C. William Walldorf offers a bold and provocative theory about the causes of war in his new book. He aims to explain why the United States pursued 27 cases of “forceful regime promotion” between 1900 and 2011. His universe of cases includes US involvement in World War II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the recent Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.
The core argument in To Shape Our World for Good is that ideas profoundly shape the decision to use force for regime change in accordance with two different models: “elite ideology” and “master narrative.” Those two models are usually at play at the same time, but the “master narrative” model is clearly the dominant one. It drives policy in his story.
The story regarding “elite ideology” is a familiar one. Policy makers and their allies bent on regime change develop a narrative that they use to help sell their public on the need to use force. The governing elites have considerable agency in this process, and the narrative they formulate is essentially an instrument they employ to manipulate public opinion to achieve their goals. A realist like me has no problem with this view of how narratives might affect foreign policy.
The “master narrative” model offers a fundamentally different and actually quite radical perspective on how ideas influence the decision to go to war. According to Walldorf, there are two competing master narratives in the United States: the “restraint narrative” and the “liberal narrative.” These are “collective beliefs” that are shaped largely by traumatic events and are wired deeply into the nation’s culture. They are not merely the reflection of public opinion. Nor are they narratives spun by policy makers to help shape public discourse. The “restraint narrative” acts as a block on forceful regime change, whereas the “liberal narrative” encourages war.
These two master narratives, which vary over time in their relative influence, play the central role in determining whether states use force in the service of regime change. Policy makers in Walldorf’s story have little agency and are effectively prisoners of the prevailing narrative. “Elites matter in certain ways,” he writes, “but the main driver and explanatory variable for policy outcomes are master narratives and the discourses, more specifically, that form around those master narratives” (p. 204). Policy elites are in this iron cage because the prevailing master narrative invariably enjoys widespread public support, and political leaders want “to avoid the electoral or political costs of appearing out of step with public expectations set by master narratives” (p. 3) In other words, the policy elites worry about audience costs, which stymies their efforts to do what they think is in the national interest. This bold claim about the power of master narratives to shape policy runs like a red skein through the book. The more familiar and much less controversial story about “elite ideology” takes a back seat.
Finally, Walldorf maintains that the two master narratives usually drive US policy makers to act foolishly and pursue policies that are not “good for U.S. security and the common good.” Policies based on the liberal narrative, which obviously promotes regime change, are “especially” likely to fail (p. 210). This conclusion, I may note, seems at odds with the book’s title, which emphasizes that the United States shapes the world in positive ways.
There are a number of problems with Walldorf’s core argument that raise doubts about its explanatory power. First, it is difficult to accept his claim that America’s foreign policy elites have had so little influence in making decisions about war and peace and instead are beholden to master narratives that they do not create and that are likely to produce failed policies. For example, he maintains that in the run-up to the Iraq War the elites mattered, “but they did so in a way that was highly determined by the robust liberal narrative” (p. 167). There is abundant evidence, however, that President George W. Bush and his lieutenants had significant agency, which they used to fashion their own highly effective narrative that allowed them to take the United States to war. Indeed, Walldorf’s discussion of the Iraq case provides substantial evidence of their agency.
To take another example, President Franklin Roosevelt played the central role in maneuvering the United States into World War II, and to the extent there was a master narrative at play, it was isolationism, which he ultimately beat back. These cases of elite influence are not anomalies by any means.
Walldorf might respond by claiming that his theory can accommodate this criticism because it allows for the “elite ideology” and “master narrative” models to operate at the same time, and foreign policy leaders have significant agency and influence in the former model. This contention makes little sense, however, because these two models are logically at odds with each other. After all, leaders either have agency or they do not, and those two models tell a different story on that count. Walldorf actually appears to support my point, when he notes that “elite ideology” is one of the “two leading alternatives” to his “master narrative argument” (p. 199). Furthermore, he consistently maintains that a “master narrative” will dominate an “elite ideology” when they clash, which means that policy elites ultimately have no choice but to act in accordance with the prevailing master narrative.
Second, one wants to know how master narratives bubble up from below at critical junctures to drive the policy-making process. In other words, who is pushing the master narrative forward? Walldorf maintains that there are “promoters” who drive the “liberal narrative” forward and “moderators” who do the same for the “restraint” narrative. In fact, these individuals are the key actors in his theory, because they ultimately manipulate the master narratives that overwhelm the policy elites and determine whether or not a state goes to war. This important line of argument, which would seem to necessitate a theory of domestic politics, is theoretically underdeveloped. It also does not square with the cases in the book, where policy elites appear to play a more important role in the decision-making process than either “promoters” or “moderators.”
Third, international politics matter little in Walldorf’s theory, as in his telling, American decisions for or against forced regime change are driven largely by master narratives that are deeply embedded in the culture. In particular, policy elites are hardly influenced by balance-of-power logic or geopolitical considerations. Walldorf’s efforts to dismiss realism are unsurprising, because it is the other alternative theory (besides “elite ideology”) that he is attempting to knock down. Nevertheless, this approach does not fit well with the evidence.
For sure, the United States has sometimes ignored realist dictates and gone to war mainly in pursuit of regime change. This pattern of behavior was at play during the unipolar moment (1990–2016), when the United States was so powerful that it could largely ignore balance-of-power logic and instead topple regimes for the purpose of spreading liberal democracy around the globe. But that was not the case regarding the United States’s entry into either World War II or the Korean War, which Walldorf categorizes as examples of forceful regime promotion. Realist calculations underpinned Washington’s decision to enter both of those conflicts. Roosevelt was determined to prevent Nazi Germany from dominating Europe and Imperial Japan from establishing hegemony in Asia. President Harry Truman intervened in the Korean War in June 1950 to prevent North Korea, an ally of the Soviet Union, from overrunning South Korea and creating a unified Korea that would be a serious threat to Japan.
One further point about realism. Walldorf writes, “Realism anticipates that robust forceful regime promotion is most likely when a state possesses a preponderance of power either globally or in a certain region(s) of the world” (p. 199). Realism, in his account, is primed for regime change, not restraint. Thus, he sees cases where the United States exercised restraint as evidence against realism. This portrayal of realism is wrong. Virtually all realists are opposed to the United States pursuing a foreign policy based on regime change. For that reason, they were among the toughest critics of liberal hegemony, which called for Washington to spread democracy across the globe, sometimes at the end of a rifle barrel. Indeed, realists frequently made the case that the United States should pursue a foreign policy that emphasizes restraint. Realists would not be surprised that Walldorf finds that most of the attempted regime changes failed.
Narratives matter in the making of foreign policy, but it is not the master narratives that are at the heart of Walldorf’s story that matter. Instead, it is the narrative that the foreign policy elites formulate to help sell their policies that matter, although, ultimately, they also do not matter much, because other factors—especially those concerning the balance of power—are the principal driving forces behind a state’s foreign policy.
