Realist School Research Articles

Burying the Hatchet? The Sources and Limits of Japan-South Korea Security Cooperation1

This article critically evaluates the basis, aspirations, and prospects for bilateral security cooperation between Japan and South Korea. The assumption that common enemies, friends, and interests should have given rise to solid and steadily improving relations between Tokyo and Seoul has been far from realized. Rather, the Japan-ROK relationship continues to be marked by highly volatile behavior – ranging from intense friction to reluctant cooperation – which not only offers a vexing puzzle to the Realist school of international relations but also to the Constructivist one. This article argues that despite the perceived improvement in relations, Japan-South Korea security cooperation is situational and limited; recent developments do not imply a fundamental realignment of the two powers towards one another.

Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism: Possibilities of Recognition

“Both Palestinian nationalism and Zionism, as concepts, embody the same principle; namely both are nationalist movements based on the requirement of a homeland for their own people.”1 The critical problem, however, seems to be that both have been claiming the same piece of land for their homelands, and thus the source of trouble is more practical than ideological. Contrary to the assumption hidden in this article’s given title, political ideologies do not recognize nor reconcile with each other, nor do they determine who recognizes whom and who reconcile with whom. It is only individuals, and sometimes also collectives, who—metaphorically speaking—initiate or undergo such modifications of relationship. Individuals tend to justify changes in their personal relations by terms that are either emotional (e.g., fallen in love with her, cannot stand him anymore) or based on moral-normative grounds (e.g., he behaved decently, she promised, yet . . .). Collectives, on the other hand, often rely on political ideologies as their justification—or excuse—for moving from one state of relations with another collective to a different state. Yet, as the dominant Political Realist school argues, particularly, although not only, on the collective/national level, inter-relations are first and foremost determined by needs and interests of the actors. Ideologies are just the legitimizing hooks to hang on, not the genuine source of or the motivation for such a change. Thus, it is unlikely that Great Britain gave up on its empire because it suddenly, in the late 1940s, recognized that the Indians, the Kenyans or the Jews in Palestine are entitled to national self-determination. Similarly, it is difficult to believe that the apartheid regime in South Africa dismantled itself because, out of the blue, in the mid 1990s, its leaders reflected upon and recognized its moral fallacies. More likely, in both cases, the situation reached the point at which the costs of maintaining the status quo became higher than the benefit, even considering the costs involved in changing it. In both cases, however, ideological reasons for the change were sought in order to legitimate it. Therefore, in order to predict the prospects for

Nagorno-Karabakh in Regional and World Politics: A Case Study for Nationalism, Realism and Ethnic Conflict

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict constitutes a perfect case study for empirical and theoretical studies in international relations dealing with the issue of nationalism and ethnic conflict as well as with realism and constructivism. The fact that the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh is recognized by the international community as part of Azerbaijan did not change the reality that the region was captured by local Armenian forces with the help of Armenia proper and Russia. This state of affairs seemed like a vindication of realist school of thought in international relations theory with its age old dictum “might makes right”. As far as the end result of the conflict is concerned, this is a correct analysis. However, when one takes the state identities and policies of Armenia and Azerbaijan, we need to recognize ideational factors such as national honor, and dignity which make any compromise on Karabakh highly costly regarding each government's relations with its constituents. This paper will demonstrate that constructivist variables are essential in explicating the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in addition to the realist factors currently at play, particularly since conquest of the region does not significantly add to a country's resources and power.

Echoes of a Forgotten Past: Mid-Century Realism and the Legacy of International Law

Those studying the work of Hans J. Morgenthau, widely considered the “founding father” of the Realist School of International Relations, have long been baffled by his views on world government and the attainment of a world state—views that, it would appear, are strikingly incompatible with the author's realism. In a 1965 article in World Politics, James P. Speer II decided that it could only be “theoretical confusion” that explained why Morgenthau could on the one hand advocate a world state as ultimately necessary in his highly successful textbook, Politics Among Nations, while writing elsewhere that world government could not resolve the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States by peaceful means. According to Speer, Morgenthau posits at the international level a super-Hobbesian predicament, in which the actors on the world scene are motivated by the lust for power, yet he proposes a gradualist Lockean solution whereby the international system will move, through a resurrected diplomacy, out of a precarious equilibrium of balance-of-power anarchy by a “revaluation of all values” into the “moral and political” bonds of world community, a process whose capstone will be the formal-legal institutions of world government. This oscillation between Hobbes and Locke, Speer asserted, must be the result of Morgenthau's “commitment to the organismic mystique that comes out of German Romantic Nationalism,” although he admitted in a footnote that his reflections on the intellectual sources of Morgenthau's theories were “mere speculation.”

