Abstract
Realism has earned many friends and foes by being focused on international relations as they really are, and not as they ought to be. However, confronted with failures of the US in aspiring to steer international system of the post-Cold War era, it has become increasingly normative and, in spite of all the theoretical disputes among its main proponents, seems to speak almost with one voice in this regard: advocating the grand strategy of restraint, or offshore balancing, for America. Great powers tend to act in ways entirely conceivable from the theoretical point of view of realism, while at the same time being, paradoxically, at odds with realist policy prescriptions. American long-pursued grand strategy of primacy, or deep engagement, is a vivid example. Strongly embracing Layne’s proposition that structural and neoclassical versions of realism are not only far from incompatible, but necessarily employed together if one is to properly understand great powers’ grand strategies; and drawing from contemporary realist literature on strategy of restraint and offshore balancing (from Waltz and Posen, to Mearsheimer and Walt, to Ashford and Porter), the author explores possible developments of transatlantic relations in case the US adopts a more restrained strategic posture. It is argued that this might be an unexpected incentive to revitalize international institutions, most notably the UN and the OSCE, as well as defense component of the EU, in order to restore great power confidence, thus mitigating the consequences of the incoming struggle for spheres of influence.
Keywords
- Europe (Central and Eastern)
- European Union
- Foreign policy
- International relations
- NATO
- US
- Realism
- POTUS
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Notes
- 1.
According to Randall Schweller, the “hard core of the realist school of thought consists of the following propositions: (1) humans do not face one another primarily as individuals but as members of groups that command their loyalty; (2) international affairs take place in a state of anarchy; (3) power is the fundamental feature of international politics, it is the currency of international politics required to secure any national goal, whether world mastery or simply to be left alone; (4) the nature of international interaction is essentially conflictual; (5) humankind cannot transcend conflict through the progressive power of reason to discover a science of peace; (6) politics are not a function of ethics, morality is the product of power; (7) necessity and reason of state trump morality and ethics when these values conflict” (Schweller 2003: 74–75).
- 2.
See Mearsheimer and Walt (2016) and Posen (2014). Grand strategy of offshore balancing is mostly similar to restraint, with a slight difference of being more proactive in its efforts to prevent the emergence of regional hegemons in regions of interest to the US. They are both, in a relatively derogatory manner, labeled as “isolationism” or “retrenchment” by the proponents of strategic primacy, cf. Brooks et al. (2012), Brands (2015), Mitchell and Grygiel (2016), or Schake (2018).
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Acknowledgements
This paper has been developed within research activities at the Institute for Political Studies, Belgrade, supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia.
The author is grateful to the participants of the CEEISA-ISA 2019 Joint International Conference held at the University of Belgrade, June 16, 2019, and European Consortium of Political Research General Conference, held at the University of Wroclaw, Poland, on September 4, 2019, for their valuable comments and feedback.
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Lišanin, M. (2021). Transcending the Rift? Realism, Transatlantic Relations, and American Grand Strategy. In: Attinà, F. (eds) World Order Transition and the Atlantic Area. Global Power Shift. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63038-6_6
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