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Response to DavisMichael C. Desch aa The George Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University,

Online Publication Date: 01 October 2006

To cite this Article Desch, Michael C.(2006)'Response to Davis',Security Studies,15:4,713 717To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09636410701190963URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09636410701190963

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Security Studies 15, no. 4 (OctoberDecember 2006): 713717Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLCDOI: 10.1080/09636410701190963

Controversies

Response to Davis

MICHAEL C. DESCH

I appreciate the opportunity to respond to James Davis four main critiquesof The Myth of Abandonment.1 These are: (1) the Holocaust analogy is notwhat I say it is; (2) showing that it is historically unfounded is not sufficientto mandate changes in current U.S. policy; (3) my realist approach is mis-leading because it ignores the domestic influences which actually define thenational interest; and (4) my argument is morally suspect because it ignoresthe competing ethical imperatives which ought to shape the national inter-est in democratic political systems such as our own. I make four points inresponse, two briefly and two at greater length.

First, one can only accept Davis characterization of my take on theHolocaust analogy as unsubstantiated and idiosyncratic by ignoring thesubstantial body of scholarly and advocacy writing on the Allies failures be-fore and during the Holocaust.2 It is also easy to demonstrate that the neveragain obligationthat the world should support the State of Israel and in-tervene to halt other mass killingsis commonly linked to that historical

Michael C. Desch is Professor and Robert M. Gates Chair in Intelligence and NationalSecurity Decision-Making at The George Bush School of Government and Public Service,Texas A&M University. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Security Studies.

The author would like to thank his colleague Christopher Layne for advice on this re-sponse.

1 Michael Desch, The Myth of Abandonment: The Use and Abuse of the Holocaust Analogy, SecurityStudies 15, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 10645.

2 The most influential exponent of this view is David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews:America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: The New Press, 1998). An earlier and equally influ-ential example is Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (Woodstock:The Overlook Press, 1998). Other widely discussed histories of American inaction include Deborah E.Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 19331945 (New York: FreePress, 1986); Richard Brietman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and AmericansKnew (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998); Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust andAmericas Most Important Newspaper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For a comprehen-sive critique of this abandonment perspective, see William D. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why theDemocracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (London: Routledge, 1997).

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714 M. C. Desch

interpretation by scholars and policy makers.3 Davis needs to explain whyalmost every American president over the past forty years (most of whomI quote in the piece) acknowledges that the Jews were abandoned duringthe Holocaust and that there is an obligation to make sure it never againhappens. Typical was Jimmy Carter: Out of our memory of the Holocaustwe must forge an unshakable oath with all of the civilized world that neveragain will the world stand silent, never again will the world fail to act in timeto prevent this terrible crime of genocide.4

Second, Davis errs in suggesting I believe that it is enough to debunkthe Holocaust analogy in order to call into question U.S. policies I oppose. Istate explicitly in the piece that current policies ought to be judged on theirown merits.5 We therefore agree that the United States relationship withIsrael and humanitarian intervention should be debated on grounds otherthan historical analogy. Proponents of the Holocaust analogy, not me, thinkcurrent policy stands or falls on its historical veracity.

Third, only a crabbed view of realism could claim that it is incapable ofaccommodating domestic variables. There is, for example, a growing body ofneoclassical realists who begin with material power and geography but thenargue that those traditional realist variables are mediated through domesticfactors like ideology, state structure, or culture.6

Davis, however, identifies me with a different strand of realism, andmost of his indictment is of that approach. But neorealism can accommodatedomestic-level variables. Kenneth Waltz suggests how it can do so when heargues that the distribution of power is a key factor in determining whetherand when domestic politics matter: The possibilities of action, by militaryor other means, are thus made large for any state that disposes of a surplusof power. Under such circumstances, national impulses shape foreign policywith lesser constraint than prevails when power is more evenly balanced.7

Despite Davis claims to the contrary, The Myth of Abandonment is notinconsistent with my earlier neorealist scholarship.8 Consider how structuralfactors such as U.S. power interact with the Holocaust analogy to affect U.S.

3 Again, this theme has been much discussed both here in the United States and in Europe in thecontext of recent events in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East. Two very prominent examples includePeter Novicks The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1999); and Samantha Power,A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

4 Jimmy Carter, quoted in Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 342.5 Desch, The Myth of Abandonment, 144.6 Gideon Rose, Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy, World Politics 51, no. 1 (1998):

146.7 Kenneth N. Waltz, The Politics of Peace, International Studies Quarterly 11, no. 3 (September

1967): 202.8 Culture Clash: Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies, International Security 23,

no. 1 (Summer 1998): 14170. I offer an even more extensive framework for how international structuraland domestic variables interact in my Civilian Control of the Military: The Changing Security Environment(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

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Michael Desch Responds 715

relations with Israel in my account. From the establishment of the State ofIsrael in 1948 through the Six Day War in 1967, American leaders generallysubordinated our relationship with Israel to U.S. concerns with the Cold Warrivalry with the Soviet Union. Such concerns led President Eisenhower to op-pose Israel during the 1956 Suez War. U.S. ties with Israel became much closerafter Israels stunning victory in the Six Day War, which convinced Americanleaders that the Jewish state could be a strategic asset to the United States.About this time, Israel also became closely identified with the Holocaust inthe minds of most Americans, as Peter Novick convincingly documents.9 Onemight have expected that the United States-Israel relationship would becomemore distant again after the Cold War. But if anything, it grew closer.10 Dueto U.S. hegemony, there is no structural incentive to rethink our relationshipwith Israel, and the Holocaust analogy now plays an important role in justi-fying the status quo. Such an account of the Holocaust analogys influenceis in no way incompatible with neorealism.