Making geography visible as an object of study in the secondary school curriculum

This article considers disciplinary‐based knowledge and its recontextualisation and acquisition in the secondary school curriculum. It starts from the premise that teaching disciplinary knowledge is important. The focus is the subject of geography and the increasingly influential realist school of thought in the sociology of education and the endeavour to ‘bring knowledge back’ into education. Social realist theorists emphasise the importance of the explanatory power of specialist or disciplinary knowledge. Basil Bernstein%s ideas of hierarchical and horizontal knowledge structures are being developed in order to bring into view the epistemological principles that underpin the recontextualisation of such knowledge within the school curriculum that can support meaningful learning. The generative capacity of Bernstein%s typology is illustrated by the work of Maton who places knower structures and legitimation codes alongside Bernstein%s knowledge structures. The article outlines this ‘structure of knowledge’ approach before discussing the nature of geographical knowledge. Consideration is then given to how these ideas about the structuring of knowledge might influence thinking about the geography curriculum and pedagogy. In recognising the significance of the social realist approach to knowledge and the link between discipline and curriculum, the article ends with some thoughts about the limitations of social realism as an overarching theory of knowledge for educational purposes. These revolve around the nature of epistemic communities and specifically: the extent to which social realism recognises the socio‐epistemic relation between educational and disciplinary contexts; the under‐theorisation of the field of knowledge production itself; and the fact that social realist theorists tend to ignore a key aspect of the epistemic relation of knowledge – what knowledge is about. Engagement with such issues is necessary to support a model of education centred on the student, the teacher and knowledge and concerned with knowledge orientation as well as knowledge acquisition.

"Gibbons v. Ogden," Law, and Society in the Early Republic , and: Law and Judicial Duty , and: Legislating the Courts: Judicial Dependence in Early National New Hampshire (review)

Reviewed by: "Gibbons v. Ogden," Law, and Society in the Early Republic, and: Law and Judicial Duty, and: Legislating the Courts: Judicial Dependence in Early National New Hampshire Jack Fruchtman Jr. (bio) Keywords Law, U.S. Constitution, Federal judiciary, Judicial review, Originalism, Judicial activismn "Gibbons v. Ogden," Law, and Society in the Early Republic. By Thomas H. Cox. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009. Pp. 262. Cloth, $44.95; Paper, $26.95.) Law and Judicial Duty. By Philip Hamburger. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp. 686. Cloth, $51.50.) Legislating the Courts: Judicial Dependence in Early National New Hampshire. By John Phillip Reid. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008. Pp. 224. Cloth, $34.00.) The three books under consideration here continue a debate that has long preoccupied American historians and political scientists: If the framers of the Constitution wanted to create an independent federal judiciary, why did they not include in Article III the courts' authority to review legislative and executive actions to determine their constitutionality? For many scholars and commentators, the power of federal judges, especially members of the Supreme Court, to declare state and federal laws and executive actions unconstitutional is simply undemocratic. Federal judges are unelected and unaccountable to the people: After the president nominates them, only the Senate confirms or rejects their nomination. Over the past several years, scholars have debated whether the founders in Philadelphia in 1787 presumed that the courts would have the power of judicial review or would simply defer to the political branches of government. Many studies of judicial review begin, therefore, with the period of [End Page 313] the American founding. While they often, but not always, offer a glimpse at Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1787-88) as a foundation for judicial authority, their ultimate focus is less on British antecedents than on the period after American independence, when James Iredell wrote in favor of judicial review in 1786, or two years later when Alexander Hamilton vigorously supported it in Federalist 78, or when James Wilson applauded it in his 1790-92 Lectures on the Law. Thus years before Marbury v. Madison (1803), when John Marshall famously wrote that "the province and duty of the judicial department is to say what the law is," there was a strong record of support for judicial review. There were detractors, of course: Undermining the view of expansive judicial review was James Bradley Thayer's 1897 seminal article, "The Origin and Scope of the American Doctrine of Constitutional Law," in which he argued that the courts should intervene to negate laws or actions only when there was a "clear mistake." In the twenty-first century, discussion of the courts' role has centered on the debate between Originalism (the theory that says we can divine the original meaning of the words of the Constitution from the perspective of those who wrote its provisions) versus the Living Constitution (the idea that we can use the words of the document as a starting point, but that we must update their meaning to fit our contemporary time). The most vocal proponents of Originalism have been Justice Antonin Scalia and Christopher Wolfe's The Rise of Modern Judicial Review: From Constitutional Interpretation to Judge-Made Law (New York, 1986), while Justices William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, and William O. Douglas were preeminent architects of the Living Constitution model, which had its roots in the early twentieth-century Legal Realist School of Karl Llewellyn. The debate often boils down to the differences between judicial activism and judicial restraint. Justices Hugo Black, generally regarded as progressive, and Felix Frankfurter, a conservative, were frequently at odds with one another when they served on the mid twentieth-century Supreme Court. Conservative judicial commentators Alexander Bickel, in The Least Dangerous Branch (Indianapolis, IN, 1962), and Raoul Berger, in Government by Judiciary (Cambridge, MA, 1977), argued in favor of judicial restraint as a means to maintain a democratic order. More recently, a liberal or progressive judicial ideology has been promoted by Ronald Dworkin, Edwin Chemerinsky, and to a limited extent John Hart Ely. In Judicial Review and the Law of the Constitution (New [End Page 314] Haven, CT, 1990), Sylvia Snowiss...

