Realism, taken to its logical end, is non-interventionist

Usually supporters of America’s current wars in the Middle East find me to be naïve when they discover that I am vehemently opposed to an American presence in the region.  In their minds, I just do not understand realism or how power politics actually functions.  My anti-war sentiments are the idealistic notions of an inexperienced youth who thinks that everyone should just get along.

The great irony here is that when followed to its logical end, the realist school of internationalist relations which so many use to justify the American presence all over the world is in fact one of the greatest arguments against our current foreign policy.  I do not argue against America’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan because I think that we would all just get along if these wars ceased to happen.  I argue against these wars because I come from a perspective that sees the people we are fighting as human beings with the same base motivations as myself, and when these people see their livelihood threatened, they take the best course of action that they can find, which unfortunately often involves siding with whatever group holds the most regional power.

The great mistake in logic made by many advocates of an interventionist foreign policy is to merely think of the world in terms of the international stage.  Such people look at the world in terms of what Iran, Al Qaeda, Russia, China, OPEC, or other entities have done or might do, rather than considering actions based on their effects on individuals, and what these individuals are likely to do in response.

This might seem to be a petty complaint, but its ramifications are enormous, for thinking of the world merely in terms of groups and calling that “realism” forces the person examining the situation to apply characteristics that are distinctly non-human to the human beings in these groups.  We assume that all of them have the same reasons for doing what they do, that all of them will react the same way in a given situation, and that the group itself is a fixed entity that does not shift and change due to both time and circumstances.  For such people there is no need to investigate who these individuals are, for by applying a group name to them, we already know everything that we need to know.

However, the largest problem with this view of foreign policy is this – when we look at the world through the lens of picking out only large international players, we are leaving out of the equation the 99.9% of people who do not in reality contribute to the mindset or actions of the group we describe.  We are forgetting the people who make or break power depending on who they turn to for protection.

Maybe an example will help shed some light on this theory, such as the war in Afghanistan.  Mainstream news typically lays out the war in Afghanistan as the United States military hunting down groups of insurgents led by warlords or terrorist leaders.  The idea portrayed to the American public is that if we could only hunt down these groups, the war would be won, but that it is just so difficult to find them because of Afghanistan’s turbulent terrain.