So you’ve decided to become a realist. Not a philosophical realist, like Wittgenstein or Popper. Not an artistic realist, like Courbet or Millet. And not a literary realist, like Balzac or Flaubert. No, something even more formidable — a foreign policy realist. It’s a sensible decision, all things considered. You wouldn’t want to be a foreign policy idealist, not these days, as the death-knells are sounding for values-based diplomacy. Besides, being a realist lends a certain frisson to your profession. You can picture yourself as Niccolò Machiavelli, gliding through the halls of the Palazzo Vecchio, alert to the whispers of conspiracy and the glinting flash of a rondel dagger, or as Carl von Clausewitz in mud-spattered Prussian livery, riding a richly caparisoned charger across the battlefields of Jena and Borodino. You can larp as as His Serene Highness Otto von Bismarck, redrawing the map of Europe while sporting a marvelous walrus moustache, or as Henry Kissinger, hands firmly grasping the levers of state power as you orchestrate coups d’état and install obedient juntas wheresoever you see fit.
At some point you may wish to select your specific school of realism. You have a number of options. There are classical realists and neoclassical realists, structural realists and constructivist realists, offensive realists and defensive realists, but at the end of the day they all agree that the international system is fundamentally anarchic, that states represent the primary actors in said system, that states pursue their own narrowly drawn self-interests, and that the chief concerns of the state are power and security. Realists are invariably unsentimental, often adopting a depersonalized, borderline sociopathic Patrick Bateman-esque deportment. They have little time for ideologies, norms, or even domestic politics, and tend to treat nations as little more than pieces on a giant chess board, or billiard balls colliding on a global pool table. To be a realist is to turn grand strategy games like Sid Meier’s Civilization, Europa Universalis, or Hearts of Iron into reality. Such is realism’s appeal to a certain personality type — perhaps your own.
Let us take as an example Darren Beattie, a former Trump speechwriter (sacked in 2018 when it was reported that he had delivered an address to the controversial H. L. Mencken Club) and founder of the Revolver News website, who is presently serving as interim under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. Last summer, Beattie proposed on the X platform that:
The reality is that Taiwan will eventually, inevitably be absorbed into China[.] This might mean fewer drag queen parades in Taiwan, but otherwise not the end of the world. This is bold and controversial, but I think a grand deal should be struck — we agree to acknowledge this reality in exchange for massive concessions from China on Africa and Antarctica. Deep state would go nuts but this is the deal to be made.
Being a realist means not having to worry about piddling matters like Taiwan’s admirable commitment to democracy and religious liberty, or its role as a bulwark of freedom and prosperity standing in such stark contrast to Communist China’s godless, soul-stifling authoritarianism. All of that can be trivialized and then traded away for “concessions from China on Africa and Antarctica,” however that is supposed to work, and your realist conscience will remain as pristine as a winding sheet. And if, for example, someone like conservative historian Niall Ferguson has the temerity to suggest that your administration should maybe not begin negotiations with Russia over the Ukraine war by publicly conceding pretty much every crucial point (with some hastily issued walk-backs further muddying the waters), you can always follow Vice President JD Vance’s suit and label your critic a “historically illiterate” “globalist” who is purveying “moralistic garbage.” This is one of the foremost perks of being a realist.
A few ground rules, though. You cannot be an isolationist, no matter how tempting that sounds, at least if you wish to have a great nation and not a hermit kingdom. Theodore Roosevelt put it this way: “A man must first care for his own household before he can be of use to the state. But no matter how well he cares for his household, he is not a good citizen unless he also takes thought of the state. In the same way, a great nation must think of its own internal affairs; and yet it cannot substantiate its claim to be a great nation unless it also thinks of its position in the world at large.” How to maintain your position in the world is the principal concern of all good realists. You must keep an eye on global and regional balances of power. You must forge robust alliances to augment your international influence. And you cannot shy away from the use of military force when it becomes necessary or advantageous.
It is entirely possible that, in recent years, you have come to loathe “neoconservative warmongers,” those “merchants of death” with all their “forever wars,” their interventions, their international adventurism. Even if you have adopted some of the more muscular rhetoric that we see on the right — Don’t Tread on Me, Molon Labe, Fight-Fight-Fight, WAGTFKY — you may regard war as the ultimate failure. Elon Musk, speaking recently at CPAC, wondered aloud: “What are they dying for, what exactly are they dying for [in Ukraine]? The line of engagement has barely moved in two years. There’s a whole bunch of people dead in trenches, for what?” Presumably the very same thing that the Poles died for in the Polish–Soviet War, and that the Finns died for in the Winter War — national survival. Indeed the preeminent goal of every state, according to realists, is survival. People generally do not like seeing their nation destroyed and absorbed by a despotic empire, or their hometowns turned into a Bucha, an Irpin, an Izium, a Mariupol, full of mass graves and torture chambers and looted museums. Realism may not be particularly sentimental, but at least it grasps this basic truth about human nature.
