Keeping it Real(ism), with Assoc. Professor Paul Poast

KEVIN MALONEY: Thank you, everybody, for joining us today on the Values & Interests podcast. It has been a while since our last episode, which was in late 2025, but obviously there has been a whirlwind of geopolitical news to start us off with the new year. Obviously, I have been trying to figure out what the right intervention point is to have another conversation and not just to be chasing the news but to add value from a morality, power, and Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs perspective. I think we have the man with us today to be that great guest.

Joining me today is Professor Paul Poast from The University of Chicago. He is also a nonresident fellow at the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs. Paul, thank you so much for joining us.

PAUL POAST: It is absolutely my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast.

KEVIN MALONEY: Paul does a lot of research and a lot of writing. I constantly follow him on LinkedIn, which is an amazing follow whether you are in the policy space or a student. If you want to learn about data cleaning or the theory of international relations (IR), he is a one-stop shop, so I highly recommend following him on LinkedIn.

Today we are going to talk about realism in practice, realism as a theory, the history of realism, and how it has changed over the years. The impetus for this conversation is from my perspective an increased use of “realism” in the lexicon of foreign policy, especially around Trump administration 2.0 and their foreign policy, whether on the pages of the National Security Strategy, Elbridge Colby today at the Munich Security Conference, or speeches galore at Davos.

The Trump administration, Paul, is using realism. They are putting it out there as a pillar of their foreign policy, so maybe we can set the groundwork for how realism is emerging today and then strip back the layers and go back to a few thousand years B.C. to get the history of this thing going.

PAUL POAST: That sounds like a great not-ambitious plan for today.

KEVIN MALONEY: We have 45 minutes.

PAUL POAST: As you just laid out, the word “realism” is being used increasingly by folks writing about the Trump administration, and it is being used directly by people in the Trump administration. It is being used in official foreign policy documents, whether the National Security Strategy or the National Defense Strategy. It is being referred to, if not by name, then at least by concept if you are talking about Elbridge Colby or Stephen Miller. They are all bringing up the ideas of realism and referencing it as such or even using that exact word to describe their approach to foreign policy.

That has led to a host of people latching onto that word and asking: “Why is that? Maybe it does explain—” so you have seen a lot of commentaries about that. I have contributed to that as have you. That is where all of this is coming about.

As I recently said, realism is having a moment, but it is having another moment. It is important to remember that realism was having a moment back in 2022 when Russia had its full invasion of Ukraine. That also prompted another period of time when people were talking a lot about realism, but it was different. It was not in this same context.

In that instance it was because there were certain prominent academic thinkers, Henry Kissinger being one of them, who are associated with realism and realist thought, making comments about the war in Ukraine, Russia’s behavior, and specifically how it could possibly end, and that was leading to some criticism of them and hence leading to criticism about realism as a whole.

It is an academic idea. It is an idea I am looking forward to talking to you about, but it is an academic idea that in many ways has long been if not always closely tied to practical policy and foreign policy, so it is not surprising to see it having yet another moment.

KEVIN MALONEY: For our listeners—everyone wants a quick, short definition—how do you think about realism from an international relations perspective?

PAUL POAST: I like to describe realism as the “school of no hope.” What I mean by that is that realism has always been defined—the very word, when you say “realism” you literally mean: “We’re going to keep it real. Let’s be real. Let’s be realistic about this, folks.”

What that means is that realism has always defined itself in foreign policy debates not so much by what it stands for but what it stands against, so it has usually been brought up in the context of people putting forward alternative views, going back to the end of World War I, such as: “The League of Nations is going to solve the problem of war” or “We are going to sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact,” signed in 1928, “that is going to ban war, and that is going to work.” Or, “After World War II, it is going to be the United Nations and international law that is going to solve the problem of war” or maybe it’s the spread of democracy, and “If everybody just becomes a democracy, that is going to solve the problem of war.” Or, “If everybody just traded with each other and we were more integrated economically, that would solve the problem of war.”

These have been the ideas that have always been put out there, that we can solve the problem of war if we can just do X, Y, or Z, usually something related to international law, international institutions, the spread of democracy, and the spread of economic exchange. Realism is the folks who sit there and go, “Not so fast, my friend.” They are the Lee Corso of international relations thought. They will say: “No, it’s not going to work that way. Let’s be realistic.”

