Power and prestige: Explaining American intervention in the Korean War

My dissertation, "Power and Prestige: Explaining American Intervention in the Korean War," contributes to a better understanding of the nature of power and morality in international relations through an examination of the concept of prestige--one of the most important psychological aspects of power--in the framework of Hans J. Morgenthau's realist paradigm. International relations theorists have paid insufficient attention to the psychological aspect of power because they have reduced the concept of power to its material aspect of force and capabilities. A close examination of the key concept of "structure" in Kenneth Waltz's neorealism, for example, shows that the concept is reinvented through a redefinition of power solely in terms of capabilities because anarchy remains constant and states therefore perform similar functions. Although it appears to be parsimonious and precise in a theoretical sense, I argue that this material interpretation of power distorts our experience in international political reality.; I use the concept of prestige to demonstrate that the psychological aspect of power is always an integral part of the conceptualization of power in international politics. I conduct a thorough etymological study of the term prestige throughout history and relate it to international relations. I identify both the positive and negative ways of gaining prestige such as self-restraint and brutality, and explore the ethical implications of each. I supplement the theoretical study of prestige with new empirical research on Stalin's decision to go to war in Korea as well as American intervention in the Korean War. Through a detailed study of US archival sources and recently declassified Soviet and Chinese documents, I seek to demonstrate that the Soviet Union and the US defined their national interests in terms of prestige in the global Cold War. This empirical study shows that Waltz's conceptualization of power solely in terms of capabilities is defective because it is at odds with the actual working of foreign policy and diplomacy. Moreover, Waltz's reductionism represents a regression from classical realism because it leads to moral abdication in international politics.