This world was not something to be imbued with moral or immoral constructions
- let alone grand aspirations of purpose. It was simply a set of contextual relations
to which foreign policy-makers had to adjust in the terms in which it presented itself - that is, in the manner of ‘a reasoned response to the world about us’.^30
While it may well be possible to locate Waltz in a broader historiography of
liberal concepts and ideas,^31 there is a closer claim to relevance for contemporary
American liberals. His study offered an organizing rationale to a world that appeared
increasingly unsettled, dangerous and liable to evoke extreme responses in the light
of unprecedented threats and the possibility of nuclear annihilation. In a political
context that was noted for the intensity of debate over the position of the US in an
emergent Cold War, Waltz offered a persuasive account of a long-established
continuity of relationships between states as operating in accordance with their own
interests and with their own calculations for survival in a condition of anarchy.
Given the absence of a functioning supranational polity – and the improbability of
one ever coming into existence – Waltz’s realism pointed to what was in effect a
closely argued realization that the international had a constant operational and
political logic of its own that was resistant to the incursion of singular and sweeping
changes from individual agencies.
This notion of an international structure of autonomous processes built upon
the participatory imperatives of its constituent units was suggestive of a need to
recognize the steady-state nature of the realm. It was this depiction that offered close
parallels to the position being worked through by many of America’s Cold War
liberals. Waltz’s kind of realism carried a positive core that implicitly addressed the
issue of American engagement in the international system. Waltz illustrated the way
that it was possible for American liberalism, and thereby the United States, to achieve
a stable and sustainable form of international involvement without falling prey to
the volatile swings between the Hartzian extremes of transformative change and
reactive dissociation. In effect, the dynamics of international bipolarity had in fact
enhanced the possibility of diminishing the chronic nature of liberalism’s own
bipolarity. Waltz underlined the reassuring existence of a differentiated framework
of world politics with which the United States could engage as a settled political
player within an ongoing and open-ended process. As such, the country could
participate without recourse to its traditionally episodic and often morally driven
dislocations exemplified in its self-conscious exertions of vivid engagement and
principled disavowal. For American liberals, it offered an altogether more congenial
prospect in relation to the international sphere. In point of fact, structural realism
may be said to have placed American liberalism in a predicament that liberals were
far more accustomed to in another and altogether more familiar context: namely
their domestic ability to work within and through the ambiguities of a predominant
system; the impulse to question an existing order whilst remaining firmly in its
mainstream; and the capacity to press for incremental changes whilst reaffirming the
foundational principles of an embedded structure of political relationships. To
American liberals, international realism had had the reputation of being a dark and
pessimistic doctrine that merely served to reaffirm an image of the outside world as
Waltz and the process of Cold War adjustment 47