Indeed, some of the earliest thinkers on this after World War I did not use the word “realism” but referred to themselves as “the practical people.” They even said that, “practical men and women.” Philip Kerr wrote a piece in International Affairs, which in the 1920s was the journal of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, in the United Kingdom. He said that people will say that international law can achieve this and that, but practical men and women know that that is not going to happen, and here is why: Someone out there always has a desire to control, someone out there always has a will to power and will want power for its own sake, and that will never be quashed. That will always be evident. That is why we will never be able to solve the problem of war, conflict, and coercion in international politics.

That in a nutshell is what realism is. It is literally the school of “Let’s just keep it real. We’re not going to solve this problem. It is not going to be about international laws, it’s not going to be about democracy, it is not going to be about this, because these things will never go away. There is always this desire for control, maybe not by everybody everywhere, but there always is, and that is why you’ll never solve it.”

There is a lot to unpack there. Why do realists think that? Is it just being contrarian for the sake of being contrary? Well, there are probably some realists out there who are like that, who are like: “Hey, if everybody else is saying it’s the end of history, I’m going to say it’s not.” In fact, a big part of the debate has been why do realists think this, and there have been various answers given for that over time. Of course that is something we can absolutely get into today.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think that is helpful at a high level.

I want to back up a little bit. Another thing that is having its moment I would say in this information ecosystem are all these history professors who are now jumping through at 100-year increments around great wars or great periods in history, so maybe we can do that quickly from a realist perspective.

We have seen many talking heads now at conferences and even on cable news starting to refer to the Melian Dialogue, the famous quote, which is “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” This is the spark of realist thought in a big way, and then we go to Machiavelli, who is thought of as the amoral realist. There are markers along the line, and obviously we are being self-selective to a point, but could you talk through how you view these key realist thinkers and how they saw the world in the context in which they lived, and maybe pick out a few markers, and then we can run up to the American context?

PAUL POAST: I think, whether it is reading History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, where of course the Melian Dialogue comes from, or whether it is reading The Prince by Machiavelli, these are important and valuable texts to read for their own sake, but I would prefer as a professor of international relations if people did not start with those and maybe don’t even come to those until much later in the process. The reason why is because I think what happens is that when people read that they read onto it our current understanding of things, then they go back and look and read Thucydides and go, “Look, 2,000 years ago someone was thinking just the same way I am thinking here.”

No, there is a lot going on there, this is a complex book, and you have to unpack things. Yes, that quote is there about “the weak must suffer and the strong can do whatever they want,” but there is a lot of other stuff there too, and you have to really think through that.

It is the same thing with Machiavelli. I have a colleague here, John McCormick, who is a world-renowned thinker on Machiavelli and has written all sorts of stuff on him. Machiavelli is not just someone you can talk about. You can approach him from a political science perspective, but I also have another colleague here at The University of Chicago, Ada Palmer, who is a historian and also teaches a class on Machiavelli from a historian’s standpoint. There is a whole other way of understanding Machiavelli.

Bringing in these ancient thinkers, even though these tend to be the people you want to bring in and talk about to justify the realist view, one, I don’t think is appropriate because we tend to impose our modern understanding of things onto them; and, two, it is not necessary. We can take realist thought as it applies to international politics on its own terms.

For me realist thought was something that very much developed because of World War I, and even then you could go back a few steps further and say modern understandings of realist thought were developing going back to the 19th century. There have been some great books written recently about that as the allure of international law was picking up and there were more international treaties being signed, global treaties, and multilateral treaties in the 19th century. Going back to my earlier point, there was the view that international law was not going to solve everything. We still have imperialism and this will to power.

You can see where modern realism was developing in the 19th century, but I would argue that the way we think about it in the context of international relations is really a product of World War I, and in particular the view that The Hague Conventions, which were signed in 1899 and 1907, the first attempts to ever try to create a multilateral international law framework to control war and maybe even ban war, failed.

One of my favorite realist thinkers on this is Merze Tate. She wrote in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Her dissertation was on The Hague Conventions and was published as a book in 1942 titled The Disarmament Illusion: The Movement for a Limitation of Armaments to 1907. That’s all you need to know. The full title is right there.

It was a history of The Hague Conventions and the attempts to form them. She has a great line in the book: “In the early 20th century the states signed on to these prohibitions on using gas, on treatment of prisoners of war, all of these prohibitions, and then come 1914 those were all pushed aside and forgotten.”

KEVIN MALONEY: As soon as the chips were down.