<i>The Cambridge Companion to Dewey</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Dewey Justin Bell (bio) Molly Cochran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Dewey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 356 +xvii pages. ISBN 978-0-521-69746-0. $25.00 (pbk.) In a typical book review, I would look for and examine what is new about a particular thinker’s idea or presentation. However, as I read The Cambridge Companion to Dewey I find that I cannot and should not use the same criteria for evaluation. I pick up a Cambridge Companion when I need an introduction or a refresher on material—not when I need to see what the cutting-edge scholarship is. That being said, a companion ought not propagate the status quo or fail to communicate what is current in the understanding of a figure or an area. Therefore, a companion ought, first, to provide an adequate introduction to a literate, but inexpert, person to the field it purports to introduce. Second, a companion should show the diversity of thought about a subject—what are the controversies and various thoughts about a figure that one might encounter. I do not expect every heterodox reading of a figure, but I would desire to know various understandings of that figure. Finally, a companion should impart the tools to start independent research on the figure in question. With this in mind, I turn to The Cambridge Companion to Dewey. Robert Westbrook’s biographical chapter is accessible and informative. His discussion of the role of Dewey’s first wife Alice and his political awareness in Chicago is instructive on how deeply democratic social life informs Dewey’s thought. Ruth Anna Putnam’s contribution to the volume is laudatory. While using the general language of contemporary philosophy, she dissolves many of the problems analytic philosophers might have in interpreting Dewey’s language. It is also noteworthy that Putnam acknowledges Dewey’s similarities and indebtedness to [End Page 92] Peirce in regard to the theory of truth—the agreement of all possible inquirers after all possible inquiry. Putnam, further, does an admirable job of showing how Dewey does not fall into the opposing schools of realism or antirealism, instead presenting Dewey’s philosophy of experience. Dewey’s theory of inquiry is not simply another epistemological category but a unifying activity that brings together all parts of inquisitive activity—including ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Richard M. Gale provides a highly critical chapter suggesting that Dewey’s naturalism is a distinctly humanistic variety of naturalism that seeks to set up a near-Hegelian, completely continuous metaphysical monism in which the organism and environment collapse together. Gale suggests this is a version of claiming that naturalism of Dewey’s sort “depict[s] nature as made for us human beings because it answers back to our deepest feelings and aspirations” (55). Gale understands Dewey’s naturalism to hold that all of nature is continuous and that our interaction with it as organisms is wholly aesthetic with cognition as an immanent quality (even accusing Dewey of scholasticism by claiming that Dewey holds that inquiry is immanent in all matter because an effect cannot have more reality than its cause). Isaac Levi also contributes a critical chapter on Dewey’s theory of inquiry. Levi presents Dewey’s theory of inquiry against Peirce’s theory of fixing belief—pointing out that Peirce’s theory allows for the fixation of belief in irrational, but all too human, manners that have more explanatory power. Levi’s concern is that doubt can be settled by means other than inquiry. This criticism of Deweyan inquiry arises from Dewey’s commitment that all problematic situations ought to be brought to determinacy by inquiry. This would imply, on Levi’s reading, that whenever a belief is formed the inquirer should play that belief out to all its logical consequences (88). Levi’s overall point is that there are, when we investigate the problems of life as opposed to the problems of philosophers, many (often successful) means of fixing belief. Further, Levi suggests a reconstruction of Dewey’s thought where we understand belief as commitment to a point of view. J. E. Tiles argues that Dewey’s philosophy takes James’s radical empiricism...

