What direction for US foreign policy under Condoleezza ?

World View: The most important contribution social science can make to the betterment of human society is "to discipline power with truth". So says Stephen Krasner, the new head of the policy planning staff at the US State Department, an internal think-tank which offers advice to the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

His and other appointments are being anxiously scanned for clues about the likely direction of US foreign policy in the second Bush administration. In the tussle for power and influence between neo-conservative hawks and classical realists, Rice tends towards the latter. Her appointments of Robert Zoellick as number two and of Nicholas Burns as number three in the department confirm that. But her predecessor Colin Powell's failure to prevail over the conservative nationalists and neo-conservative radicals implanted in the Pentagon and the White House during the first Bush term shows there is no guarantee that the impasse will be broken.

Krasner has been a close colleague of hers at Stanford University, where he is a professor of international relations and a very distinguished practitioner of the discipline. His work on international regimes, international political economy and state sovereignty puts him firmly in the realist camp, but independently so. Understanding the intellectual mindset involved may provide clues to the direction of Rice's approach, following her whirlwind tour of Europe and the Middle East this week in preparation for Bush's visit to Europe later this month.

Realism has been the dominant theory in international relations since the discipline matured after the second World War, mainly in the United States. It puts states at the centre of international order, which is assumed to be in condition of anarchy.

States are self-interested, rational and unitary actors which value survival above all else, making security the major issue in international politics. Realists are pessimistic about the ability of international institutions to change this condition and convinced that international and domestic politics are fundamentally different types of arena.

Realists take state sovereignty seriously as the fundamental building block of world politics. This largely coincides with common-sense assumptions about world politics and the self-understandings of political leaders and media portrayals of national interests which reproduce them. It certainly reflects the real world, however incomplete or distorted is the account it gives.

Realism arose in reaction to inter-war idealism which failed to prevent the second World War. It was developed by theorists such as Hans Morganthau, Henry Kissinger, Stanley Hoffmann and Kenneth Waltz to provide an account of the continuing importance of the nation-state and of military power and security as the key determinants of world politics. International relations was long seen as an American discipline because of the proximity to and overlap with the US as the dominant world power.

Intellectually and politically its major arguments have been with liberalism, which started with a different set of assumptions about world politics: that there are many other types of actors besides states, such as multinational corporations, NGOs or terrorists; that they pursue different objectives and have variable power; and that international relations offer opportunities for everyone to gain at the same time rather than only at the expense of other actors.

In recent years realism has been challenged not only by liberals, but by a variety of post-modernist, Marxist and feminist critics, both academically and politically. This has coincided with (and is inspired by) important shifts in world politics, among the most significant of which is the emergence of the European Union as a more powerful international actor, supplementing the power of its individual member-states. Rice welcomed this in her speech at the Sciences Po in Paris, calling on European leaders to work together with the US "to shape a global balance of power that favours freedom".

Krasner's predecessor at the State Department, Richard Haass, says Bush faces three choices in Iraq - to stay the course, leave abruptly or transform its role and leave gradually. Haass says he should leave gradually, because guns, butter and lower taxes at the same time are unsustainable. He should consider the cost to his whole foreign policy of an overly ambitious agenda for Iraq. Are Bush and Rice willing to discipline their power with similar uncomfortable truths from Krasner?

Realistically, she recognises that the US cannot achieve its international objectives unilaterally or by military power alone. While the EU and the US agree on "the interwoven threats we face today" - terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, regional conflicts, failed states and organised crime - they disagree on how to address them, including the use of institutions such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court. Nevertheless she insisted "there is not any conflict between a European identity and a transatlantic identity".

As Rice pursues this policy Krasner's advice about it will be interesting over the next four years. He recognises that the EU is more than an international regime, defined classically by him as "sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actors' expectations converge in a given area of international relations"; but he does not accept it is possible to generalise the EU's model of pooled sovereignty or international justice elsewhere in the world. Europe's experience of war and the post-1945 security guarantee by the US were special conditions.

The International Criminal Court is a tremendous error, he believes, because it lacks democratic accountability, which can only arise in domestic politics. In a recent article in Foreign Policy he speculated on what would happen if terrorists set off nuclear weapons in Washington, New Delhi, Berlin and Los Angeles. "Full-scale preventive wars would be accepted in principle," he says, "and the major powers would no longer" bother trying to get United Nations approval. "A consortium of major powers would assume executive authority". Krasner says there is a "growing tension" between states that cannot manage their internal affairs and "the handful of states that possess the means and wherewithal to set matters right"; he has written much on failed states.

Krasner's book on sovereignty is sub-titled "organised hypocrisy". By this he means that states say one thing but do another because life is complex and sovereignty many-sided. The logic of this position preserves US hegemony, a subject he has also theorised. But a hypocritical policy towards Europe will more likely deepen its disenchantment with the US than create a new more realistic transatlantic alliance. As another US international relations theorist, Robert Keohane, puts it, "different conceptions of sovereignty could make it even more difficult for European and Americans to understand one another".