PAUL POAST: As soon as the chips were down, it was, “Nope, we are going back to what we do.” That to me was a definitive realist view, and that was the view that came about. I am not saying, don’t read Thucydides, don’t read Machiavelli, but I think if you want to understand modern realist thought, that is not where you should be starting from.

KEVIN MALONEY: From a practical perspective of understanding today you are talking about this 1907 moment. There is a lot of history here at Carnegie Council in terms of seeing what’s coming next around the corner and attempting to mitigate that, and it feels very much like that today in terms of having so much time and proximity since the last big thing.

We talk a lot about that today in terms of the normative responsibilities as they get eroded when generations turn over. We are in a gap right now from a historical perspective, but also as you talked about from a realist perspective it seems like a new cycle might be emerging.

A quick intervention, and I want to get your reaction to this from the Melian Dialogue perspective. For our listeners, Athens goes in there and basically wipe out this island. Joel Rosenthal, the president of Carnegie Council, who our listeners will know well, said to me when we first started to work together: “Well, you know the lesson of that from the Carnegie Council perspective is not that Athens was able to do whatever they wanted through power, it is that this and a bunch of other decisions that were amoral in nature basically led to civilizational rot and the eventual collapse of Athens.” We are thinking about it at the Council in terms of power, but to what end? Yes, they had the ability to do this, but should they do this?

I think if you are taking a lesson from a realist perspective from that and importing it today especially into the U.S. perspective, it is, “Okay, we can do this, but does this align with our present-day values as historically understood in the proximity of the last 80 years?” This is the big ethical realist question from our perspective at the moment.

PAUL POAST: One thing that is important to keep in mind is that the caricature of realism is that it is amoral and has nothing to do with ethics or morals. One of the key 20th-century figures to think about realism and indeed is considered the father of modern realism is Hans Morgenthau of The University of Chicago. Writing in the 1940s his foundational books, Scientific Man versus Power Politics and then his Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace are considered founding realist texts. I teach from these texts, and they are important texts, especially his book, a shorter book, Scientific Man versus Power Politics, which I think is a really good book to read.

He also wrote a lot on ethics, and he even wrote about ethical issues. It would be a mistake to say that realism has nothing to do with ethics and that it is amoral and there are no values.

It can get complicated, but you can think about this in many ways. On one hand, you can say having a realist view is indifferent to whether you have values or not. You can have a certain set of values and be a realist, and that set of values could vary quite a bit.

You can see that in terms of certain people who will label themselves as realists but say that race relations are a key part of the organizing principles of international relations, and you could see people who would take that view who maybe are imperialists. We do see that, people who are imperialists and have certain views of hierarchy of races and that was a value they had, the value of “white supremacy,” if you will. But they could take a realist frame, or you could also back to someone like Merze Tate, who would identify herself as someone who had a race-informed view of realism.

She was an African American. She was the first Black women to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard in government, and she also had a view that was about realism, but hers was “Yes, there are these racial tensions and these racial problems, and they can be addressed, but at the same time we should not be deluding ourselves about what it could be a solution to and what it cannot be a solution to.”

In both cases you can have a different set of values—and here I am using your views of race as being almost an extreme view of it—that can lead to different perceptions of what it means to be realist, and in both cases they can have the same idea of, Yes, we’re not going to solve the problem of power in the world, but it is independent of what our value system is.

KEVIN MALONEY: This is one example of something that I think ethics provides somewhat of a framework or prescription to, especially in this tension between theory and practice. Within theory there is this tension between being able to mitigate against the main theoretical strands that are tying your worldview together. As you talked about, there is a spectrum of people within realism in terms of mitigating anarchy and what power actually is and how it is wielded. There are varying conceptions and variability within that.

What ethics does for us at Carnegie Council is especially around the values point. We are not pushing a universal set of values on everybody. We might have a preference, but operating within international relations ethics allows people to mitigate or engage with differing value systems that are going to be there based on differing state systems across the world.

It is interesting to think about the different thinkers who allow for the amount of variability when it comes to realism because some of them as we know are quite hardcore at one spectrum and other ones. Joseph Nye explains in his book Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump, that presidents are basically all a mix of cosmopolitanism, realism, and liberalism. There is just a spectrum there. Show me a realist, and I will show you a liberal on another day.

