Post-ismism

I have never understood why so many defense and security analysts typically come out on the mercantilist/protectionist side of so many of the 'big' political economy questions. 


It seems to me that we are finally (albeit painstakingly gradually) starting to transcend the 'ism'-debates 
(what I sometimes jokingly call 'ismism') in the field of International Relations Theory, that are amusingly debated in a recent issues of International Studies Quarterly. Yet there can be little doubt that the isms still persist, and perhaps nowhere more than in the field of defense and security analysis, which for some bizarre reason has always tended to be dominated by what is know - in one of the most spectacular misnomers of all time - as the 'realist' camp. Not hindered by much knowledge about international political economy (or frankly - of modern international history), this field has always displayed a remarkably persistent tendency to ignore the powerful linkages between the various dimensions of the international system (of course economics, but also demographic, legal, sociological, etc.). And in those instances where it DID take some of them into consideration (like economics), to interpret those in an almost caricature-like 'vulgar' realist way.  In the much more 'linear' and less interconnected world, relative growth rates could indeed be interpreted