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No one loves a realist explanation

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Abstract

Responding to the special issue editors request, I conduct a retrospective evaluation of my own scholarship on realism and the end of the Cold War. I reprise the main arguments in light of what appears to be the most probative new evidence. I find that ,even though almost all scholars who write about the Cold War's end either dismiss or denounce explanations informed by realist theory, these explanations actually have stood the test of time and new evidence.

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Notes

  1. For citations, see Wohlforth, 1994, 1998; Schweller and Wohlforth, 2000.

  2. Stephen Walt's balance of threat theory (1987) has similar implications.

  3. See Brooks and Wohlforth, 2000/2001, fn. 1, for citations.

  4. I pursued this in several other collaborative papers with Brooks (2002, 2003, 2004), as well as with James W. Davis (Davis and Wohlforth, 2004).

  5. Some readers may see such an economics-focused approach as falling outside realism. I see this explanation as consistent with classical realism, but it clearly breaks from the neorealist system of explanation, as we made clear on pp. 10–11.

  6. I interviewed Kataev when he visited Stanford but, unfortunately, as of this writing I am relying on others’ descriptions of his materials. See Kataev (2001); Harrison (2008); and Hoffman (2009), who also had access Kataev's other personal papers not included in the archive.

  7. For a description, see Battilega (2004).

  8. Similar estimates for earlier periods are given by Simonov (1996). Bystrova stresses that many if not most key documents remain classified; hence, she relies extensively on memoirs and other publications of former MIC officials.

  9. This corresponds precisely to the postmortem analysis of the OECD, IMF and so on (Rosefielde, 2007, Chapter 10).

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Acknowledgements

This first draft of this article benefitted from the critical comments of other project participants, especially Steve Kotkin and Dan Deudney. Later drafts were much improved by comments from Randall Schweller and Stephen Brooks.

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  1. Department of Government, Dartmouth College, 6108 Silsby Hall, Hanover, 03755, NH, USA

    William C Wohlforth

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Wohlforth, W. No one loves a realist explanation. Int Polit 48, 441–459 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2011.17

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