A few days ago in our discussion forum, our reader WigWag offered a theory to explain Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I disagreed with him.
I was thinking about this exchange over the weekend and wondering if it might be useful to back up a few steps and think about theories of international relations, more broadly. What causes states to behave as they do? Are there general rules we can use to predict their behavior?
I should say from the outset that I’ve never had much use for IR theory. I learned enough to pass my exams—I have a doctorate in International Relations, so that was a fair bit—but mostly, I found the discipline a waste of time. There’s no such thing as a true theory of international relations, by which I mean a powerful analytic tool that allows us reliably to explain inter-state behavior in the past and predict inter-state behavior in the future. We’ll never have a science of international relations that rises to the standard of proof, explanatory precision, and predictiv…