Finally, Davis dismisses realism as ill-suited to the task of adjudicatingcompeting moral claims. Realists, however, have done that successfully forhundreds of years. Consider St. Augustine of Hippo, whose major contri-bution in The City of God was to reconcile the moral and ethical demandsof Christs teaching with the reality of life in a warlike and therefore sinfulworld.11 Closer to our own time, Reinhold Niebuhr managed to be both a re-alist and a Christian ethicist in the Augustinian tradition.12 While Davis mightnot agree with how Niebuhr ultimately reconciled interests and ethics, hecan hardly claim that Niebuhrs realism and his ethics were incompatible.Careful readers of Waltz recognize the pervasive influence of ethical realistslike Niebuhr on him.13

Realists are generally skeptical about the possibility of radically trans-forming the international system given its enduring anarchical nature.14 That,however, is not the same as being amoral. Indeed, despite their pessimism,most are still animated by an ethically motivated desire to improve the hu-man condition within the constraints of the world the way it is: often the

9 Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 14851.10 For an overview of this, see Howard M. Sacher, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to

Our Time, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1996).11 Reinhold Niebuhr, Augustines Political Realism in Christian Realism And Political Problems

(New York: Scribners, 1952), 11946. See also the discussion of Augustine in Michael Joseph Smith,Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 12627.

12 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man & Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (Louisville: West-minister John Knox Press, 1960).

13 See the very subtle discussion of Waltzs ethical agenda in Thomas L. Pangle and Peter J. Ahrens-dorf, Justice Among Nations: On the Moral Basis of Power and Peace (Lawrence, KS: University of KansasPress, 1999), 247.

14 Robert Gilpin, No One Loves a Political Realist, Security Studies 5, no. 3 (Spring 1996), 328.

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716 M. C. Desch

realists pragmatic and apparently cold-blooded policies can and do improvethe quality of human life around the world.15

A key area in which realists offer policy prescriptions that are more likelyto lead to a better world is U.S. grand strategy. It was, for example, realistssuch as Waltz, Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau, and George Kennan who wereamong the earliest and most cogent critics of U.S. intervention in Vietnam.16

Waltzs opposition to the war was practical, but it also led him to advance apolicy position in the debate over Vietnam that was more humane and justthan those argued by others for intervention on the grounds of spreadingdemocracy:

But which is the better basis of policyto kill people in order to freethem, or to undertake war only out of apprehension for ones ownsecurity? The first amounts to deducing necessity from a liberal princi-ple and wrapping the mantle of justice around a national cause in or-der to legitimate bloodshed. The second amounts to doing what neces-sity dictates and eschewing force except where vital interest dictates itsuse. . . . Statesmen of the nineteenth century, it has been said fought nec-essary wars and killed thousands; the idealists of the twentieth centuryfight just wars and kill millions.17

Had U.S. leaders taken to heart these warnings about intervention inVietnam, they would have averted both a strategic blunder and a moralcalamity.

Today, proponents of Pax Americana, such as liberals and neoconser-vatives, believe that the rest of the world will be content to live under itshegemony because the United States is a just and democratic society. In con-trast, realists understand that the rest of the world does not see the UnitedStates as a benign hegemon.18 A British diplomat noted that one reads aboutthe worlds desire for American leadership only in the United States, [but] ev-erywhere else one reads about American arrogance and unilateralism.19

In the end, Davis is not satisfied simply to criticize my argument; he alsohints at darker motives for my interest in the Holocaust analogy. Along theselines, he chides me for citing only Jews who endorse the Holocaust analogysinfluence upon American foreign policy while ignoring those who do not.This is a strange charge to level given that my two most important sources

15 I make this argument at greater length in my It Is Kind to Be Cruel: The Humanity of AmericanRealism, Review of International Studies 29, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 41526.

16 Hans J. Morgenthau, The Failings of Foreign Policy, The New Republic, 11 October 1975, 1621.See also Smith, Realist Thought From Weber to Kissinger, 18588, 23132.

17 Waltz, The Politics of Peace, 207.18 Kenneth N. Waltz, America as a Model for the World A Foreign Policy Perspective, PS: Political

Science and Politics 24, no. 4 (December 1991): 66770.19 Unnamed British diplomat, quoted in Kenneth Waltz, Globalization and American Power, The

National Interest, no. 59 (Spring 2000): 4656.

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Michael Desch Responds 717

on the historiography of rescue (William Rubinstein) and the contemporarypolitics of Holocaust (Peter Novick) are Jewish. Worse, it implies that I thinkthe Holocaust analogy grows out of some sort of Jewish cabal, which is nota fair reading of my argument at all. This may be a useful rhetorical moveto score debating points (Desch is wrong because hes an anti-Semite), butit contributes little to serious theoretical or policy analysis.

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