PAUL POAST: I think there is a lot to that. Another way to contrast it is that often when people think of realism and foreign policy, especially U.S. foreign policy, they think of the individual I brought up earlier, Henry Kissinger. You usually think of Kissinger as Realpolitik. He was someone who would say: “You know what, if we have to bomb Cambodia, that is just what we have to do because that is what is necessary for the United States to secure itself, and it doesn’t matter how many innocent people are killed. This is the reality of the world.” That is the reason people have been highly critical of Kissinger’s foreign policy.

They will typically contrast it—I have done this myself—with, say, the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter seemed like he was on the other end of this in terms of allowing his values, and having a different set of values, guiding his view of foreign policy, to say, “No, we have to take a view that there is a way of improving humanity and a responsibility in terms of how we use force.” There was a sense of “with great power comes great responsibility” in terms of helping those who can’t help themselves. This is the typical view of Jimmy Carter.

There are a lot of reasons for that. That is why he received the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Carter Center has done a lot of great things, but what is interesting is when you start studying the two individuals you see that they are very much a mix of both these things. There were definitely things Jimmy Carter did, like trying to free the hostages from Iran, the response to the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, boycotting the Olympic Games, sanctions on the Soviet Union and taking a very tough line there, of saying no. He used his values, but he also said, if you will, that we are going to use our power as a way of exerting those values.

Jimmy Carter did that in his own way in the same way that Henry Kissinger did at times too. Think about the whole idea of Nixon going to China. People talk about that, but Nixon went to China because Henry Kissinger first went to China. You could say it was realist calculation and so forth, but in many ways it was the idea of, “you know what, maybe we can actually get along, maybe there is actually a way we can create some common ground.” Many people put that forward as something that, even if you are a critic of Nixon, you say, “Wow, him opening up relations with China was a great and a positive move,” but it was Kissinger who laid the groundwork for that. It is a complex mix of both.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think you are hitting on one of the things that is a tension point today in the conflation of realism with bold strength and military action. Kissinger, from a Realpolitik perspective, was like, “I need to start opening up a line of communication to China.” That might have been a realist calculation to split the difference with Russia. There have been tons of writing about this, but I am sure if he was still alive and being interviewed about that he would say: “Yes, of course it was a realist calculation. I used the means that the United States had based on its diplomacy and history of reciprocity. We are not just this amoral, expansionist actor.”

Tactically and policy-wise there are tons of examples of that, but on the whole I think that is where we are seeing change now. The North Star is different. It’s transactionalism, military force first, and reciprocity second. This realism is being morphed. Agree or disagree, but that’s how I’m seeing it right now.

Before I get to your response to that, we are talking about that a lot at the Council now. You talk about the spectrum of Kissinger to Jimmy Carter, with Realpolitik in the middle. The other end of that is this Machtpolitikt hat our president talks about a lot, and this is closer to amoral realism. Can that even be a thing in an open society?

I said a lot there, but I am going to have you throw that back at me or say, “Kevin, you’re wrong.”

PAUL POAST: What I would say is that realism should not be confused with militarism. Oftentimes they are put together: “Okay, if you’re a realist, then you recognize it is a pipe dream and you are never going to solve the problem of war.” That does not mean you go around fighting wars. It means that you are cognizant of the fact that you are not going to be able to solve that problem, so you do need to be prepared for that. It does not mean that you cannot reduce the potential pain of that problem, and it does not mean that you yourself cannot be constrained in how you make use of the instruments of warfare.

Just because you sit there and say, “Well, since we can’t fix that, we might as well just go all-in.” No. Realism does not say that. What it says is that you are not going to be able to fix it, but you can still be prudent in the use and pursuit of foreign policy and you can still choose whether to use those instruments in a restrained and sensible manner. Realism in no way tells you that you have to make the use of military power your first instrument.

What has happened in my read on the current political climate, and especially with respect to how the Trump dministration or at least some people within the administration have put forward the realist approach they are taking, is that they have been using the military and the use of militarism as the first instrument of foreign policy, even if it is not used —unfortunately, it is being used—but is being threatened: “We are going to put that out there right away and start off with, ‘By the way, we could invade, By the way, we could attack. Let me show you that we can launch these boat strikes. We are even going to relabel the Department of Defense the Department of War and talk about warrior ethos.’”

Realism does not tell you that you have to do that. You can have a realist view of the world and not be like, “Therefore, I am going to go around and be militaristic.” Again, realism does not mean militarism.

KEVIN MALONEY: We are seeing a lot of the narrative become reality. There is an irony right now. It used to be that the president steps to the podium and basically his word is policy. Now there couldn’t be a bigger gap between that existing, but at the same time people like Hegseth, Rubio, and Vance are signaling significant changes around how the United States conceives of its power and its role in the world.

