Tag: IR

Policy churn, selective memory, and the mess on repeat

There’s a familiar pattern in foreign policy debates: outrage at the current regime, amnesia about how it got there. Yes, the current government of #Iran is repressive. It crushes dissent, restricts freedoms, and enforces authoritarian rule. None of that needs soft-pedalling, but if we’re at all serious about understanding the world – rather than just reacting to #fashernista headlines – we also have to look at how situation came to be.

In 1953, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was removed in a coup orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency and MI6. The reason wasn’t hidden. Mosaddegh had nationalised Iran’s oil industry, which had been dominated by British interests. Oil, not democracy, was the priority.

The coup, coup d’état, dismantled a native government with a democratic mandate and reinstalled Mohammad Reza Pahlavi an authoritarian monarch, backed by the United States and the United Kingdom. His regime relied on repression, secret police, and heavy Western support to maintain control. That repression didn’t produce stability, it produced rage. In 1979, the backlash came in the form of the Iranian Revolution, which overthrew the Shah and replaced him with a theocratic system that remains in power today.

This is the #churn, Western powers intervene blindly for strategic and economic gain. They undermine any democratic movements that natively conflict with corporate and geopolitical greed. The installed regime rules repressively, public anger builds, eventually, it explodes – often empowering forces that are more hostile, more radical, and less aligned with Western interests than the government that was overthrown. Then we act surprised and circle back to the same mess.

None of this excuses the Iranian regime’s actions, but pretending history began in 1979 is dishonest. If we want fewer authoritarian states and fewer hostile stand-offs, we need to start by acknowledging how “defending freedom” has meant undermining it. Policy churn without accountability simply produces the next crisis, and then the next one. We need to compost this mess.

In the #mainstreaming mess, international relations (#IR), energy has always been about power and security as much as economics. The modern system was built around chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz, where a disruption can shake global markets overnight.

With this in mind, when we step to a different subject, the framing renewables as “unreliable” misses this wider point: oil and gas are only “reliable” so long as fragile geopolitical routes remain open and militarily secured. Wind and solar don’t sail through Hormuz; they are generated locally, distributed across grids, and not hostage to a single naval blockade. From a security perspective, decentralised renewables reduce exposure to exactly the kind of chokepoint crisis that has defined fossil-fuel geopolitics for decades.

There are meany resigns to compost this kind of mess.

The #IR view of how to survive in a hostile world

The #IR view of how to survive in a hostile world

The Changing Character of War programme at #Oxford is discussing Patrick Porter’s new book How to Survive a Hostile World from Stanford University Press. Porter argues for realism – what I’d call the “lawful evil” path of international relations – as the right response in an age of war, economic dislocation, and climate crisis.

The panel includes: Prof. Patrick Porter (Birmingham), Dr. Susan B. Martin (King’s College London), Dr. Jeanne Morefield (Oxford), Dr. David Blagden (Exeter), and Dr. Seán Molloy (Kent).

Porter tackles three standard critiques of realism – that it’s immoral, unrealistic, and provincial – and flips them. He insists realism is moral because it defends the polity where no higher law exists, realistic because it reflects how human groups actually behave, and universal because it can apply beyond the Euro-Atlantic world.

But this is Oxford #IR, so don’t expect much challenge. Realism here really means: how to manage decline without admitting it. It’s hard to argue for realism in an era of #climatechaos and the global hard-right shift. If the state is the “rational actor,” that actor is already captured, elitists circling the wagons while “strongman politics” gets rebranded as “stability.” Expect talk of “peace through strength,” the same logic that once drove Japan before WWII and now drives Israel. They’ll all agree they hate the liberal imperialism of the past 20 years – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya – while quietly defending the same machinery that made it possible.

The deeper question, what’s the optimal flock size for survival in a hostile world? will be avoided, because that would mean admitting that what really matters to them isn’t the state at all, but the tribe: class, in-group, and out-group. Realism today is an ideology for managing collapse, not preventing it. If we want a liveable world and culture, we have to move beyond this toward post-capitalist, trust-based cooperation, not another round of “lawful evil” geopolitics.

By serious academic standards, realism is a “degenerating research program.” Every time reality disproves it, the theory just bolts on new excuses, a patchwork of “yes, but” footnotes that never die. Lacking moral grounding, it hides behind “pragmatism” while refusing to say what’s good or bad. “That’s just how the world works,” they say, mistaking description for wisdom.

Realists claim they see the world as it is: power, conflict, survival. But even within their own logic, it’s full of contradictions, empire pretending to be restraint, militarism dressed as reason. Realism doesn’t always mean war, but it always means preparing for one. For them, the state is sacred and indivisible – the only actor that matters – which is why their worldview drips with Eurocentrism and state worship.

In truth, realism isn’t wrong so much as exhausted: a worldview for a dying world that can’t imagine anything beyond power. In the age of #climatechaos and #deathcult politics, we need a new grounding – trust, cooperation, transparency (#4opens) – rather than fear and force.

Realism is international relations for adult teenagers who never grew up – still desperate to make their childhood world of heroes, villains, and empires real.