Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism ofNiebuhr, Morgenthau,
and Waltz, Campbell Craig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 216 pp.,
$34.50 cloth.
The central premise of Campbell Craig's ences, Craig writes, "All three eventually
book Glimmer of a New Leviathan is that the chose to favor an atheoretical program for
nuclear revolution devastated the theoreti- great-power war avoidance over philosophcal foundation of American realism. Real- ical consistency" (p. 165).
ism holds that great-power war is an
The stories for Niebuhr and Morgenthau
inevitable consequence of states seeking to are similar. Both believed that the causes of
survive in an anarchic world. But, Craig war derive from human nature (greed, the
asks, how can great-power war be inevitable desire for survival, and/or the lust for
if nuclear weapons have rendered it power); argued that conflict among states
unwinnable and almost certainly suicidal? under anarchy is immutable and the creCraig's book seeks to show how three ation of a world state impossible; rejected
founders of realism—Reinhold Niebuhr, the premise that right reasoning could reliHans J. Morgenthau, and Kenneth Waltz- ably point the way to world peace; and vehestruggled to come to terms with this basic mently dismissed liberal universalism and
paradox and ultimately were forced to aban- Marxism as alternatives to the traditional
don their realist worldviews. Craig offers state system. Their views led Niebuhr and
realism a lifeline, however: the same logic of Morgenthau to demand that the United
self-preservation realists traditionally use to States accept and engage the nasty world of
depict an immutable world of competing international politics by intervening in
states also points to the possibility of build- World War II against Nazi Germany and,
ing a world state, a new Leviathan, to elimi- later, preparing to wage war against the Stalnate the planetary threat of nuclear inist Soviet Union. Although such actions
annihilation.
would inevitably lead to conflict, death, and
Glimmer of a New Leviathan is neither a injustice, it was preferable—strategically
new work of international relations theory and morally—to ignoring the dangerous
nor a set of biographies, but an intellectual stakes of international power politics and
history. Craig analyzes the published writ- seeking to avoid war at all costs.
ings of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz in
order to understand how they adapted their
ideas during the height of the Cold War,
when the United States and the Soviet Union
were well on the way to building huge
nuclear arsenals. Specifically, the book
explores how all three scholars sought to
reconcile their theoretical understanding of
international politics with their normative
desire to avoid a nuclear conflagration
between the superpowers. That shared project, according to Craig, transcended the
familiar distinctions drawn between "classical" and "neo" realists. Despite vast differ-
Craig claims that the early Cold War policy Niebuhr and Morgenthau advocated
generated two unresolvable inconsistencies
in their scholarly views. First, both scholars
shared the assumption that universal
human nature entailed a struggle for power
among morally indistinguishable states. By
the late 1940s and early 1950s, however,
Niebuhr and Morgenthau were routinely
drawing moral distinctions between the
superpowers in order to justify a more
assertive American foreign policy and military buildup. They increasingly portrayed
the United States as a defensive, peaceful
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107
nation and the Soviet Union (like Nazi Germany) as an aggressive nation bent on totalitarianism. Craig argues that the temptation
to make moral arguments about good guys
and bad guys in order to motivate the American people overwhelmed Niebuhr's and
Morgenthau's commitment to scholarly
consistency and dispassionate realist logic.
To paraphrase one contemporary realist:
realism is a hard sell, especially in America.
A second philosophical challenge
emerged by the late 1950s when Niebuhr and
Morgenthau were forced to confront the
moral quandary raised by their advocacy of
a hard-line policy toward the Soviet Union.
The logic of realism, with its depiction of
military force as the ultima ratio of selfpreservation, had earlier led both scholars to
argue not only that the United States must
prepare for and threaten nuclear war against
the Soviet Union, but also to suggest that
nuclear war might be justifiable and even
unavoidable. For Niebuhr and Morgenthau,
the dawning realization that nuclear war
would be suicidal completely undermined
their worldview and led them largely to reject
their realist principles. "They made this decision because they each concluded that a
political philosophy that justified thermonuclear war in the name of human survival had
become, by definition, absurd" (p. 116). Their
overriding concern in the twilight of their
careers, aside from articulating early and
active opposition to the United States'
involvement in Vietnam, was to advocate
peaceful coexistence between the superpowers. According to Craig, Niebuhr and especially Morgenthau concluded that some kind
of world state was necessary to prevent a
nuclear holocaust in the long term. Neither
made a serious effort to develop the argument, however, in part because they retained
vestigial realist pessimism about radical
solutions to any important problem.
