Specter, Matthew

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Ukraine, Realism, and theSynchronization of Political Time in theUS and GermanyMatthew Specter 2022-03-27T21:11:02How quickly things change. The horrifying reality of the Russian invasion of Ukrainehas revealed the mentality of a leader who would rather destroy a country than seeit become independent of his will. Russia has chosen bombs that terrorize as theinstrument of punishment for daring to choose a fate other than the status of Russianvassal. Underlying the actions of the Russian state is the sobering edict: Ukraine willexist neither as nation nor state “ohne mich.” The solipsistic narcissism behind theRussian war of collective punishment has revealed that its true motives are not tokeep NATO away from its borders but to Russify Ukraine, to incorporate it as satelliteat best, but as “verbrannte Erde” if necessary. The reality of the Russian threat toits neighbors in NATO is clear. No-one knows the true limits of Putin’s ambitionsin Europe and it would be reckless to assume that NATO’s capabilities are alreadysufficient to deter a potential attack on the Baltic states.As recently as last fall, many scholars and pundits in the US plausibly argued thatif Russia’s “legitimate security interests” were properly respected, a compromisecould be reached over the geopolitical orientation of Ukraine in the 21st century.The outlines of such a potential compromise – Ukraine in the EU, but not in NATO,a so-called neutralization model, for which the case of Austria during the Cold Waris one model, are still visible. We can still hope for a negotiated peace but the goalof peace is best served by greater military capacity to deter further attacks. Anxietiesin the US and Germany that strengthening NATO’s Enhanced Forward Defenseposture could undermine peace by dangerously escalating the conflict with Russiaare wrongheaded. For these reasons, the “Zeitenwende” recognized by ChancellorOlaf Scholz on February 27, is justified, and should be applauded.What are the implications of this dire challenge to the European international orderfor the German-American relationship, and how should we think about and help toshape this Zeitenwende? This invasion demands a synchronized response fromthe US and its allies. But it may afford some historical perspective to recall othermoments in the history of the US-German relationship when the sense of urgency toface threats synchronized or failed to synch.From the 1880s to the outbreak of WWII, statesmen and intellectuals in the USand Germany engaged in a dialogue about the nature of geopolitics, of “powerpolitics,” and of the nature of a “realistic” approach to the problems of war, peaceand empire. As I have argued in my recent book, The Atlantic Realists: Empireand International Political Thought Between Germany and the United States, whatWestern-educated elites call realism in foreign policy-making derives primarily from aUS-German dialogue that dates back to their inter-imperial competition at the fin de- 1 -siècle. Between 1895 and 1900, German and US intellectuals grappled with what itmeant to be a “world power,” and wrestled with each other to attain power that wouldplace them in the first “rank.” While the competitive assessment of “great power”status was not new in the 1890s, a shift did occur from the pursuit of power throughterritorial expansion on the American and European continent respectively, to thepursuit of new markets and territories overseas. As Friedrich Ratzel, the geographerwho influenced subsequent generations of geopolitical thought in both Germanyand the US, wrote in 1897, Wilhelm II’s Weltpolitik disclosed the need for a “truerRealpolitik,” anchored by naval power and overseas colonies. While the debate inGermany—empire by land or by sea—continued down to WWI, the US defeat ofSpain in 1898 prompted a similar public Auseinandersetzung with the meaning,opportunities, and costs of US advent to a “leading role” on the “world stage.” Therewas a temporal synchronicity in how the two countries’ strategic elites conceived ofthe world.In the last twenty-five years, the boundaries of the US foreign policy debatehas shifted towards imperial restraint. After twenty years of failed wars inAfghanistan and Iraq, fewer elites believe the US capable of spreading freedomand democracy as the neoconservatives of the Project for a New American Centuryhad advocated en route to the Iraq War in the late 1990s. Nor is the confidenceof the liberal internationalists the same as it was when in 1998, Secretary ofState Madeleine Albright (whose death was announced recently) coined thephrase the “indispensable nation” to refer to the US at the height of its unipolarpower. During the Trump Administration, liberal internationalists despaired of the“America First” rhetoric, and the dismissal of soft power and multilateralism infavor of nationalist swagger and economistic transactionalism. They looked toPresident Biden to restore the rules-based liberal international order under Americanleadership.1)Patrick Porter, The False Promise of Liberal Order, p. 8 Others arguedfor that Trump had exposed weak points in liberal order and that saving it wouldrequire reimagining it.Another Zeitenwende was proclaimed during the Trump presidency – the so-called“return of great-power competition.” Intellectuals writing at the speed of social mediahave a tendency to ontologize the present—think of the ritualistic use of the term“the Trump era” – a locution that dignified the raging dumpster fire of a patrimonialkleptocracy with temporal gravitas. We can face the challenge of the present withoutfalling back on clichés about the return of “power politics” or “great power politics.”The revanchist grievances of China in Taiwan and Russia in Ukraine are rooted inparticular histories and cannot therefore illustrate the eternal return of the same.The crises of liberal order are real but they do not vindicate a return to the traditionslabelled “realist.” The crisis of liberal internationalism and liberal order also cannotvindicate classical realism’s emphasis on power politics – the locus classicus ofwhich is the American corpus of the German emigré Hans Morgenthau – becauserealism is not liberalism’s “other” so much as its disavowed shadow side. Theflip-side of liberal internationalism from Woodrow Wilson to Biden has been thepursuit of American hegemony, even if today it is a chastened primacy. Some ofthe most insightful critics of US foreign policy thinkers in the last twenty years—Andrew Bacevich and Patrick Porter, for example – consider themselves realists.