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Ideas
The Theory That Gives Trump a Blank Check for Aggression
The true meaning of “flexible realism” — abroad and at home.
In an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN on Monday, President Trump’s aide Stephen Miller blithely articulated the outlook that has taken hold of the White House. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
His words seemed to deliberately echo Trump’s statement on Saturday that the capture and extradition of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his wife, Cilia Flores, was the product of “the iron laws that have always determined global power.” Not international laws, which prohibit the use of force to threaten the independence and territorial integrity of another sovereign state. Trump, for his part, said in a recent interview with The Times, “I don’t need international law.”
“America will never allow foreign powers to rob our people or drive us back into and out of our own hemisphere,” Trump said on Saturday. To that end, the administration is reviving the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in its neighborhood. “Under our new National Security Strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” the president said.
That National Security Strategy, released in early December, gave a name to one of the organizing principles supposedly governing the administration’s foreign policy: “flexible realism.” The document stated that the United States would pursue “peace through strength,” have a “predisposition to non-interventionism” and safeguard the “sovereign rights of nations,” first and foremost those of the United States. It would reassert American dominance over the Western Hemisphere.
The strategy maintained that there was “nothing inconsistent or hypocritical” about taking action in response to “a realistic assessment” about what could be achieved, nor in maintaining relations with undemocratic states if it served the national interest.
“If you look at the document carefully, it has a profound realist bent to it,” said John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and one of the country’s most prominent realist scholars. “The basic realist worldview is that the Western Hemisphere is the most important area of the world for the United States.”
The realist school of foreign policy is rooted in the belief that the world is fundamentally ungovernable and that politics comes down to power. While idealists might believe in the potential for international law to coerce states into good behavior, realists have never put much stock in such dreams. Realism is at heart “a pessimistic intellectual tradition about how the world of human politics is and how it is bound to be,” as the scholar Patrick Porter puts it in his new book, “How to Survive a Hostile World,” a kind of self-help manual for states.
While the varied strains of realism are plentiful and sometimes contradictory, the Trump administration is channeling one of its crudest forms. Scholars generally view realism as a theory for describing the world as it is; Trump and his team are using the term in an effort to redraw the world map. By invoking realism to justify their actions abroad, Trump and his associates are treating it as an alibi for a distinctly American imperialism, a pretext for belligerence.
“The Monroe Doctrine is like the ur-text of realism, at least in the American context,” said Matthew Specter, a historian and a senior fellow at the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Originally written to prevent further European colonization in the Western Hemisphere, it became a tool in the 20th century for justifying U.S. military interventions in the region. The United States invoked the doctrine during its 1941 occupation of Greenland to protect it from falling to Nazi Germany. American troops have been stationed there ever since, and Trump seems to be focused on claiming the entire territory.
Raphael S. Cohen, of the RAND Corporation, has argued that the administration is engaging in a “grand experiment” in realism that will indelibly change the field of foreign affairs. In a speech last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the administration marked a new era of “hard-nosed realism.” Others argue that the president’s approach undermines his realist credentials and betrays a profound misunderstanding of the concept.
“There are iron laws of world politics that they don’t understand,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Realism is all about realizing that in a competitive world, you want to be smart and go for genuine strategic advantage, not just pointless displays of power.”
Whether Trump deserves to be called a realist will be debated for decades. But the National Security Strategy announced that a kind of self-described realism is now officially U.S. policy, and the abduction and prosecution of Maduro is one of its products.
Foreign leaders have quickly taken notice, responding in bellicose and foreboding terms. Over the weekend, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil said on social media that the attack on Venezuela was a “first step toward a world of violence, chaos, and instability, where the law of the strongest prevails over multilateralism.” Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland wrote that “neither enemy nor ally” would respect weakness. Jordan Bardella, the leader of the far-right French party National Rally, called for France to “strengthen our industrial and military capabilities.”
Yet a global drift toward realist thinking has been in motion for some time. At an E.U. retreat in February, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said that the bloc must acknowledge the “harsher, more transactional reality” of the day and needed to “deal with the world as we find it.” In March, Singapore’s foreign minister, Vivian Balakrishnan, said that the rules-based international order was “reverting to a time when the world is divided into blocs controlled by big powers.”
If we are now living through an age that rewards pessimism and power, its effects will not remain neatly confined to foreign policy.“Trump is not revealing the world as it is,” Specter said. “He is remaking the world.”
Nasty and Brutish
Realism is the kind of word that, as the Times columnist William Safire once observed, almost always comes with an “adjectival qualifier.” The field is populated by classical and neoclassical realists; offensive and defensive realists; progressive, ethical and now, apparently, flexible realists. As an academic theory and worldview, it is a “mansion of many rooms,” Specter said.
Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes are often invoked as its oldest representatives; each warned of the fundamentally self-interested nature of humankind and the perilous conditions of the political world. One of realism’s founding creeds comes from Thucydides: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Machiavelli argued that “to help another ruler grow powerful is to prepare your own ruin,” that the ends justify the means and that one must embrace the world as it is rather than as one might wish it to be. Hobbes constructed his theory of sovereign power, embodied in the idea of the Leviathan, to shield humankind from the “nasty, brutish and short” conditions of life in the state of nature.
But the most important historical antecedents of Trumpian realism may lie in the late 19th-century age of empire, when German thinkers coined terms like Weltpolitik and Lebensraum, or “living space,” to describe how empires should think, speak and act on the world stage. The great powers of the era took for granted that the world should be carved up into spheres of influence for the powerful to exploit as they wished. Hitler’s expansionist foreign policy was derived partly from this strain of realism. In 1939, he spoke of constructing a German Monroe Doctrine to justify domination over Europe.
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