I am specifically studying narratives and values in the U.S. context, and I keep coming back to this one thing that happened in 2025. Secretary Hegseth is in the Oval Office with President Trump, who is signing the Executive Order to rename the Department of Defense the Department of War. He says, “We are going to focus on maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” You can draw a straight line from September 2025 to January 2, 2026, when they go into Venezuela.

There is this weird thing happening right now where you simultaneously cannot believe anything they are saying and you have to take everything at face value, even if normatively it seems crazy to a certain extent. Every one of these things is this masculine caricature of realism, and as you said before, people connect with realism. It is not a term like “cosmopolitanism,” where you are like, “Oh, what the heck does that mean?” It is something that every person can attach some emotion and action to, even if they never studied international relations, which most people haven’t. It is interesting.

PAUL POAST: That is exactly right. I definitely commented on Hegseth when he gave a speech to the flag staff of the U.S. armed forces and so forth. To me the whole idea of “maximizing lethality” and not the “tepid legality”—I actually laughed at the phrase in his cover letter to the National Defense Strategy, where he said something like “cloud castle.”

KEVIN MALONEY: Internationalism and stuff like that.

PAUL POAST: “Cloud-castle ideas of a rules-based order.” I laughed at that one, but it is the same idea of, “Why do we even talk about these things?” To me that is absolutely a caricature of what it means and even what it takes to win wars.

I cannot think of a greater military thinker than Dwight Eisenhower. You cannot argue with this. He was the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II. He is the one who was like, “We are doing D-Day, and I’m taking responsibility if it fails.” This is the epitome of it.

He was also the epitome of the idea that amateurs talk about tactics and professionals talk about logistics. He understood that. He also understood that an overemphasis on militarism is bad for society. That is well-captured in his farewell address when he talked about the military-industrial complex, and he made a point of emphasizing how this amount of money spent on the military will take away from money that could be spent on schools, hospitals, and other things that society needs.

Here is someone who you cannot argue with in terms of his, “masculinity,” if you will, with respect to militarism. Again, this is the person who was the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe in World War II, and he is also probably the biggest skeptic of the idea of having a “warrior ethos.” His view is that World War II was won by a bunch of people who would rather have been doing something else rather than a bunch of people who were excited about the idea of getting involved in a war. These were people who would rather be doing something else, and in an ideal society these people were able most of the time to go and do something else.

Eisenhower was very much a realist because he was not an idealist. He knew how this was going. He was signing military alliances during his time as president. It was the “pactomania”—“We’re signing this alliance and this alliance.” He was very much about containing the Soviet Union, but he was also trying to bring about the “Atoms for Peace” program. He was saying, “Maybe we can develop this too because I am worried about nuclear weapons,” and that set the stage for the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the International Atomic Energy Agency. He is doing this at the same time that he is like, “But we also have to form alliances to contain.” That is a realist view of the world. It is not “cloud castle,” if you will.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think this brings to life what you were talking about before, the virtues of pragmatism, prudence, and even restraint, especially within an open society, a democracy that purports to align with certain liberal values. That does not mean we are going to allow things to happen that are against those values or against our security interests, but it also means there is restraint; we are not an empire. There is a big difference in that pre- and post-1945 in the context of today.

You talk about Eisenhower. Going back to Joseph Nye, he talks about Truman and his decision not to drop nuclear weapons during the Korean War. He has a blank check from Congress and MacArthur is hammering him publicly to be able to do this. He did authorize the dropping of weapons in World War II and then, for what seem to be moral and ethical considerations, he said that just because I can doesn’t mean I should, and—this is not a direct quote, but basically he says, “I don’t want more dead kids.”

That is not nothing from an international relations perspective. That is millions of people alive today because he decided not to make the blank-check decision but decided to ask the question, “Power to what end?” I think that decision and what you are saying about Eisenhower are two great examples of post-World War II pragmatic American realism. You are not giving away the farm, but you are also not giving away the values at the same time.

PAUL POAST: Exactly. Truman is a great example of this. If you hold up Eisenhower, you cannot argue about him and masculine militarism or however you want to go with it. You also cannot argue about Truman. The atomic bomb is the most devastating weapon, and if you are going to talk about “maximum lethality,” you are talking about nuclear weapons, and he is the president who used these weapons.