Tell Me How This Ends

How Wars End. By Reiter Dan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. 301 pp. $26.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-691-14060-5). Dan Reiter offers a linked two-part explanation for the termination of wars based on the concept of bargaining. Following Thomas Schelling's (1960) idea that wars are, in part, negotiated transactions, Reiter shows that it is not just the causes and conduct of war, which need to be understood in this way, but the conclusion of conflicts too. He notes that where IR theorists, particularly the Realist school, often see wars as the product of a need for information caused by uncertainty and also as the result of the “anarchy” that prevails in the international system so that no agreements are ever truly binding, he argues that the same theoretical approach can be applied to the ending of wars. Reiter believes that the ending of war requires the rebalancing of cost-benefit analysis by the belligerents. Reiter notes that, at the commencement of his research, the task of offering a unified theory of how wars end seemed beyond the scope of any individual, but he selected a series of case studies, building on his work on why democracies could win …

Rudolf Von Jhering’s Influence on Karl Llewellyn

Karl Llewellyn and Jerome Frank are today considered co-founders of the American Legal Realist School. Although American legal realism is no longer the predominant school of jurisprudence in the United States, it still plays an important role in the formation of our legal traditions. Given the breath of Karl Llewellyn’s contributions to law in America, it would be unfathomable for such a varied body of work to have had only one or just a few significant influences. Several of the influences on the life and work of Karl Llewellyn have been suggested and expounded upon, including Arthur Corbin, Jerome Frank and Roscoe Pound. While these are certainly important influences on the life and work of Llewellyn, one major influence on his thinking has rarely been considered. The role of Rudolf von Jhering deserves further exploration.The purpose of this Article is to shed light on the influence of Rudolf von Jhering on the life and scholarship of Karl Llewellyn. Following a brief overview of Llewellyn’s life, education, major work, and jurisprudential philosophy, information is provided on the life of Rudolf von Jhering. Consideration is given to the influence of German jurisprudence on American jurisprudential theory and thought, as well as the recognized influences from German jurisprudence on Llewellyn’s work, including Jhering’s influence on the life and work of Llewellyn, with particular emphasis on the Uniform Commercial Code.

The Role of Power and Negotiation in the Global Commercial Arena

Negotiation and the Global Information Economy. By J.P. Singh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 357 pp., $37.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-73108-9). Negotiation and the Global Information Economy. By J.P. Singh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 357 pp., $37.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-73108-9). Power has been cited since the fifth century BC as a key factor to understanding the relationship between states. One of the most profound debates in international relations literature is the impact of power on the behavior of states and their interactions. The present work is another attempt to tackle the influence of power on outcomes in the international arena, with special attention to the processes of international negotiations and their impact under different power configurations on the global commercial arena. Zartman and Rubin (2000:4–5) maintain that there are two schools of thought that look at the relationship of power to international negotiation. The first argues that power differences do not matter as they are evened by the negotiation process, while the second school of thought contends that differences in power do make a difference in the way negotiations unfold and the outcomes that result. Although Zartman and Rubin explore the relationship between power and negotiations, they do not look at the negotiation process itself and how the negotiation strategies and tactics help to achieve the desired outcomes. This is a focus of J.P. Singh's book. For the most part, and due to the dominance of the realist school of thought (for example, Morgenthau 1978), power has been operationalized in terms of military capability. As a result, a majority of the studies in …

Lesotho's policy towards South Africa: Policy of Imperative? What has changed?<sup>1</sup>

Based on the realist school of thought, which stresses, among other things, that national interests predominate in international relations and are the key determinants of foreign policy decisions, this article analyses Lesotho policy towards South Africa since the former's independence in 1966 to date. The central argument of the article is that Lesotho has been unable to pursue an independent foreign policy towards South Africa because it is a small state; especially if such a policy is injurious to South Africa's national interests. The small state theory as applied to Lesotho has been a resilient and convincing explanatory tool in Lesotho-South Africa relations. The article argues further that nothing has changed in Lesotho's policy towards South Africa or the relations between these two countries. Whether it is the apartheid government in South Africa and the authoritarian Basotho National Party (BNP)/military governments in Lesotho, on the one hand, or the democratically elected African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa and the popularly elected Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD) in Lesotho on the other, their relations and indeed Lesotho's policy have been determined largely by South Africa's national interests; there appears to be little or nothing Lesotho can do to change this.

