Framing U.S.-Russian Security Cooperation: Neorealist and Neoliberal Alternatives to Navigating the New Security Terrain

IntroductionConflict during the Cold War revolved around decision making in two camps, each equally dedicated to neorealist foreign policy goals. The irony behind a foreign policy doctrine centered on balance-of-power considerations and national security was that it lent a degree of predictability (and hence stability) to superpower relations. Indeed, some observers have mentioned that the key behind the post-Cold War U.S.-Russian rapprochement is the fact that Moscow and Washington think alike, in large measure because of their mutual past as great powers. Continued positive relations between the United States and Russia could to some degree be attributed to this mutual understanding. Indeed, the beauty of neorealism as a driver of foreign policy is its simplicity.1By reducing international politics to a few key variables (the state, anarchy, power, and security), it is possible, in the context of great-power competition, to delineate categories of competition, stalemate, and cooperation. The ever-present specter of confrontation keeps these categories mutually exclusive. However, is the complexity of the post-Cold War world order so great that it challenges neorealism as the dominant paradigm of international relations? Whereas the centrality of power politics and national security has not come into serious question, the calculus of power has changed how students of foreign policy formulate responses to contemporary risks. Given contemporary threats, what should the nature of U.S.-Russian relations be in the future? Furthermore, why, and on what grounds, should cooperation occur?Critics of neorealist foreign policy usually focus on the state-centric approach to politics it represents and counter that the threats of the post-September 11, 2001, post-Beslan reality contradict the utility of unilateral, hegemonic, or great-power politics. In particular, liberal critics of Cold War-era foreign policy point to the preeminence of terrorism, and specifically the threat of terrorist use of WMDs, as proof that multilateralism is the new security doctrine. As one specialist on U.S.-Russian relations put it, the fundamental conflict of the post-Cold War era is not a clash of ideological "alternative modernities" such as communism vs. fascism or liberalism vs. communism but rather the wholesale rejection of "modernity" in exchange for radical religion.2 The policy prescription then, is international cooperation in the neoliberal tradition, specifically in the areas of law enforcement, intelligence sharing, and nonproliferation, all made possible through the propagation of international law and institutions. Unilateral attempts to further security through the U.S. invasion of Iraq or Russia's insistence on solving its Islamist problem itself only alienates the international community to the detriment of those very institutions' norms and laws that serve as a nation's best defense in a war on terrorism.The reaction of neorealists to this argument points out the obvious: the emergence of terrorism is not a new phenomenon and its reemergence in the form of religious radicalism does not end great-power competition. Furthermore, terrorists do not represent as grave a threat to state survival as peer competitors. Thus, terrorism, although a threat to human security, is not in the strictest sense a threat to state survival, so it takes a back seat to traditional power politics. The resulting policy prescriptions, then, are those that favor freedom of action over deference to international constraints, accentuate strategic superiority, and predispose national leaders to hold other nations in contemptuous suspicion at best.The result of competition between these two main paradigms of foreign policy are two polarized sets of policy alternatives; neither one adequately addresses the reality of the international system. Neoliberals,3 for their part, fail to address the very real impact on the distribution of power certain policies have. …