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Response to Davis
Michael C. Desch a
a
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,15:4,713 717

To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09636410701190963
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09636410701190963

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Security Studies 15, no. 4 (OctoberDecember 2006): 713717

Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
DOI: 10.1080/09636410701190963

Controversies
Response to Davis

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MICHAEL C. DESCH

I appreciate the opportunity to respond to James Davis four main critiques

of The Myth of Abandonment.1 These are: (1) the Holocaust analogy is not
what I say it is; (2) showing that it is historically unfounded is not sufficient
to mandate changes in current U.S. policy; (3) my realist approach is misleading because it ignores the domestic influences which actually define the
national interest; and (4) my argument is morally suspect because it ignores
the competing ethical imperatives which ought to shape the national interest in democratic political systems such as our own. I make four points in
response, two briefly and two at greater length.
First, one can only accept Davis characterization of my take on the
Holocaust analogy as unsubstantiated and idiosyncratic by ignoring the
substantial body of scholarly and advocacy writing on the Allies failures before and during the Holocaust.2 It is also easy to demonstrate that the never
again obligationthat the world should support the State of Israel and intervene to halt other mass killingsis commonly linked to that historical

Michael C. Desch is Professor and Robert M. Gates Chair in Intelligence and National
Security 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 response.
1 Michael Desch, The Myth of Abandonment: The Use and Abuse of the Holocaust Analogy, Security
Studies 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 influential 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: Free
Press, 1986); Richard Brietman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans
Knew (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998); Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and
Americas Most Important Newspaper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For a comprehensive critique of this abandonment perspective, see William D. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the
Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (London: Routledge, 1997).

713

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M. C. Desch

interpretation by scholars and policy makers.3 Davis needs to explain why

almost every American president over the past forty years (most of whom
I quote in the piece) acknowledges that the Jews were abandoned during
the Holocaust and that there is an obligation to make sure it never again
happens. Typical was Jimmy Carter: Out of our memory of the Holocaust
we must forge an unshakable oath with all of the civilized world that never
again will the world stand silent, never again will the world fail to act in time
to prevent this terrible crime of genocide.4
Second, Davis errs in suggesting I believe that it is enough to debunk
the Holocaust analogy in order to call into question U.S. policies I oppose. I
state explicitly in the piece that current policies ought to be judged on their
own merits.5 We therefore agree that the United States relationship with
Israel and humanitarian intervention should be debated on grounds other
than historical analogy. Proponents of the Holocaust analogy, not me, think
current policy stands or falls on its historical veracity.
Third, only a crabbed view of realism could claim that it is incapable of
accommodating domestic variables. There is, for example, a growing body of
neoclassical realists who begin with material power and geography but then
argue that those traditional realist variables are mediated through domestic
factors like ideology, state structure, or culture.6
Davis, however, identifies me with a different strand of realism, and
most of his indictment is of that approach. But neorealism can accommodate
domestic-level variables. Kenneth Waltz suggests how it can do so when he
argues that the distribution of power is a key factor in determining whether
and when domestic politics matter: The possibilities of action, by military
or other means, are thus made large for any state that disposes of a surplus
of power. Under such circumstances, national impulses shape foreign policy
with lesser constraint than prevails when power is more evenly balanced.7
Despite Davis claims to the contrary, The Myth of Abandonment is not
inconsistent with my earlier neorealist scholarship.8 Consider how structural
factors 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 the
context of recent events in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East. Two very prominent examples include
Peter 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 structural
and 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 of

Israel in 1948 through the Six Day War in 1967, American leaders generally
subordinated our relationship with Israel to U.S. concerns with the Cold War
rivalry with the Soviet Union. Such concerns led President Eisenhower to oppose Israel during the 1956 Suez War. U.S. ties with Israel became much closer
after Israels stunning victory in the Six Day War, which convinced American
leaders that the Jewish state could be a strategic asset to the United States.
About this time, Israel also became closely identified with the Holocaust in
the minds of most Americans, as Peter Novick convincingly documents.9 One
might have expected that the United States-Israel relationship would become
more distant again after the Cold War. But if anything, it grew closer.10 Due
to U.S. hegemony, there is no structural incentive to rethink our relationship
with Israel, and the Holocaust analogy now plays an important role in justifying the status quo. Such an account of the Holocaust analogys influence
is in no way incompatible with neorealism.
Finally, Davis dismisses realism as ill-suited to the task of adjudicating
competing moral claims. Realists, however, have done that successfully for
hundreds of years. Consider St. Augustine of Hippo, whose major contribution in The City of God was to reconcile the moral and ethical demands
of Christs teaching with the reality of life in a warlike and therefore sinful
world.11 Closer to our own time, Reinhold Niebuhr managed to be both a realist and a Christian ethicist in the Augustinian tradition.12 While Davis might
not agree with how Niebuhr ultimately reconciled interests and ethics, he
can hardly claim that Niebuhrs realism and his ethics were incompatible.
Careful readers of Waltz recognize the pervasive influence of ethical realists
like Niebuhr on him.13
Realists are generally skeptical about the possibility of radically transforming 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 human condition within the constraints of the world the way it is: often the

Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 14851.

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: Westminister John Knox Press, 1960).
13 See the very subtle discussion of Waltzs ethical agenda in Thomas L. Pangle and Peter J. Ahrensdorf, Justice Among Nations: On the Moral Basis of Power and Peace (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas
Press, 1999), 247.
14 Robert Gilpin, No One Loves a Political Realist, Security Studies 5, no. 3 (Spring 1996), 328.
10

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M. C. Desch

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realists pragmatic and apparently cold-blooded policies can and do improve

the quality of human life around the world.15
A key area in which realists offer policy prescriptions that are more likely
to lead to a better world is U.S. grand strategy. It was, for example, realists
such as Waltz, Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau, and George Kennan who were
among 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 a
policy position in the debate over Vietnam that was more humane and just
than those argued by others for intervention on the grounds of spreading
democracy:
But which is the better basis of policyto kill people in order to free
them, or to undertake war only out of apprehension for ones own
security? The first amounts to deducing necessity from a liberal principle and wrapping the mantle of justice around a national cause in order to legitimate bloodshed. The second amounts to doing what necessity dictates and eschewing force except where vital interest dictates its
use. . . . Statesmen of the nineteenth century, it has been said fought necessary wars and killed thousands; the idealists of the twentieth century
fight just wars and kill millions.17

Had U.S. leaders taken to heart these warnings about intervention in

Vietnam, they would have averted both a strategic blunder and a moral
calamity.
Today, proponents of Pax Americana, such as liberals and neoconservatives, believe that the rest of the world will be content to live under its
hegemony because the United States is a just and democratic society. In contrast, realists understand that the rest of the world does not see the United
States as a benign hegemon.18 A British diplomat noted that one reads about
the worlds desire for American leadership only in the United States, [but] everywhere else one reads about American arrogance and unilateralism.19
In the end, Davis is not satisfied simply to criticize my argument; he also
hints at darker motives for my interest in the Holocaust analogy. Along these
lines, he chides me for citing only Jews who endorse the Holocaust analogys
influence 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 American
Realism, 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.

Michael Desch Responds

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on the historiography of rescue (William Rubinstein) and the contemporary

politics of Holocaust (Peter Novick) are Jewish. Worse, it implies that I think
the Holocaust analogy grows out of some sort of Jewish cabal, which is not
a fair reading of my argument at all. This may be a useful rhetorical move
to score debating points (Desch is wrong because hes an anti-Semite), but
it contributes little to serious theoretical or policy analysis.