# Realism (International Relations) **Realism** is the oldest and most influential paradigm in [[International Relations]] — the theory that international politics is, at bottom, a struggle for power and security among self-interested states in a world with no government above them. It is the lens through which most American statecraft has been conducted, and the intellectual tradition now being revived on the foreign-policy right as the conservative alternative to neoconservative interventionism. ## Core assumptions Across its variants, realism rests on a small set of premises: - **Anarchy.** There is no sovereign authority above states; the international system is self-help. This is structural fact, not chaos. - **States are the primary actors**, and they behave as rational, unitary units pursuing the national interest. - **Interest is defined in terms of power and security.** Survival comes first; everything else is conditional on it. - **Morality is constrained.** Universal moral principles cannot be applied straightforwardly to state action; prudence — weighing consequences — is the cardinal virtue, not ideological purity. ## The variants - **Classical realism** ([[Hans Morgenthau]]) locates the drive for power in human nature and emphasizes statecraft, prudence, and judgment. Its intellectual ancestors are Thucydides, [[Niccolò Machiavelli]], and [[Thomas Hobbes]]. - **Neorealism / structural realism** ([[Kenneth Waltz]]) relocates the cause of conflict from human nature to the **structure** of the anarchic system and the distribution of capabilities among great powers. State behavior is explained by the system, not by leaders' character. - **Offensive vs. defensive realism** splits the structural camp over how much power states seek: enough to be secure (defensive) or as much as they can get (offensive — the position associated with [[John Mearsheimer]]). ## Realism against its rivals Realism defines itself against **liberal internationalism** (which trusts institutions, trade, and law to temper conflict) and against **idealism / legalism-moralism** (which Morgenthau blamed for the interwar catastrophe). Constructivism, in turn, challenges realism's claim that interests are fixed rather than socially constructed. ## KB Significance Realism is the **theoretical home of the foreign-policy restraint argument** that has migrated from the academy to the political right. If states are driven by structure and the search for security rather than by the wickedness of particular regimes, then crusades to remake other nations' internal politics — the neoconservative project behind the Iraq War — are both futile and dangerous. That logic underwrites the realist critique of NATO expansion (most famously [[George Kennan]]'s) and the broader case, audible in the [[New Cold War]] and Ukraine debates, that great-power balancing and limited national interest, not democratic evangelism, constitute the genuinely conservative foreign policy. The tradition runs Morgenthau → Kennan → Waltz → [[Henry Kissinger]] and into the contemporary realist revival. ## See Also - [[Balance of Power]] — realism's master mechanism. - [[Hans Morgenthau]] · [[Kenneth Waltz]] · [[George Kennan]] — the founders and the conscience. - [[International Relations]] — the parent subfield and its rival paradigms. - [[John Mearsheimer]] · [[Stephen Walt]] — the contemporary realist revival. - [[Andrew Bacevich]] · [[Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft]] — where the restraint argument was institutionalized.