I have talked and written about his “decisions” to use them. On the one hand, there was not a decision per se to use it, and it is worth taking a moment to talk about this. For example, Alex Wellerstein just wrote a book, The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age – The Anti-Nuclear President, the Bomb Decision, and Cold War History.

KEVIN MALONEY: I cannot wait to read that book. He has been to the Council before.

PAUL POAST: It is about the process of dropping the atomic bombs. I have been a fan of his work for a while, but he points out that it was not like the Situation Room. People have in their mind something like the Osama bin Laden raid, where the president is weighing this, then you are going to make a call, then you are going to drop it.

There was not anything like that. It was not like he was sitting there at the beginning of August and said, “Okay, I’m making the call. We’re going to drop the bomb on Hiroshima.” There was a series of decisions that he also was part of that led to dropping the bomb.

Where he did make a decision was when he said, “We’re not going to do a third.” It was after the first two, which were kind of baked. That is where he did say, according to the people who were there: “We can’t have more dead kids. We can’t keep doing this.” Where it is acknowledged that he made a decision was saying they were not going to do a third.

It was not clear that if Japan did not surrender would they go on and do more, but he came to the realization that this was enough. I think that was already where he was starting to get the view that informed his decision later during the Korean War to say, “No, we’re not going to do this,” for the same reason. He recognized the horror of what was happening there. In that sense, it is similar to what I was saying about Eisenhower.

Again, these are two individuals where you cannot question the extent to which they understood maximum lethality and understood the use of violent power in the international system. These were two people who came to the realization that that was not something you just do because you can but that there is a heightened responsibility when you can do it, and that that necessitates—again, that with-great-power-comes-great-responsibility view—and in many ways that is a realist view.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is this relationship between power and principle that we think deeply about here at the Council. If I was going to distill it down to one thing in the practice of international relations from our perspective, it is that. There are two very interesting case studies as you said. With Kissinger and Nixon that is another interesting period.

The period we are in now definitely poses some challenges in terms of that relationship and what that looks like moving forward. As I said before, you see multiple sub-actors in the Trump administration, each with their own view and I would say wielding significant power differently in terms of this relationship between U.S. values and U.S. interests. The Hegseth version may be a little more one-dimensional and masculine, and then you have the antiauthoritarian Rubio older-school version, and the Vance version, which is civilizational erasure and Western defense.

Then you have someone who is obviously not at the cabinet level like Elbridge Colby, who was at the Munich Security Conference giving a more pragmatic and strategic view: “Realism for us is a focus on China and self-care for the Europeans when it comes to Russia.”

It is hard to track all this. It is always to some extent fractured for other administrations, but it seems to be more fractured and more chaotic now. What are your thoughts on that?

PAUL POAST: You are 100 percent right. Many members of the administration at different levels have used the language of realism. If I had to pick one that I think is closer to actual realism, it is Colby, and maybe he understands it better than the others because I do think you have seen this language used more and used in a way that goes against what we have talked about, even looking at some of the documents that have come out of the administration, like the National Security Strategy.

It is an interesting document. I will put it to you like that. I have written about how it is very clear that the notions of racial dominance, racism, and white supremacy are evident in there, but not in all of it. There are other parts of it that are more like what you would expect to find in any National Security Strategy. It seemed like it was something that was written by four or five different people.

KEVIN MALONEY: My thoughts exactly. It feels very tactical and like it is attempting to please many people, to keep a coalition of supporters together.

Someone wrote me a funny note the other day—I will not reveal who. There was a very odd usage, I think in the National Security Strategy or it might have been in the National Defense Strategy, of a semicolon somewhere. The note said: “ChatGPT definitely wrote this line.”

PAUL POAST: Then you have to throw in that there was some ChatGPT going on there too.

KEVIN MALONEY: There might be a fifth author somewhere in San Francisco.

PAUL POAST: Exactly, 100 percent. You can tell with the parts: “I wonder if Stephen Miller wrote that part,” or “I think that is the part that Elbridge Colby wrote,” so, yes, there were different elements, and that is also why the document contradicts itself at points.

We can criticize the Trump administration and people in it for how they have used realism, but the reality is that this is not unique to them, and I think a big part of the conversation today is that realism is this idea that is easy to invoke, easy to bring up, and easy to use to justify a foreign policy view or view about the world, but people can use it in a way that is trying to do more than it was intended to do. That is why I always come back to this notion of realism being this idea of the “school of no hope,” the curmudgeon of international relations thought. It is the idea that, “Nope, sorry, not so fast, we are not going to see this all get solved.”