Perhaps instead of using war as an crucial instrument of national policy, as realists have advocated from Thucydides’ time to the present, we could instead use positive and negative economic statecraft in the pursuit of maximal power and security. We could convince our chief geopolitical adversaries to de-nuclearize and slash their defense spending by half, and even trust that they would hold up their end of the bargain. We could wage and resolve international conflicts through tariffs and mineral right deals. Everything can be treated as a transaction, for everything has its price. Yet realists like Machiavelli have always understood that “friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind [grandezza e nobiltà d’animo], may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon.” Arrangements predicated on rapacious resource extraction deals imposed in extremis will prove even less reliable, leading to recalibrations of the balance of power that may exacerbate the anarchical tendencies of the international system, making conflict more, rather than less, likely. We forget that alliances require a certain “greatness and nobility of mind” at our peril.
Another thing to remember, as a budding realist, is that you can never, ever admit to having ideological attachments, affinities, affections, spiritual connections, basically anything of the sort. Do you remember how Nancy Pelosi, at the Israeli-American Council’s 2018 National Conference, declared that “If this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid — I don’t even call it aid — to our cooperation with Israel”? Most American politicians think this way, in terms of an absolutely iron-clad bond with Israel that for historical and ideological reasons transcends all other considerations, but it is not the sort of thing a realist would confess outwardly, even if he believes it inwardly. So you must come up with some other rationale that sounds vaguely plausible. Take the example of JD Vance, who during a 2024 speech at the isolationist-adjacent and vaguely pro-Russian Quincy Institute contrasted aid to Ukraine, which he considers “charity” and therefore opposes, with aid to Israel, which he views as a sort of multiplier, and therefore supports. Financial and military assistance to Israel, Vance contended, is directed towards “one of the most dynamic, certainly on a per capita basis, one of the most dynamic and technologically advanced countries in the world,” and Israel’s technological achievements “actually give us missile-defense parity. That’s a very important national security objective of the United States of America, and that’s something we’re working with one of the most innovative economies in the world to accomplish.”
One wonders whether Vance, who visited Jerusalem a few years back, donned a kippah, prayed at the Western Wall, and tweeted about “Jerusalem, the eternal capital of Israel,” really views our relationship with Israel in such purely pragmatic terms, but this is how you are obliged to speak if you want to burnish your realist credentials. As Seth Mandel pointed out in the pages of Commentary, Vance’s attempt to distinguish aid to Ukraine and Israel doesn’t make much sense if you think about it for a moment. Ukraine doesn’t deserve our assistance, because it needs it, whereas Israel does, because it doesn’t. What is more, as Mandel asks, “At what point in Israel’s 76-year history did the Jewish state become worthy of American support? We can all agree that Israel overcame the odds to become — at this point in history — eligible for acceptance into The JD Vance School For Gifted and Talented Nation-States. But surely that wasn’t always the case.” Did Israelis “deserve” our support during the Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine, or during the perilous days of the First Arab–Israeli War in 1948? Did it “deserve” it during the existential crisis of the Yom Kippur War? Or did it only come to “deserve” American support when it reached a certain level of economic dynamism (“on a per capita basis”) and developed the impressive Iron Dome air defense system? Nobody actually thinks this way, but as a realist apparently you have to pretend to.
Do bear in mind, however, that there are those of us who can readily admit that our adherence to Iron Wall Zionism of the Ze’ev Jabotinsky school is not predicated on Israel’s per capita GDP or useful technological advancements in the field of mobile all-weather air defense systems, just as our support for the cause of freedom, democracy, and cultural survival in Ukraine and Taiwan is not bound up in the former’s underground reserves of rutile and ilmenite ores, titanium sponge, lithium, erbium, yttrium, neodymium, beryllium, hafnium, germanium, and gallium, or the latter’s lucrative semiconductor foundries. If that represents “moralistic garbage” to the marble-hearted realist, then so be it.
If you are still dead-set on this realism business, I would suggest paying a visit to the so-called “high church of realpolitik,” which is to say China, for it is there that foreign policy realism has reached its high-water mark. Hal Brands, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has described China’s “concentric circles grand strategy, organized around four major ambitions”:
At the core is the eternal goal of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — preserving and strengthening the party’s power. A second goal is restoring national unity, by bringing wayward regions and provinces, such as Hong Kong and Taiwan, back into the fold. A third goal includes reestablishing a sphere of semi-exclusive interest in China’s geopolitical neighborhood, in which smaller countries defer to Beijing’s wishes and outside actors — namely, America — are powerless to interfere. Finally, China is seeking global influence as a means of weakening the US-led liberal order and, perhaps, constructing a Chinese-led order in its place.