Poetics and Eros in Early Modern Persia: The Lovers' Confection and The Glorious Epistle by Muhtasham Kāshānī

The poet Muhtasham Kāshānī (d. 1588) is today known primarily for his strophic elegy on the martyrdom of Imam Husayn at Karbalā, but such devotional poems make up only a tiny fraction of large oeuvre. Far more substantial are two works of a very different tenor, Nuql-i ‘Ushshāq (The Lover's Confection) and Risāla-yi Jalāliyya (The Glorious Epistle). Using an innovative combination of prose and poetry, these works tell the story of the poet-narrator's stormy affairs with, respectively, an upper-class courtesan and a footman attached to a nobleman's house. As part of the larger literary movement known as the maktab-i vuqū‘ or “realist school,” these purported autobiographical accounts of Muhtasham's amorous adventures reveal a sophisticated culture of eros and desire that differs strikingly from the usual representations of the state of literature and the arts under Shah Tahmāsp. After situating these works in their historical, literary, and cultural contexts, the article turns to a close analysis of an extended passage from each work to show how Muhtasham integrates lyric poetry, narrative, and setting to depict the pursuit of desire in the urbane world of early modern Persia.

Technological Effects on Aesthetic Evaluation: Vermeer and the Camera Obscura

The question of whether an artist’s use of technology to create art results in a detectable aesthetic difference was investigated in the case of Dutch realist painter Johannes Vermeer and his use of the camera obscura. In Experiment 1, participants evaluated 20 Vermeer paintings on 6 aesthetic dimensions and preferred paintings created with the aid of the camera obscura. In Experiment 2, participants evaluated 4 Vermeer paintings on 6 aesthetic dimensions after they either read about camera obscura technology or read in general about methods of creating art in the Dutch realist school of painting. Knowledge of technology use did not affect aesthetic evaluation. In Vermeer’s case, technology was used to enhance rather than substitute for artistic talent and did not decrease but rather enhanced the viewer’s aesthetic experience. The painter stood Before her work She looked around everywhere She saw the pictures and she painted them She picked the colors from the air “Painter,” Neil Young (2005) Aesthetics, an appreciation of the beautiful and the sublime, is used to evaluate technology (Norman, 2004) and behavioral interventions (Hineline, 2005), but technology’s role in creating beauty is less explored. With the ready availability of technology that can be used in aesthetic creation, such as a digital camera to take photographs, a computer program to create graphic art, or a synthesizer to compose music, the role of technology as a contextual factor in the evaluation of art deserves further scrutiny. Art criticism has moved away from considering only the technical and aesthetic qualities of a work to explicit assessments of its social and contextual implications, including the means used to create art (Dickie, 1997; Shusterman, 1997). However, aesthetic assessment from the perspective of the art viewer may be less concerned with contextual criticism and more concerned with an Portions of these data are derived from an honors thesis submitted to Temple University by

Mass Media and International Relations

In the modern theories in the science of International Relations, the traditional pillar of the school of Realism that considered the state as the only actor in the international scene, actor who took every decision in a monolithic and rational way, taking into consideration only the national interest, has now been rejected. The metaphor of the "black box", indicative of this monolithic way of operation and the rejection of every non-state, but also intra-state and out-of-state actor, even if it was valid once, has definitely been weakened by the events of the post-cold war era, and especially with the advent of globalization. New parameters have been inserted in the process of foreign policy formulation and politicians (and all those responsible for a country‘s foreign policy) have to take them into consideration.

Theory for Strategy

The realist school of thought in international relations theory, under attack in the post-Cold War era for its numerous failings, has turned away from its focus on system structure to a refined version of its earlier form, which also focused on domestic factors and policy choice. But the neoclassical school neglects important systemic dynamics arising from variations in levels of economic and strategic interdependence. A refined neoclassical approach, by focusing on the relationship between degrees of interdependence and the role of structure, identifies the scope for optimal policy choice in different settings. For India, a nation on the threshold of major power status, this provides an improved basis for interpreting the changing international system and fashioning an appropriate broad strategy toward it.