Once you start adding in assumptions to that, you can then take that framework to start coming up with theories of how states should behave, and that is where you start to get theories of realism. People will talk about defensive realism, offensive realism, neoclassical realism, human nature realism, and system realism. The list goes on and on.

KEVIN MALONEY: We are getting the new “neo-royalism,” which would be realism adjacent with a world run by transactional oligarchs.

PAUL POAST: Exactly, exactly. So, you are getting all these different ones, and some of them are better than others in terms of explaining things at certain times, but they are all theories that are built on the framework of realism, where that framework is just this idea that there are certain inherent features about the world that will not lead to the ability to solve the problem of war.

I think it is important to think about it as that framework. It is a philosophical framework. It is even—and Morgenthau himself would have talked about this – a theological framework.

KEVIN MALONEY: You wrote about this the other day, and I was going to get to this, but let’s go.

PAUL POAST: I present this to my students. Morgenthau in his book Scientific Man versus Power Politics, talks about the views that realism stands against, the views of “Oh, international law is going to solve all this, democracy is going to solve all this, commerce is going to solve all this,” which tend to fall under the umbrella of liberalism, big L, classic realism.

KEVIN MALONEY: He was not a fan of utopianism.

PAUL POAST: People call this idealism or utopianism, but what he says is that all of these views have at their center an “eschatological hope,” which is a theological term in reference to the notion of the “consummation of all things.”

For example, in Christian thought, the eschatology is the Second Coming of Christ, that he will come, and it is going to bring about peace and prosperity, there will be the judgment of those who are wicked, the glory of those who are good and are in his grace, and then everything will be wonderful from here to eternity. That is an eschatology as expressed through Christianity. But the whole idea of eschatology is that there is an end state that you can reach where everything will be complete.

What Morgenthau says is that these other views—the spread of international law, democracy, or commerce—imply that this is eventually going to take us to an end state where everything is going to be great and will all be solved forever. What he is saying is that realism does not say that.

This leads to another theological view, which is that realism is not so much a theory as a theodicy. Theodicy is another theological concept; theodicy is the area of theological thought that tries to explain why there is pain and suffering in the world, which seems very appropriate when you are trying to talk about war: Why does war happen? If you are trying to say wars cannot be solved, it seems like you are trying to offer an explanation for why pain and suffering is in the world.

Of course, the reason this gets brought up in a theological context, especially if you are using Christianity as the example here and you are worshiping an all-powerful and all-loving God, then people ask, “Why would God allow a world where there are pain and suffering.” Theodicies try to explain that.

Realism is a theodicy. Realism is saying: “This is why the world is this way. Humans have this desire for control and power, or the international system lacks a world government, and because of that we will always have incentives to go to war,” and so forth.

Some people have said that realism is “realism is theodicy without eschatology,” that basically it is an explanation for why there is pain and suffering and war in the world, and it holds that we will not reach an end state, that we are not going to be able to go to that point. That is how it is not just a philosophy but is even a theology.

KEVIN MALONEY: I have to send you this article. I am sure you have come across it. It is from the mid-1950s. It is basically a publication of the letters that Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau wrote back and forth to each other. This is basically what you are talking about.

For my listeners, Reinhold Niebuhr is a famous “Christian realist,” as I will call him, and Morgenthau and Niebuhr inform one another. Niebuhr was more focused on domestic politics and wrote a book called Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, but they had this amazing friendship and intellectual relationship.

As a Christian, Niebuhr understood I think from a realist perspective but was a bit higher up in terms of capabilities to improve and push society forward, and that is where tension emerged with Morgenthau, but a very friendly and intellectually respectful tension, which is something we do not have that much nowadays. I will put that article in the link to this podcast.

PAUL POAST: Absolutely. When people think about the intersection of realism and theology and specifically Christianity, Niebuhr is the first and foremost individual brought up there. You are exactly right.

Morgenthau had a lot of influence from a variety of individuals. Morgenthau himself evolved from being someone who originally was writing a lot about international law and eventually in the 1930s he came to the realization that this is not going to solve this. Along with these conversations with people like Niebuhr, he was very much influenced by the work of Merze Tate, so he was influenced by a variety of people to develop what we again have come to now as a modern understanding of realism.