During the 2013 Peripheral Diplomacy Work Conference, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping set forth the objectives of China’s peripheral diplomacy: the maintenance of integral Chinese sovereignty, security, and developmental interests; mutually beneficial cooperation with peripheral countries in order to “weave a closer network bearing common benefits”; and the pursuit of mutual support, equality, and affection between states, thereby making “peripheral countries kinder and more intimate to China … thereby increasing China’s affinity and influence.”
You don’t have to actually believe any of this, but you do have to acknowledge the importance of what China calls its “peripheral diplomatic work.” Suppose China is having some difficulty with Türkiye with respect to the Uyghur Question, the Turks being famously solicitous about the plight of Turkic ethnic groups in Xinjiang, Crimea, Azerbaijan, Syria, and Iran. Instead of escalating tensions, one option is to leverage the economic opportunities provided by the Belt and Road Initiative, elevate bilateral relations to the status of “strategic cooperation,” and announce that the Chinese electronic vehicle manufacturer BYD Auto is setting up a billion-dollar plant in the city of Manisa where some 150,000 cars per year will be manufactured. Pretty soon thereafter, Ankara will agree to an extradition treaty demanded by Beijing, and Uyghur asylum-seekers in Türkiye will find themselves deported to China instead of being given a safe haven. There is some good old-fashioned realism for you — cynical, systematic, clear-eyed, with common benefits but the desired outcome achieved in the end. At the same time, never forget that Chinese foreign policy is not a product of pure, unalloyed realism, but rather “regime realism,” defined by Hal Brands as an approach “that combines an understanding of power and anarchy with an appreciation of ideology and the nature of a country’s government.” As a realist, you may want to spit when you hear the word “ideology,” but I assure you that if you truly desire to be a successful realist in the real world, and not just in the lecture hall or the think-tank boardroom, you would do well to take this as a model.
The United States has, mutatis mutandis, traditionally behaved in a roughly analogous fashion in terms of a concentric grand strategy, securing its interests in its own “near abroad” while carving out spheres of exclusive or semi-exclusive interest in the European or Pacific theaters, and imposing an ideologically-driven, U.S.-led global order while representing the sole guarantor of international peace and stability. Over the years we have gradually tired of the role of stalwart defender of democracy, as evidenced by President Barack Obama’s 2014 ominous comment, made at a time when ISIS was on the rampage and Russia was invading Ukraine: “Can’t we be a little bit more like China? Nobody ever seems to expect them to do anything when this stuff comes up.”
Now an American retrenchment is truly in the offing, as the current administration pursues various diplomatic realignments, and seeks rapprochements with its geopolitical rivals, albeit in a rather more erratic fashion than China’s unfailingly subtle and calculative approach. Seeing the United States and a couple of hangers-on vote alongside Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and Nicaragua at the United Nations will definitely take some getting used to. Will this new American strategy bear fruit? And what sort of fruit is it meant to bear? Are we just going to up sticks and join BRICS at some point? And how long will this course correction actually last, with the United States increasingly resembling two completely different countries that regularly take turns governing? It’s hard to know. Once again we can cite the arch-realist Machiavelli, who in the sixth chapter of Il Principe counseled that “it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, then to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” History, as always, will be the judge.
As you venture into this brave new world of foreign policy realism, I only ask that you consider the importance of at least some ideals. G. K. Chesterton, in his “Concluding Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy,” included in the 1905 essay collection Heretics, argued rather persuasively to my mind that “human nature simply cannot subsist without a hope and aim of some kind; as the sanity of the Old Testament truly said, where there is no vision the people perisheth. But it is precisely because an ideal is necessary to man that the man without ideals is in permanent danger of fanaticism.” A realist seldom thinks of himself as a fanatic, preferring to conceive of himself as a cynic of the variety defined in Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary: a “blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.” Yet the dyed-in-the-wool realist, with his antipathy to ideological considerations, has an unfortunate tendency to wake up one day and find that he has become an abject totalitarian bootlicker, countenancing any number of crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, ecocide, even physical and cultural genocide, all on the basis of raison d’état. Such is his aversion to the sort of “moralistic garbage” that, incidentally, has been espoused by America’s greatest statesmen over the centuries, from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, all of whom were able to marry political idealism and realism.
You may be comfortable with all this, preferring as you do to think solely in terms of anarchy and self-help and all those other harsh realist assumptions. And you may be looking forward to the grand deals you can strike, trading democratic Taiwan for mineral concessions in the Arctic and sub-continental Africa, or what have you, like a NBA general manager trading future draft picks for a center. It’s certainly fashionable, I’ll give you that. Still, you might want to keep at least a few ideals and values in reserve, just in case. They could well prove useful in the fullness of time. They often do.
READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky:
The Obligations of Home: JD Vance and the Ordo Amoris
Never Had It So Bad: The Decline of the Great British Empire