Trump and the Gaslighting of American Realism

Power, power, and more power. The intellectual and political gaslighting around “realism” and U.S. foreign policy has gone into overdrive these past months.

From the Trump administration, we’ve seen a multi-pronged strategy to elevate a caricature of realism as a central pillar of its foreign policy. In November, with the publication of the U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS), the administration offered what it coined “flexible realism” as a guiding foreign policy principle. The NSS was followed by the recent National Defense Strategy (NDS), which was peppered with mentions of realism paired with hollow modifiers such as “practical” and “hardnosed.”

Perhaps the most transparent attempt to strip realism of its complexity and moral-political depth was the following line from the NDS: “Out with utopian idealism; in with hardnosed realism.” Make no mistake—this approach by the Trump administration and its surrogates is a deliberate effort to reshape and obfuscate the very meaning of realism in the context of post-World War II U.S. foreign policy.

This past year, the administration has worked feverishly to strip away any nuance from the historically dynamic interplay between U.S. liberal values and national interests of the past 80 years. In its place, they offer a version of realism principally concerned with hemispheric security through coercive power—largely indifferent to its preference for kinetic means and unbothered by consequences for those beyond America’s borders. As part of this new realism, there is a push to capture and rewrite the intellectual legacy of the famed political scientist Hans Morgenthau, widely regarded as the father of American realism in the years following World War II.

Whether through op-eds claiming that administration officials are finally channeling the wisdom of Morgenthau, or thin essays that conflate Morgenthau with the likes of Machiavelli and Kissinger, these narratives represent, at best, a misunderstanding of Morgenthau, and at worst, a willful manipulation of his work in support of a new form of amoral realism that aims to remove ethical constraints from the practice of U.S. foreign policy. Within this framing, concerns of morality become an impediment to be discarded rather than a critical component for legitimizing U.S. power in the world.

But this version of Morgenthau is a lie—concocted for an information ecosystem that deprioritizes context and a political class that assumes no one will take the time to return to the source material itself. In reality, Morgenthau was deeply concerned with the moral dimensions of foreign policy—both as an abstract trap to avoid when crafting policy and as a practical tool to temper and shape the worst impulses of power. Such concerns, Morgenthau argued, are especially vital for democracies such as the U.S., whose very identity is purportedly derived from liberal values.

While Morgenthau rejected moral crusading and liberal idealism as misunderstandings of human nature and therefore poor policy, he remained focused on a central question of U.S. foreign policy: Power, but to what end?

If one actually takes the time to read Morgenthau’s key writings—The Mainsprings of American Foreign Policy: The National Interest vs. Moral Abstractions, In Defense of the National Interest, and Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace—it becomes apparent that he consistently and deliberately grappled with the relationship between morality and power.

Today, the conflation of “might equals right” with “realism” that permeates U.S. policy circles is pushing a one-dimensional caricature of American realism, devoid of Morgenthau’s concern with the spectrum between liberal idealism and amoral realism in international affairs. A concern that is perhaps best captured when he wrote: “The choice is not between moral principles and the [U.S.] national interest, devoid of moral dignity, but between one set of moral principles divorced from political reality and another set of moral principles derived from political reality.”

As Morgenthau and his peers, such as Christian realist Reinhold Niebuhr and British diplomat E. H. Carr, alluded to in their own ways, realism sans morality is a barren desert of foreign policy—one that creates a mirage of security through strength but ultimately erodes the very foundations upon which liberal democracies are built.

In Politics Among Nations, Morgenthau’s most famous work, he reflects on the moral constraints and attendant duties required to wield legitimate power at a new moment in history following two catastrophic world wars: “There is a misconception . . . that international politics is so thoroughly evil that it is no use looking for moral limitations of the aspirations of power on the international scene. Yet, if we ask ourselves what statesmen and diplomats are capable of doing to further the power objectives of their respective nations and what they actually do, we realize that they do less than they actually did in other periods.”

Such an approach does not require a blind embrace of liberal idealism, nor an acceptance of amoral realism as zero-sum policy prescriptions. Rather, it demands an understanding of the traps at both ends of the spectrum and a commitment to pursue a more morally attuned and pragmatic form of ethical realism. A foreign policy unwilling to reckon with morality, and unbothered by the relationship between intentions, means, and consequences, is little more than a thin caricature of Morgenthau’s realism.

Americans and their allies who fought and lived through World War II—and the generation of political leaders that followed—understood all too well the consequences of great powers bent on expansion through amoral means, unconstrained by ethical concerns or shared principles beyond their own borders.

In the pages of the NSS, on the stage at Davos, and in the streets of Caracas, U.S. gaslighting around realism has reached full effect. In response to the American pivot and declining trust in the international system, leaders such as Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney and Finland’s President Alexander Stubb have begun calling on middle powers and others to embrace a form of values-based realism—an approach that refuses to throw principles out with the bathwater while honestly assessing the dangerous power dynamics of this uncertain moment.

For the U.S., only time will tell whether its own foreign policy rediscovers a more reflective equilibrium between power and principle that Morgenthau himself so carefully articulated.

Kevin Maloney is director of communications at Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and a Ph.D. candidate at Leiden University, where his research assesses the value systems and related foreign policy narratives of post-Cold War U.S. presidents.

Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs is an independent and nonpartisan nonprofit. The views expressed within this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Carnegie Council.