Halloween in July

I sort of recognized the name Daniel Drezner, though I'm not sure what I've read by him.  He seems to be that extremely rare rock star poli sci theorist, at any rate, Samuel Huntington for the digital age.  In any case, he has written a book called Theories of International Politics and Zombies, and he has a little bite-sized tidbit up in Foreign Policy, which is trying to be a rock star poli sci publication (difficult when people like me can never remember the distinction between you and stodgy podgy Foreign Affairs): "Night of the Living Wonks."  He's trying to mockingly figure out how different IR theorists would predict the world would respond to zombies.

So (American) realists would say:

How would the introduction of flesh-eating ghouls affect world politics? The realist answer is simple if surprising: International relations would be largely unaffected. Although some would see in a zombie invasion a new existential threat to the human condition, realists would be unimpressed by the claim that the zombies' arrival would lead to any radical change in human behavior. To them, a plague of the undead would merely echo older plagues, from the Black Death of the 14th century to the 1918 influenza pandemic. To paraphrase Thucydides, the realpolitik of zombies is that the strong will do what they can and the weak must suffer devouring by reanimated, ravenous corpses.

(American) "liberals" would say:

Provided that the initial spread of zombies did not completely wipe out governments, the liberal expectation would be that an international counterzombie regime could make significant inroads into the problem. Given the considerable public-good benefits of wiping the undead from the face of the Earth, significant policy coordination seems a likely response... Quasi-permanent humanitarian counterzombie missions, perhaps under United Nations auspices, would likely be necessary in failed states. Liberals would acknowledge that the permanent eradication of flesh-eating ghouls is unlikely. The reduction of the zombie problem to one of many manageable threats, however, is quite likely. Most countries would kill most zombies most of the time.

And neocons (they're their own category?) would say:

Neither accommodation nor recognition would be sustainable options in the face of the zombie threat. Instead, neocons would recommend an aggressive and militarized response to ensure human hegemony. Rather than wait for the ghouls to come to them, they would pursue offensive policy options that take the fight to the undead. A pre-emptive strike against zombies would, surely, be a war against evil itself.

I'm not really sure what to make of this, except I think he may be underestimating zombies' disruptive capacity.  The whole thing is clearly an attempt to get "young people" to care about political science, by the way: "interested and intelligent students of world politics should use their own brains -- before the zombies do."