, his awareness of the vagaries of human nature, and his ability to analyze the large forces that undoubtedly do operate in the political world. Perhaps he has much to learn from the international relations theorists , but I doubt it. Rather, they—and we—have much more to learn from him. Copyright © Eliot A. Cohen EliotA. Cohen is the Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies atJohns Hopkins University's School of AdvancedInternationalStudies. His most recent book, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (Free Press, 2002), won thefirstHuntington Pri%e, administered by theJohn M. OUn Institutefor Strategic Studies at Harvard University. ' Isaiah Berlin, "PoliticalJudgment," in The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History, ed. Henry Hardy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 47. Response to Trachtenberg Donald Kagan Marc Trachtenberg's essay is a model of the wisdom and good sense that characterize all his work. His suggestion that historians need to examine the theoretical underpinnings of their interpretations is surely right, as is his advice to theorists that they need to go beyond cherry-picking convenient facts and interpretations and get the true feeling for how things work in the real world by the careful study of history . Theory has the function of suggesting what questions may or must be asked to achieve understanding. From earliest times at least up to the 1 8th century, men have included die role of the divine in their efforts to understand war, peace, and human events in general. Theories that excluded the role of the gods were rare. Clearly, some theories stubbornly persist, although to many they seem to have been discredited by events. Marxism is another example of this phenomenon. In spite of all the evidence that appears to have disproved the several versions of economic determinism emanating from Marxist theories, they still underlie, in more or less obvious ways, many current interpretations. These examples remind us that the theories dominating the scene at any time and the questions they suggest are not the only ones possible. In our time the dominant theory has been one form or another of "realism," which puts the competition among nations for power at the center of the matter. "Realists" believe that all states and nations seek as much power as they can get. The desire for power is almost like original sin: unattractive, Clearly, some theories stubbornly persist. . . . In spite of all the evidence that appears to have disproved the several versions of economic determinism emanating from Marxist theories, they still underlie, in more or less obvious ways, many current interpretations. deplorable, and regrettable, but inescapable. "Neorealists " understand die behavior of states in their international relations in a tamer and less reprehensible form as the search, not for power itself, not for domination, but for security, which, in turn, requires power. The realist view is a gloomy one, for it envisages no way to stop the unlimited search for power and the conflict it must engender except the conquest of all by one power, or the maintenance of an uneasy peace by...