Realism and World Politics

one less well equipped for the contest must imitate the other or fall by the

wayside.^12

As Waltz shows, this conclusion was drawn by a wide range of thinkers at the time.
For ‘while Lippmann’s harsh indictment is rejected by most students of politics,
many would assent to a milder charge’^13 – and amongst the many he lists such figures
as Gabriel Almond, V.O. Key, W.W. Rostow, and Henry Kissinger. Equally
importantly, he notes, the theme had substantial appeal amongst policy elites. As
Waltz phrases it:

Haunted by the memory of the democracies’ failures in the 1930s and

dismayed by America’s inability to adjust force to political purpose in and

immediately after World War II, critics of democratic institutions found ample

sustenance for a far-reaching pessimism. Although somewhat allayed by the

rapidity and breadth of response to Soviet challenges in the period that began

in 1947 and reached into the 1950s, pessimism reappeared in the Eisenhower

years. Lippmann’s critique, Emmet Hughes’s description of the nation’s plight

in the title of his book America the Vincible, the officially sponsored investi-

gation by the Gaither Committee, and the unofficial but highly authoritative

studies of the Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund, all reflected the fear that the 1950’s

like the 1930’s were years of the locusts.^14

Seen against the background Waltz sketches in Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics,
the issues at stake are momentous and go well beyond social scientific claims about
the logic of anarchy. For if the claims of Lippmann and many realists in the academic
and policy worlds were true, they would mean that democratic control over foreign
policy-making needed at the very least to be curtailed (and perhaps removed) as
liberal democracies were forced by the ‘systemic’ logic of anarchy to become like
their ‘garrison state’ competitors. Indeed, the idea that states will be forced ‘to
become alike’ inevitably calls to mind the ‘third image’ conclusions of Man, the State
and War, and might seem to presage the analysis in Theory of International Politics,
whereby states are seen as forced by systemic pressures to become ‘like units’. In
short, in both Lippmann’s jeremiad against the decline of Western civilization, and
in the wider political position that portrayed liberal democracies as operating at a
potentially fatal disadvantage to their Cold War competitors, nothing less than the
future of liberal democracy might well be at stake. A key and generally unexamined
concern for Waltz is whether this widely shared (often realist) scepticism toward
democracy is in fact true.
Although Waltz is clearly aware of the depth of the concerns of those who favour
curtailing democracy in order to safeguard the state, and although he is more aware
than most of the pressures created by the international system, he disagrees
fundamentally with the conclusions drawn by so many prominent figures on the
relationship between democratic decision-making and foreign policy, and thus on
the implications of this question for the future of liberal democracy as a whole.^15 To

The politics of theory 55