La norma č una credenza? Su The law and the Right di Enrico Pattaro

- Enrico Pattaro's volume The Law and the Right features an appreciable finesse of argumentation and an analysis of unusual historical density. The attention paid to psychology absolutely significant when studying an area like that of law, which comprises relationships of expectation and of claim is deserving of recognition as an indispensable, urgent complexification of the conceptual framework of legal positivism and realism, whose reasoning has for some time been manifesting a degree of aridity and, I dare say, poverty. The author identifies the fact that Hart is treated as having espoused the psychologically-inclined realist school as a consequence of the realistic attention to describing normative attitudes as somewhat forced reasoning. These normative attitudes that Hart analyses by drawing a distinction between the internal and the external point of view can hardly be reduced to mere internal experiences that are pregnant exclusively in empirical psychological terms. While the epistemological option in favour of a radical, materialist, psychologist monism expounded in Pattaro's book on the one hand stimulates a valuable investigation into the mental and social dynamic immanent to reality (which must be), no less than the plane of reality that is, on the other hand it runs the risk of casting a shadow on the dimension of designing and transforming reality practised by those who generate norms (marginal in volume compared to the prevalence of believers who make them what they are by the very act of believing in them), thus blacking out the dialectic tension between law and facticity, obedience and effectiveness. This is a classical objection to radical realism that is not overcome by the attention paid by Pattaro to the normative dimension "in the relative sense".

The Limits of International Law by Jack L Goldsmith and Eric A Posner

The Limits of International Law by Jack L Goldsmith and Eric A Posner. Published by Oxford University Press (2005, 226 pp). Occasionally a book appears that not only informs , but questions . It is not a frequent event, which makes it all that memorable. The Limits of International Law is an interesting contribution to International Law. No doubt, some will characterise it as ‘iconoclastic’. They should not. A better adjective is avant-garde . The reason: it touches upon a neuralgic subject of international law – its leitmotif ; and it does so from an innovating angle: game theory. The thesis it advances may (at first impression) seem unattractive, even stale: International Law is observed, not because of a sense of obligation , but in furtherance of self-interest . According to the authors, International Law is a product of states’ rational conduct aimed at maximising their interests, given perceptions of other states’ interests and the distribution of power. In other words, it is strategic. Their goal is to integrate state interests with simple rational choice models so as to offer a theory of the roots of International Law. Two methodological ingredients are important, which are frequently neglected or discounted by scholars: power and state interests. Normative lessons are derived. Ab initio , this will not surprise. It is not the first time International Law students have been confronted with the notion. The realist school of international relations has so argued for decades.1 But its micro-economic angle is refreshing. The authors’ profile is noteworthy. Jack Goldsmith is a recognised expert in International Law, and Eric Posner is a synonym of (acute) economic analysis of law. Their blend is a success, for it produces an essay which is just delicious. The book is divided into three parts, preceded by a (useful) chapter that sketches basic game theoretical scenarios. The step is convenient for it makes it palatable not only to the connoisseur, …

