Week 3: Interests and Ideas

There's a train of thought running through Kirstin and Dan's blogs for this week that I'd like to pick up and expand a little more upon.

Kirstin begins by questioning why ideas have yet to be tied systematically studied in connection to the actions taken by states in the international system, and if our focus on metaphorical/rhetorical discourse is actually doing a disservice to the field in that it doesn't seem entirely connected to the actions of states in the real world, at least directly.

Dan solves this problem to an extent by arguing that interests and ideas aren't necessarily mutually exclusive and that, rather, should probably be understood as being intertwined.  I think that this understanding of the two is probably the most instructive out of what I've seen from Prof Jackson's lecture for this week and the readings, but wanted to expand a bit more as to why I think it works so well.

I'm not necessarily certain that in the present day, that states are able to act on either idea or interest alone.  Rather, I'm convinced that even when it appears an actor is acting according to one train of thought that there's probably some amount of the other underlying that serves to reinforce the decision.  Here, Prof. Jackson's example about McDonald's switch from styrofoam containers appears to be relevant - there's no reason why both the idea that McDonald's decided it wanted to be (more) environmentally friendly and that the switch was simply a cynical ploy to increase sales can't simultaneously be true, and in this case, I tend to believe the latter, but this cynical calculation is yet derived from the commonly-held (though rarely acted upon) belief that protecting the environment is the right thing to do and preys upon that idea even if only to make money for the corporation - the outcome is the same, however, McDonald's became more environmentally friendly.

But we can see this when viewing nations as international actors as well; the US' engagements with Saddam Hussein during the 90's and early 2000's (the Bush Wars?) are pretty good examples.  In both cases, the public rhetoric explaining US intervention was based more in political/social norms and ideas; for the former, that we needed to protect our allies; and in the latter, that we were bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East (at least, this was what began to be used after the WMD argument fell through), but yet, in both cases, the rhetoric and actions taken can easily be couched within cynical interest-based assessments of economic factors such as the benefits of a stable OPEC system and the ability of Iraq to stably produce oil for global markets in the case of the latter.  There's no reason why both the more ideas-based and cynical cost/benefit analyses trains of thought aren't correct here, and looking at the aftermath of both conflicts, the outcomes support both notions - while the Gulf War resulted in the destruction of infrastructure in both Kuwait and Iraq, Iraq came out facing heavy sanctions, which would be undone in 2003 so that Western investments into Iraq could revitalize the oil-producing sector of the country's economy ("revitalize" is a subjective term here, I don't necessarily agree that's exactly what happened, but neoliberals will), with the added benefit of having deposed a long-time dictator and laid the framework for free elections within Iraq.  In this case, you can see that both normative and rational analysis-based trains of thought for entering the conflicts from the US' point of view were eventually achieved.