The USA and the second Gulf War. (Defence).(Bush foreign and military policy and theories of international relations)

THE REALIST SCHOOL has dominated the study of international relations since its first known practitioner, Thucydides, wrote The Peloponnesian War over two thousand years ago. (Pericles' speech over the Athenian dead remained a favourite Open Day oration for scholars even until my schooldays.) It continued this hegemony within the intellectual life of the sovereign state system through its evolution in the seventeenth century and its expansion throughout the world during the next three hundred years, from Machiavelli's The Prince, to Carl yon Clausewitz's On War, and E.H. Carr's The Twenty Years Crisis. This is not difficult to understand, since it comes closer to describing the realities of international politics than any other methodology.

Not surprisingly, when the US academy took up international relations in earnest after the Second World War its study became dominated by the realists, from H.J. Morgenthau's classic epoch-dominating textbook, Politics among Nations, from the late 1940s, through Kenneth Waltz's defence of the approach, Man, the State and War, in the late 1950s, to Henry Kissinger's magisterial Diplomacy, published in the aftermath of the US victory in the Cold War. The realist's-realist journal International Security is now published in Boston.

The central tenets of realism may be quickly described, although their operational practice is usually more difficult. The principal actors in international relations are sovereign states. States acknowledge no superior power--the title of one realist classic is No Higher Power--and pursue their own interests as they, usually quite rationally, decide them. Their capacity to pursue these interests successfully is determined almost wholly by their own power relative to that of other states, and is rarely arrested by considerations of morality or law, since these are determined and interpreted by and through the interests of each state.

Power is a relationship between states; the ability of one state to get another to do what it would not otherwise do. Power has different operational components, the most important being military, closely followed by political, economic, and power over opinion, both domestic and foreign. In the purest form, realism holds that ideology has little impact on state behaviour but is rather a cloak to disguise the pursuit of real interests in the cant of religious or secular philosophy or rhetoric.

The internal structure of states also has little influence on their behaviour, which is influenced by more lasting considerations of geography, culture and national character. Nonetheless, in peculiar circumstances a revolutionary regime may be consumed by the passions of its ideology and may let this override its national interests. This condition rarely lasts longer than a generation of political leadership and is usually much shorter. Also a state's leadership may miscalculate its interests or how to pursue them; in which case a further measure of a state's power is the capacity of its governing regime to correct such errors with minimum damage.

Any appreciation of the political career of the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, would have to rest firmly in this tradition. He came to power by use of violence within a Ba'athist regime that had itself been created by the violent overthrow of a monarchy established with support from British imperial power. He then used the state power he acquired to suppress critics and opponents, to build a formidable military machine with mostly Soviet help, and to attack several of his neighbours, including Iran from 1980 to 1988 and then Kuwait, which his forces briefly and barbarously occupied in 1990-91. But the application of realist theory to the United States has been more difficult.

THE TRANSITION of intellectual realism from Europe to the USA was not unproblematic. Realism is often unclear, especially when not disciplined by the editors of International Security, whether it is describing state behaviour as it actually occurs, or advocating that states behave in a particular (realist) way, or trying to determine whether political leaders are in fact pursuing naked self-interest and then lying to justify it on moral grounds. Its practitioners in the USA, in particular, whether social analysts or nationalist spokespersons, are often not entirely self-conscious about their own role.