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After World War II, realism became a framework for rethinking the nature of politics. The collapse of the Weimar Republic, the failures of the League of Nations and the cataclysm of the Holocaust had left a generation of political scientists — men like Hans Morgenthau, Paul Nitze, Henry Kissinger and Reinhold Niebuhr — convinced that politics was fundamentally irrational and that the state was not intrinsically a force for good. They set out to construct a cleareyed philosophy of international relations founded on the idea that great-power politics is a fact of life.
Realist thinking prevailed during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union were rival hegemonic powers. The establishment of NATO in 1949 was a realist response to the nuclear threat posed by the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, realism fell out of favor because the world had entered a unipolar era.
Critically, 20th-century realists accepted that all power is necessarily bound by constraint, hemmed in by the limitations of geography, politics and human nature. To lose sight of this is to risk slipping into much darker territory. Thucydides’s claim that the strong will do what they can was not meant as a prescription but rather as a warning. The use of unbridled power against the weak was “a sign that Athens had gone off the deep end, lost a sense of strategic restraint and has become depraved and decadent,” Walt said.
For Walt and other realist thinkers, Trump’s aggressive and chaotic actions on the world stage — his antagonism of U.S. allies, threats of territorial conquest and assertions that the U.S. is not afraid of putting “boots on the ground” — undermine any claim he could make to practicing a realist foreign policy. Realists largely opposed the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, preferring policies of restraint. The failures of those episodes vindicated the realist worldview.
“‘Flexible realism’ is a beautiful neologism because it doesn’t point you in any particular direction, and it doesn’t steer you away from any direction,” Walt said. The incoherence of Trump’s foreign policy is explicitly memorialized in the National Security Strategy. On one page, the document states that Trump’s foreign policy is “realistic without being ‘realist.’” On another, it lays out a distinct strain of realism that purportedly governs its actions.
For Porter, it is not realism that defines the Trump era but rather its “corrupt cousin,” Machtpolitik, which pursues power for its own sake and is defined by a “sort of violent exhilaration of destruction, nihilism and vengeance.”
Trump’s penchant for theatrics and bombast, his obsession with status and his use of power to enrich himself and his family — all these are characteristic elements of this darker ideology. Machtpolitik is realism gone wrong, the kind of phenomenon that it was ostensibly invented to prevent.
“By losing all restraints, you destroy yourself,” Porter said. The perpetual threat of Machtpolitik is why, he says, “realists can never relax, never just sit back when people invoke the philosophy for the sake of imperial hubris.”
A War Mentality
That loss of restraint was on full display during Trump’s address to the nation hours after the attack on Venezuela. At one telling moment, the president paused his excoriation of the Maduro regime to praise the actions of the National Guard in American cities, singling out their police presence in Memphis, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C. To these cities, he issued much the same threat that he had addressed to Venezuela’s new interim president, Delcy Rodríguez. “We’ll go back if we have to,” he said of Los Angeles. “We are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,” he said of Venezuela.
It has long been realist orthodoxy that while the international arena is anarchic and ungovernable, the opposite is true of domestic affairs. Every state has a sovereign that keeps order, upholds the law and safeguards its citizens. But for Trump, the threats posed at home and abroad are seemingly the same, and so is his response. Armed government agents have arrested and killed U.S. citizens as part of Trump’s anti-immigration policies; the federal government has strong-armed universities into accepting its agenda by withholding research funding; the Federal Communications Commission uses mergers as leverage to influence media coverage.
“In a number of places, including here in the U.S., confidence in the social contract is eroding,” Walt said. “This is reflected in the polarization of American politics and also in the nastiness, the worship of violence and the tendency to depict other members of society as not just people with whom one disagrees but as the enemy.”
The ongoing debates over the nature of realism and its contours are, among other things, a symptom of this imperiled state of affairs. “Democrats feel besieged and believe that Trump has brought a kind of war mentality into our civic life,” said Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That makes our domestic politics resemble what realists say that international politics is like — a situation of anarchy where the only real way to check a powerful actor who wants to do you harm is to build up your own power.”
Under these conditions, the return of realism makes sense as a strategy for navigating a world caught in perpetual crisis — a world unable to prevent the commission of the worst crimes or to slow climate change and which seems to have lost faith in the loftier aspirations of international law.
“We’ve spent 30 years in a period of extreme liberal overextension,” said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “We swung so far in that direction that a course correction was almost inevitable. Now the question is, What form does that course correction take?” In addition to the bitter legacies of Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of China and the return to a multipolar world have pushed realism back into politics.
Trump rose to power in part because he explicitly rejected liberal moralism and spoke frankly about the brutal and often transactional nature of politics. “His depiction of America in the world mirrored how a lot of people felt about how their own lives were going,” Wertheim said. “It seemed to at least recognize a certain kind of base-line reality about the competitive nature of the world. For decades, American leaders had told a happy story about producing peace, stability and democracy, and the results were quite different.”
The president seemed to believe that after decades of failed American interventions commissioned in the name of democracy, the public would be more willing to accept foreign meddling for self-interested reasons. The attack on Venezuela, and especially Trump’s pledge to seize its oil production infrastructure, is the result.
The second Trump administration may very well mark the start of a violent global age of Machtpolitik. “Trump is different than all of his predecessors because of his contempt for international law and international institutions,” Mearsheimer said. Whenever past presidents blatantly violated international agreements, he said, “they felt compelled to try to justify it, to put a velvet glove over the mailed fist, because they correctly understood that those laws and institutions were in America’s interest.” Over the past week, Trump and his deputies have revealed how profoundly they disdain the norms of global governance and demonstrated their willingness to use force to get what they want. On Wednesday, the president signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from dozens of international organizations.
But to acknowledge that we have entered a pessimistic and belligerent era is not to give in to it. Realism offers many lessons for the present moment — about the profound dangers of unrestrained power and the tragic bent of contemporary politics. “What is important is that we use pessimism as a starting point in a human sense,” Porter said, “to work out what is possible and to strive for that.”
