In a world of sovereign states, foreign-policy decisions naturally should account for national interests and the broader balance of power. But unlike the World War II era, when this realist perspective gained greater purchase, today’s international politics call for a much more nuanced approach to power. Read More Here
In ending the two-decades-long war, Biden rejected every “liberal internationalist” premise of the enterprise, including the notion that building a democratic Afghanistan and transforming the region served U.S. interests or advanced universal values. Read More Here
It was already clear that former President Donald Trump repudiated the humanitarian or quasi-humanitarian motives that underpinned US military interventions after the Cold War. But Joe Biden’s forceful renunciation of foreign-policy idealism is somewhat surprising. Read More Here
Ideas won’t matter if the reigning hegemon is overstretched and collapses like the British Empire or the Soviet Union. The instinct of a realist and a restrainer is to avoid a scenario that might result if one keeps following failed prescriptions of the last quarter-century. And that is why restraint is on the rise. Read More […]
Realism, long associated with authoritarian European statesmen such as Otto von Bismarck and Klemens von Metternich, has been consistently portrayed as antithetical to American democratic traditions. During the Cold War, statesmen such as Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski were depicted as amoral or even harbouring, in the case of the latter, loyalties to Poland rather than […]
As a foreign policy story, Martin’s tale is far less conservative and far more transformative than meets the eye. A parable about the consequences of unchecked realpolitik, it does not celebrate power and the powerful but challenges and interrogates them. Society is complex, roles and identities are varied and contingent, and division risks disaster. Hic sunt dracones indeed. […]
Realists understand that nationalism is the most consequential-ism in world politics. While sometimes it manifests itself in ugly xenophobia it can, ironically, also work to make the international system more benign. It is the engine for balancing behaviour among states, which helps maintain an equilibrium of power and ensures that most states will make provision […]
Foreign-policy realists define great-power status in terms of a country’s self-perception or material capacities. For China, however, status is conceived in the context of its relationship with the established authority, namely the West. Read Here – Project Syndicate
It is easy to say that nothing that is happening right now is normal, that the world has changed. It is harder but no less important to think about whether what seems strange right now does not amount to significant change in the future. Read Here – The Washington Post
Though (Henry) Kissinger has come under attack from liberal circles—among the more notable assaults are Seymour Hersh’s The Price of Power, Christopher Hitchens’s The Trial of Henry Kissinger and, most recently, Gary J. Bass’s The Blood Telegram—he has also regularly incurred the ire of conservatives. Throughout the 1970s, he was steadily denounced as deaf to […]
looking beyond borders 