80 CHAPTER THREE ■ InternatIonal relatIons theorIes
rapidly forced the retreat and later surrender of the Iraqi army. Iraq was forced to repay
all the damages of its conquest, and its sovereignty was abridged by two “no- fly” zones,
which offered some protection to Kurds in the north and Shia Muslims in the south
from Saddam’s harsh reprisals. Conquest, in other words, did not pay for Iraq.
For defensive realists, the outcome of Iraq’s 1990 war forms part of a long histori-
cal pattern of effective (and inevitable) balancing. In this case, Saudi Arabia, the United
States, and others supported Kuwait to balance against Iraq’s regional power. As a result,
defensive realists argue that states in the international system should pursue policies of
restraint, whether through military, diplomatic, or economic channels. Such defensive
moderate postures can be pursued without leading to dangerous levels of mistrust
among states and, more importantly, without fear of unintended or uncontrolled esca-
lation to counterproductive wars.
Offensive realists, by contrast, note that periodically demonstrating a willingness
to engage in war, though perhaps costly in the short run, may pay huge dividends in
reputation enhancement later. They argue that the credible threat of conquest can often
act as a motivation to alter a target state’s interests, leading states that might have
opposed the threatening state to ally with it in a pro cess international relations theo-
rists call bandwagoning. The logic is that the more power you have, the more power
you get. Conquest, in other words, pays. States may thus pursue expansionist politics,
building up their relative power positions and intimidating potential rivals into coop-
eration.
Consider the stunning case of Libya’s decision in December 2003 to publicly acknowl-
edge and then abandon its years- long efforts to acquire nuclear, chemical, and biological
weapons, along with the vehicles to launch them. To an offensive realist, Libya’s decision
could well have been the result of the George W. Bush administration’s decision to invade
Iraq in March 2003, an invasion justified to halt Saddam’s production or dissemination
of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). After years of opposing the United States,
Libya chose instead to bandwagon in the face of this demonstration of U.S. power. By
offensive realist logic, the costs of the war against Iraq were at least partly redeemed by
Libya’s change of policy: conquest, or the credible threat of conquest, paid.
Thus, defensive and offensive realists have significant differences of view about
appropriate foreign policy.^7 In fact, realism encompasses a family of related arguments,
sharing common assumptions and premises. It is not a single, unified theory. Among
the vari ous reinterpretations of realism, the most impor tant is neorealism (or struc-
tural realism), as delineated in Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics.^8 Rea-
soning that lack of pro gress in social scientific theory of international politics was due
to lack of theoretical rigor (especially in comparison to steady theoretical pro gress in
the natu ral sciences), Waltz undertook this reinterpretation of classical realism to
make po liti cal realism a more rigorous theory of international politics. Neorealists