Comment by newbamboo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newbamboo | Hacker News Reader

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“I have been interested to see how much debate he has caused in such a short time - We need more lightning rods like this!”

Agree 100%. To ignore the realist framework makes the world less safe, more prone to war. More theories, more voices, makes us a safer world less prone to war. War is bad, so putting a lot of thought into avoiding it is good.

My sense is that many people have an inverted view because they haven’t studied history or international relations, and lack the meta cognitive capacity to consider what theories are and how to evaluate them. Criticism of defensive/offensive realism comes from this deficit. Learners think a theory is either right or wrong, and that a person is more or less synonymous with a single monolithic theory and so they too must be either right or wrong (eg Darwin, Freud).

The reality is that even “wrong” theories are useful. When nuclear war is a possible outcome, we do ourselves a favor by considering more voices and theories especially those with strong predictive power.

I think most people who are making counterarguments to Mearsheimer et al are not ignoring or dismissing realism, they are pointing out the limitations and flaws with its predictive powers and usefulness for determining 'optimal' policies.

> People want realism to be a theory of how the world actually works, a theory of how the world should work, and a theory of what should we do given how the world works, all at the same time.

In terms of presenting an accurate model realism is only as good as the analysis you put into it, and unless you have a very advanced computer simulation of the world you can't test these models for what exactly will happen and when. Sometimes your prediction will be reasonably accurate and sometimes it won't, and hindsight bias will play tricks.

And as for its usefulness for deciding what we should do there seems to be little provision for the role of ideology, ethics, a sense of honour etc, i.e. what kind of world people would like to live in. Those factors are critical not just for making a model of current and future realities, but are of course essential for figuring out how we want to shape our world. A purely utilitarian view just aiming to minimise war and death might permit a more highly autocratic and repressive world, which could be at odds with many people's view of meaning and personal or collective destiny. An example of such a destiny would be the Ukrainian people's desire to live in a democractic Western-aligned state, and the West's desire to support them in this goal.

Sure, the neo-cons are right to criticize realist frameworks on those grounds; the importance of moral imperatives, importance of soft power and other cultural factors, etc…. The neo-cons sure to get us into a lot of foreign entanglements so they aren’t perfect either. It’s good to have more perspectives, more voices at the table was my point.

You don't have to be a neoconservative to criticise realism, just speaking for myself I wouldn't fit into the definition of one. Using expressions of particular opinions to demonstrate that people belong to a more general class is usually a bad idea.

I am not demonstrating anything. I am saying the argument you make is the distinguishing feature of neo-conservative foreign policy- viz the importance of value judgements about the sort of world we want to live in. I would add also that neo-cons generally do not self identify. They see themselves as defending liberalism and protecting people from tyranny. You may or may not fall into that camp, but you are carrying their water for them here in the rhetorical sphere, whether you understand that or not.

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