interventions would lead to extravagant wars and to an unsettled peace relying upon
international organizations without the necessary machinery of effective governance.
Waltz summed up the liberal theory of intervention as being hopelessly imprecise
and logically flawed. It amounted to a thoroughly dangerous prospectus because it
was based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of international politics. In seeking
to supersede the politics of a balance of power by resorting to a set of transcendent
moral standards more commonly associated with a first image conception of
appropriate behaviour, Wilson and the other advocates of messianic interventionism
were overlooking the dynamics and conditioning effects of what was a functioning
system of states.
Liberals and the Cold War predicament
Situated in an era of entrenched Cold War confrontation during the late 1940s and
1950s, it can be supposed that Kenneth Waltz would not have been unaware of
the contemporary danger of nuclear conflict and of the contemporary debates
surrounding the ways of avoiding it, or at least of containing the possibilities of war.
As a political theorist and political analyst, his outlook in Man, the State and Warwas
conspicuously informed by the perceived limitations of liberal conventions and
prescriptions – and by extension to all those perspectives exclusively confined to the
first and second images. In the conditions of the Cold War, Waltz’s critique of
Marxist and socialist conceptions of international peace might be considered to be
unremarkable. More noteworthy in this context was the inclusion of liberal
internationalism in his indictment of universalist notions of human nature and state
typologies.
For Waltz, no special status could be claimed on behalf of liberalism in the quest
for a peaceful world. It was merely one form of associational life with the same
predilections towards its own interests as the other forms. In the realm of inter-
national anarchy, liberal states were no different to other states in an aggregated
system in which each state’s sovereignty coexisted with that of every other state. As
far as Waltz was concerned, there was no bias against liberal states. Equally, there
was no discrimination in their favour: ‘Our criticisms of the liberals apply to all
theories that would rely on the generalization of one pattern of state and society to
bring peace to the world’.^22 Waltz was intent upon incorporating into international
theory the ‘conditioning effects of the state system’^23 – that is, the way that the
international environment operated as an explanatory dimension in its own right –
as a medium of exchange and thus as a ‘permissive cause’^24 of war.
Waltz would have been conscious that his analysis was germane to the state of
liberal anxieties that were current at the time. American liberalism had emerged
from the Second World War with a renewed affirmation of confidence in the
grandeur and virtue of the liberal ethos. But this was qualified by an unnerving
disquiet over the implications of mass politics and in particular over the dangers of
unmediated forms of political engagement. Liberal reason had recognized how social
intolerance and political extremism could be elicited from the interior impulses of
Waltz and the process of Cold War adjustment 43