Transcending the Rift? Realism, Transatlantic Relations, and American Grand Strategy

Realism has earned many friends and foes by being focused on international relations as they really are, and not as they ought to be. However, confronted with failures of the US in aspiring to steer international system of the post-Cold War era, it has become increasingly normative and, in spite of all the theoretical disputes among its main proponents, seems to speak almost with one voice in this regard: advocating the grand strategy of restraint, or offshore balancing, for America. Great powers tend to act in ways entirely conceivable from the theoretical point of view of realism, while at the same time being, paradoxically, at odds with realist policy prescriptions. American long-pursued grand strategy of primacy, or deep engagement, is a vivid example. Strongly embracing Layne’s proposition that structural and neoclassical versions of realism are not only far from incompatible, but necessarily employed together if one is to properly understand great powers’ grand strategies; and drawing from contemporary realist literature on strategy of restraint and offshore balancing (from Waltz and Posen, to Mearsheimer and Walt, to Ashford and Porter), the author explores possible developments of transatlantic relations in the unlikely case of the US adopting a restrained strategic posture. Particular research attention is devoted to the Balkans region, as one of the theaters where great power competition is purportedly most obvious at present.