- 2 -They argue that the only credible alternative path to an overweening Americanhegemony is a self-aware power politics. As Porter put it in an important 2020book, “If emancipation [in the name of a new humanist order] is impossible in thispessimistic tradition, if some hypocrisy and brutality is inevitable, if states and theirrulers cannot be ‘good,’ they can at least be wiser and more self-aware.”(26)Without a doubt, prudence, self-awareness, and imperial restraint are far betterthan its alternative – the pursuit of US primacy in either liberal internationalist orneoconservative garb. But hegemonic restraint does not require a realist ontology.The north Atlantic realism of empire, whose historical development from orthodoxyto crisis and restatement I trace, teaches skepticism about the imperial foundationsof realism. Disentangling restraint, prudence and other sensible virtues from themetaphysics of realism resembles what Richard Rorty counseled in philosophy as aretreat from metaphysical foundations. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rortyargued that the philosophers who claimed to mirror nature in their reason woulddo better to give up their belief in the natural foundations for their politics, and justget on with their work. No version of classical realism or neo-realism gives us thenormative grounds to critique Putin’s expansionism and brutality. A Zeitenwende thatis correct for prudential reasons has no need of a grand realist theory to authorize it.What the US and Germany face today with Russia is evidently not a peacefulcompetition of rivals that can be managed by the pursuit of equilbrium and balance,the leitmotifs of 19th century Realpolitik. Nor is the Russian invasion a result ofWestern failure to heed realist caution about the project of NATO enlargement inEastern Europe. Biden deserves high marks for threading the needle thus far insanctioning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while resisting calls for a no-fly zone.Restraint is warranted here, but not because power politics or the problem of evilis hard-wired into the nature of international politics. Rather, restraint is warrantedbecause a desperate Putin may use nuclear weapons. And the robust Westernresponse to Russia includes a strong moral dimension, echoing the heroic agency ofUkrainians who speak in terms of self-determination that are generally dismissed bythe realists’ focus on spheres of influence and allegedly objective measures of hardpower.Mobilizing the Euro-Atlantic alliance to support the Ukrainian people, nation, andstate, through military aid, humanitarian relief, refugee assistance and beefing upNATO’s defenses is the correct course of action. American intellectuals on the Left,among which I count myself, are rightly cynical about bloated military budgets, longwars against amorphous or asymmetrical threats, and the kitschy aura of the rhetoricof defending the “Free World” from tyrants who are alleged to hate and fear Westernfreedoms and their unstoppable appeal. We on the Left need not forget everythingwe learned in the Cold War about the pathologies of US foreign policy and embracea neoconservative vision of US primacy that exploits the blue and yellow flag. Butnor can our anxieties about the revival of fundamentalist Cold War liberalism – andthe backsliding that might entail with regard to the critique of American empire –justify avoiding our moral and political responsibility to counter the concrete andimmediate threat Russia poses to Ukraine and the sovereignty of other EasternEuropean nations.- 3 -In the 1963 foreword to the first translation of Politics among Nations into German,Hans Morgenthau wrote, “While the US tended to underestimate [in the twenty yearsbefore he wrote it, i.e. in 1947] the significance of power, finding a replacementin vague legalistic and moralistic aspirations, Germany on the other hand showsthe propensity to understand power in narrow ‘material’ terms and in practice relyon coercion, above all in its military form…So may this book serve as a correctivefor German mistakes, as much as it has done for the American ones.” By the timehis pupil Gottfried-Karl Kindermann attained the first German university chair ininternational politics, the moment for the synchronization of the “times” of Americanand West German realism had passed. Détente, Ostpolitik, Vietnam, and newperspectives from the peace research institutes founded in 1968, made the WestGerman uptake of classical realism partial and halting. In 1973, Hans-Peter Schwarzwrote that realists like Morgenthau, Kennan and Aron had “scarcely influenced thepolitical and theoretical discussion in the Federal Republic.” Schwarz surmisedthat “an essential role was played by the fact that the concepts of Realpolitik andMachtpolitik aroused…associations as unfavorable as the concepts of nation orVolk in other contexts.” Only with the waning of detente at the end of the 1970s dida new so-called “realism” about East-West politics emerge, advocated by figureslike Helmut Kohl and Hans-Peter Schwarz. What was lost in the revival of realistfundamentalism was the fruits of the productive intellectual crisis of realism in the1960s – a determination to reduce the threat of nuclear war, a commitment to North-South dialogue, and a constructivist disdain for simple measures of power and thenational interest.If the Zeitenwende is inspired in part by the moral demand to remember WWII, itwould be a pity if in the course of remembering we also forgot hard-won lessonsabout the limits of classical realism that emerged from the intertwined histories ofGerman and American empire.References• Patrick Porter, The False Promise of Liberal Order, p. 8- 4 -

Ukraine, Realism, and the Synchronization of Political Time in the US and Germany

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Ukraine, Realism, and the Synchronization of Political Time in the US and Germany

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