Review: The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt Toronto: Viking Canada 2007. 484pp, $34.00 cloth (ISBN 0-670-06725-3)When you check in at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, the favourite watering hole of foreign correspondents in the Levant, you are offered a choice of Israeli newspapers to be folded into your morning International Herald Tribune: the right-wing nationalist Jerusalem Post (previously owned by Conrad Black) or the English-language edition of Ha'aretz, with its distinguished reporting and editorial openness to the full spectrum of Israeli opinion. Mearsheimer and Walt, ail-American nationalists and prominent political scientists of the realist school, are decidedly more comfortable with Ha'aretz, which they cite repeatedly in this hugely controversial work.While there is nothing in this book that would scandalize Israeli scholars and intellectuals of the centre-left or cosmopolitan opinion overseas, Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy has created a furore among the Israeli-American right in the United States, including of course leading neoconservative spokespersons. As with any succes de scandale, a reviewer is tempted to focus on the public controversy-with its charges of disloyalty to American interests in the Middle East and high-profile imputations of anti-Semitism-rather than on the intrinsic merits and demerits of the work under review. That said, it is instructive to note the work's unusual publication history, beginning with an article commissioned by Atlantic that was later killed in mysterious circumstances by that magazine's editors, the authors' subsequent conclusion that their thesis and viewpoint was simply too iconoclastic to see publication in book form in the US, and eventual vindication when the original Atlantic article was published to considerable fanfare across the pond in the London Review of Books.Yet it would be wrong to view Mearsheimer and Walt-thoroughly conventional pillars of the IR community at Chicago and Harvard-as prophets without honour in their own country. Their book has acquired stature and a measure of fame not because of any original research or analytical rigour but because of the calumny heaped upon it and its authors by their uncritically pro-Israel enemies. This tells us something interesting about American intellectual culture. While there is much that is useful in this book, there is more that is unsurprising, prosaic, and predictable. And the authors' own prescriptions for American policy in the greater Middle East are largely unworkable in today's environment.The book is divided into two parts. In part one, The United States, Israel, and the lobby, Mearsheimer and Walt recapitulate, largely from newspapers and other secondary sources, the financial assistance lavished by the United on Israel, the dwindling moral for American indulgence of Israeli territorial expansion and occupation of Palestinian land, the structure and functioning of the famously effective Israel (notably the American Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC) on Capitol Hill, and the direct effect on policy toward Palestine and the Middle East, generally by pro-Israel think tanks and networks of neoconservative policymakers in George Bush's Washington. authors detail the influence of pro-Israel writers and intellectuals in the media and on university campuses. While there is little new here, it is useful to have this material on the Bush years pulled together in one place. What is new in part one-and legitimately debatable-is the authors' conclusion that [n]ow that the Cold War is over, has become a strategic liability for the United States (5). issue is analyzed at length in chapter two.In part two, Mearsheimer and Walt discuss The lobby in action. What follows are essentially case studies of the lobby's influence on the Bush administration's longstanding do-nothing policy toward the question of Palestinian statehood, the American tilt against Syria, rising tensions with Iran, and the nonchalant stance of the United toward Israel's disproportionate attack on Lebanon in the summer of 2006. …

A How-To Handbook for Hegemons

Have you ever eaten dinner at a Japanese restaurant but on the way home secretly been tempted to grab a burger at a fast food drive-through? No matter how delicious the sushi was, sometimes one is left yearning for... a little something more. That is precisely the feeling one has after reading Jakub Grygiel's generally excellent Great Powers and Geopolitical Change. Despite its short length (only 177 pages, not counting the 49 pages of Notes), Grygiel has aggressive ambitions for this little book. In it, he aspires to do nothing less than (i) review the historical development of geopolitics, (ii) argue for its current relevance to the study and practice of international statecraft, (iii) present three relevant case studies, and (iv) posit some strategic lessons for future United States decision makers. Grygiel succeeds in much of this, and as such Great Powers and Geopolitical Change is a must-read for anyone interested in international relations in general and geopolitics in particular. Nonetheless, partly due to the book's brevity, the reader is still left with a vague hunger for a little more: a little more depth in the policy analysis, a little more breadth in the theoretical scope. At its simplest, geopolitics is the study of the role that geographic factors (very broadly defined) play in the behavior of nations. By the beginning of the twentieth century, geopolitics had formed one of the basic foundations of the traditional realist school of international relations and every self-respecting political scholar was expected to acquire a firm knowledge of geography. In the interwar years, however, German geopoliticians highjacked the field to justify the Nazi regime's policies of military aggression and genocide. As a result, the field of geopolitics fell into a long period of intellectual disdain, reviled by academe for its intellectual and moral ambiguity. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, scholarly interest in geopolitics has enjoyed a substantial revival. The neoconservative clique within the Bush Administration has shown itself to be particularly enamored with the role that geographic factors can play in strategically dominating the post-Cold War environment (Ikenberry 2002). Celebrating this renaissance of interest, Great Powers and Geopolitical Change begins with a history of geopolitics' rollercoaster ride as an academic approach to international relations. Grygiel argues convincingly that the austere econometric models favored by the current generation of number crunching political scientists shortchange our understanding of state behavior. His portrayal of geopolitics is decidedly mainstream, ignoring the full flower of the approach that is so well illustrated in, for instance, The Geopolitics Reader by Gear6id Tuathail, Simon Dalby, and Paul Routledge (1998). Nevertheless, the first chapter of Great Powers and Geopolitical Change is a superbly succinct essay that shows the enduring relevance of geopolitics. International relations instructors should consider it as an introductory reading on the subject for both undergraduate and graduate students. Grygiel's second chapter sets out the central thesis of the book: the fairly obvious admonition that states, especially those with imperial ambitions, must

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