108
Waltz is partly immune from the problems
faced by his predecessors. He argued that realist explanations of international politics and
war based on human nature—"unit-level" as
opposed to "structural-level" explanations—
were untenable, and his call for a positivist,
explanatory analysis—as opposed to one driven by moral and policy concerns—purportedly eliminated the moral dilemmas that vexed
Niebuhr and Morgenthau. For Craig, however,
the Waltzian turn did not solve the nuclear
dilemma for realism, it merely ignored it. Craig
argues that Waltz, too, was eventually forced to
abandon his realist roots and turn toward a
normative, unit-level understanding of international politics as part of a tacit normative
program to preserve peace among the nuclear
powers. Specifically, Craig claims that Waltz's
thesis that the spread of nuclear weapons helps
to keep the peace is "theoretically devastating"
to core structural realist principles because the
main explanatory variable of nuclear deterrence is based on the human fear of nuclear war
(a unit-level variable), not the distribution of
material power (a structural variable) that is
central to Waltz's theory of war and peace.
Craig concludes that the very fear of nuclear
war that confronted the three founding realists
might facilitate the building of a serious world
state. Craig does not provide a blueprint for
how the current realist world of power politics
will evolve into a new Leviathan; he simply
refers to "a new, that is, unforeseen political
process" and suggests that U.S. hegemony "provides an unusually propitious opportunity for
global state formation" (pp. xvii, 172). Though
aware of the many obstacles, Craig concludes
that given "the statistical certainty of global
thermonuclear war occurring as long as interstate anarchy and nuclear arsenals persist"
(p. xvii), it behooves realists and others to not
just glimpse—but also begin to think seriously
about how to build—that new Leviathan to
save the human race.
RECENT BOOKS ON ETHICS AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
Glimmer ofa New Leviathan is an ambitious
and fascinating work of intellectual history.
Excellent biographies of Niebuhr and Morgenthau exist, but Craig's book provides a unique
comparative analysis of how the theoretical
and normative dimensions of American realism developed under the brooding shadow of
nuclear Armageddon. The critique is all the
more compelling because Craig takes realism
seriously and is sympathetic with some aspects
of realist theory.
There are a few important flaws. First, Craig
is occasionally too sweeping with his claims.
Craig persuasively tracks and criticizes theoretical inconsistencies, but it is a reach to
assert that Waltz's structural theory "disappeared into thin air" with the publication of
his essay on the spread of nuclear weapons or
that Niebuhr and Morgenthau "came around
to admitting that nuclear weapons had devastated their worldviews" (pp. 157,165). These
claims are especially problematic when
important counterarguments are left unexplored; for example. Waltz would likely have
responded that his discussion of nuclear
deterrence is perfectly consistent with structural theory, and that nothing about his theory of international politics should disqualify
him from making normative arguments
about foreign policy.
Second, Craig acknowledges at the outset
that he is writing a traditional history of ideas,
not biography, and thus elevating published
works over private correspondence, psycho-
logical analysis, or personal circumstances. Yet
Craig relies on the latter at key points in the
book; for example, he explains Niebuhr's failure to offer new scholarly arguments after
purportedly coming to terms with the inherent flaws of his realism by his desire not to
appear as a ridiculous, elderly crank. Similarly, Craig suggests that Morgenthau was slow to
acknowledge his philosophical inconsistencies because he coveted the public intellectual
roles of pundit and policy analyst. One is
inclined to accept these interpretations, but
they call for the kind of biographical analysis
that Craig does not offer here.
Finally, Craig's central claim—that the
realist logic of self-preservation inevitably
points to the decline of the modern state system and the rise of some kind of world state
to control the forces of nuclear destruction—
rests on the debatable assumption that the
eventual use of nuclear weapons in war will
result in hundreds of millions of deaths and
possibly the extermination of the human
race. Global nuclear holocaust was certainly
conceivable during the Cold War. Today, war
in South Asia, terrorists, loose Russian nukes,
or even preemptive American strikes against
rogue arsenals could kill millions, but the
threat of an all-out nuclear war has surely
receded—still plenty to be alarmed about, of
course, but not enough to declare the demise
of realism.
—KEIR LIEBER
University of Notre Dame
After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust,
Eva Hoffman (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 320 pp., $25 cloth.
The Holocaust has become the paradigmatic case for discussions of ethical approaches
to memory, justice, apology, reparations,
representations, and reconciliation in the
aftermath of atrocities and genocides. But as
After Such Knowledge shows, the passage of
time between the original events and
the present leads to the development of
RECENT BOOKS ON ETHICS AND INTERNATIONAL AFEAIRS
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