USAID threatens to make Canada the 51st state threat. Humiliation in Ukraine. What happened to U.S. foreign policy? Some believe this is driven by President Trump’s personal greed or love for dictators. Both may be correct, but neither tells the whole story. What matters most to Mr. Trump is not the wealth or ideology of a country, but the degree to which it is powerful. He believes in dominating the weak and respecting the strong. This is a strategy as old as time. This is realism.
Don't get me wrong. Many of the things Mr. Trump does abroad, like what he does at home, are ham-handed, short-sighted and cruel. But I also found in his administration that it is simply because of the American military force, and that Americans do not want to pay for the bill anymore, so they can recognize the free international world order. It is realism – a rough, unstrategic “Neanderthal realism” that, as political scientist Stephen Walt puts it, but remains a form of realism.
Realists see the world as a cruel state of anarchy. For them, security is not about spreading democratic ideology and creating international laws that we had to enforce at the time, but about avoiding fighting other bullies. Mr. Trump wants to avoid a war with Russia. This means putting our hearts in Ukrainian dilemma.
The origin story of realism can be traced back to the Peloponnese War, when the superpower of Athens, of that era, sieges the island of Melos and declared that if its people did not promise loyalty, these men would be massacred, women and children were enslaved, and the islands were colonized.
The Merians protested that Athens had no right to do so. Athens doesn't care. Noble ideas are only as durable as the army executes them. The Athenians spoke about the boundaries that remained famous in Thucydides’ history: “The strong do their best, while the weak suffer the pain they must.”
Honestly, I might bend my knees and live to fight another day with secret resistance. But Melos's leader is braver than me. They choose to fight. result? The men were slaughtered, women and children were enslaved, and the island was colonized. Are they heroes or fools? If you see them as heroes, you are a liberal internationalist who believes that peace and security depend only on governments that adhere to enlightened rules. If you think they are fools, you are a realist.
Last week at the White House, Mr. Trump played the role of the Athenian. When he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that you don’t have a card right now, he was talking about the country’s strategic position, not the ideas or shared values of the nobles. One of the reasons the administration is so disoriented is that U.S. foreign policy has been reversed by realism for decades. The main struggle in Washington, especially in recent decades, is in the New Conservative Party, who hopes to spread democracy through war, and liberals who want to support civil society through USAID contracts, such as USAID contracts.
Realist thinkers have been expelled to academia or ignored for years. Hans Morgenthau, a leading 20th-century political scientist, was one of the most famous realists of his generation, advised the Johnson administration not to expand the Vietnam War and was rejected in 1965. George Kennan opposed NATO expansion on these pages in 1997, predicting that it would infuriate Russian armed forces and Russian Russian democrats. No one listened. Brent Scowcroft told President George W. Bush that the invasion of Iraq would be a serious mistake. He has since been seen as an outsider.
But in recent years, realism has been rising in Washington. Realist policy shops, such as Quincy’s stewardship of the Equity Institute, Defense Priorities and RAND’s Center for American Grand Strategic Analysis. The “realist” tag is being abandoned to describe people throughout the new administration, such as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Intelligence Company Tulsi Gabbard. Mr. Trump’s policy secretary nominee Elbridge Colby is one of the most important realist thinkers of this era.
“We are entering a new era of American realism,” Sen. Eric Schimitt, a Republican of Missouri, recently announced on Fox News.
What did this round bring? In a way, this is the motivation for all bullies. Back when the United States was an unparalleled superpower in the world, Americans had the ability to use their military power to promote democracy, essentially ignoring China's interest in Taiwan and Russia's Ukraine. Today, Russia and China have hypersonic missiles, i.e., the U.S. military does not yet know how to effectively counterattack. China already has the ability to eliminate U.S. satellites in space, destroying the GPS system where the U.S. military and our economy are located, and Russia is believed to be testing the weapon.
The Americans are not ready to fight against China. In fact, most of the industrial capacity needed to fight wars in China now, due to the naivety of the decision to make China a liberal internationalist in the world’s factory. Even so, the United States and its allies are united more than Russia and China. But many Americans no longer want to compete with our allies for lofty ideas overseas, especially after the catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The question now is what kind of realism Mr. Trump will accept. Offensive realists like John Mearsheimer see the war with China as a very real and deadly serious possibility, and everything else will be distracted. Defensive realists believe that great powers should avoid doing things that trigger weak countries to build their own strength. That is how Mr. Trump dispersed with many realists. Mr. Walter told me that no real realists would threaten to annex Canada, Gaza and Greenland.
When Mr. Trump embraced some elements of realism (submitting to the powerful and sacrificing the weak), his tariff war and threats to peaceful neighbors could be as expensive as the military adventurous spirit of the previous liberal order. Rajan Menon, an emeritus professor at City College in New York City, told me that those who want the Trump administration to “follow the realist script” to show “restrictiveness” and “will be very disappointed”.
At the White House meeting, Mr. Zelensky reminded Mr. Trump that war could one day hurt Americans. “You won't feel it now, but you will feel it in the future,” Mr Zelensky said.
Mr. Trump retorted: “You don't know. Don't tell us how we feel.”
For Mr. Trump, the United States is a huge force that Russia dares not attack, and Ukraine is a pawn that can be sacrificed. But it's about the great power: they all end up falling. Neanderthal realism cannot save them. After Athens fired Melos, the news of his cruelty spread. Its allies oppose it. Athens lost the war. It turns out that noble ideas are important.