KEVIN MALONEY: I need to go back and re-read some of the international law over a timespan, earlier works and then critiques because we are in a moment right now in terms of the realist critique of international law. How we think about it at the Council is: Yes, international law was a normative thing for a bit. It was not always perfect, but people who thought it could exist outside of the underwriting of a powerful state now see that the chickens are coming to roost on that.

There was a great lecture by Janina Dill at Oxford about a year-and-a-half ago. She is an international law expert, but she ends her lecture making the point that power needs to underpin this or it is going to go the way of the dodo. I will circulate that to the listeners as well.

I want to end with a specific question in terms of the moment we are in today. Obviously, you are an academic, Paul, but you are also writing a lot on the current political moment. If we look at the spectrum that we talked about from Jimmy Carter to amoral Machtpolitik, where do you think the normative energy is right now in U.S. politics? Are we moving closer to Elbridge Colby or to Stephen Miller? I don’t want you to give you the crystal ball, but how are you reading the room right now?

PAUL POAST: It is a big question. One way to answer it, and it ties in nicely to what we are talking about, is that I think there is a need for—and I think it will resonate—the idea of a no-drama foreign policy. We just do not need the drama, and what I mean by “drama” is that it is not that bad stuff is not happening in the world, but why are we intentionally causing bad stuff? Why are we creating tension? Why are we creating arguments? Why are we being a problem when there is already enough bad stuff happening in the world?

I have been giving Marco Rubio some pretty good marks in terms of his usage of IR concepts in much of his talking. When he first became secretary of state, if you look at his opening remarks during his confirmation hearing but also in a subsequent interview maybe with Megyn Kelly to talk about his vision of things, one of the things he talked about, and it is a line I have used quite a bit, is trying to justify why the Trump administration was going to be taking the approach it was taking.

I actually thought there was a great statement and I teach with it: “There are a lot of horrible things happening in the world. There really are. And then there are horrible things happening in the world that are actually in the U.S. interest to try to address, and we need to focus on those things.”

I thought that was a good line because it acknowledged that, yes, there are all sorts of bad things happening, but there are bad things we can focus on and we should center ourselves on those. I would contrast that with the view that was typically attributed to Hillary Clinton. She used the phrase, “The United States needs to be ‘caught trying’ to fix problems, even if we can’t solve them.” It is building on that notion from Madeleine Albright that we are the indispensable nation and we have to try to be involved. Rubio is giving a view that we cannot be involved everywhere and we have to pick our shots, if you will, of what we can fix and what we cannot fix, which you can argue is very much a realist view of how to be involved in the world.

What is interesting is the extent to which that has and has not been the guiding principle of the Trump administration. It is like, yes, they have been selective, but they almost have been selective in saying, “Well, yes, there are horrible things happening, there are horrible things that we can do something about, and then there is a whole other set of things where we can create problems out of thin air that were not problems to begin with but we have decided to make them problems.” If we are going to start making demands for Greenland, where did that come from? Why do we need Greenland?

KEVIN MALONEY: In my opinion, it is because a new variable has been introduced that used to be null but now is really influential, which are transactional considerations for people around the president who are influential.

If I can give the Morgenthau critique to the Rubio-Clinton spectrum, it is liberal idealism overstretched, which manifests as Bush post-2001 and Clinton in a way, the nonpragmatic side of that, and then the criticism Morgenthau would give Rubio is: “You are trading short-term tactical wins for potentially strategically giving away the farm at the end of the day because you are contracting too much; there is going to be another pandemic, etc.” This is not like a liberal utopia. There are things where we need to be in the world to secure our interests in this interconnected world.

I do not have the answers. I am just putting on the Morgenthau hat for a minute and trying to criticize both sides.

PAUL POAST: Exactly. To me the benefit of a no-drama foreign policy is—look at the Maduro raid. I have been talking quite a bit about that in different outlets and have been writing about it, but one thing I brought up is that that should have been an easy win for the Trump administration. Maduro was not popular in Venezuela. Of course, people have come to the United States because of the turmoil in Venezuela, and they don’t like him. He is not popular among the leaders of Latin America.

Yes, it would be illegal to go in and do that—just like it was illegal to go in and remove Manuel Noriega from Panama—but by and large people would be like, “Yeah, you know what, though? We’re glad he’s gone.” I have even gone to the point to say if Harris had won, I could have seen Harris actually carrying out a similar operation because I think Harris would have put more of a priority on this and the issues of Venezuela and so forth.

Somehow Trump took what should have been an easy win that gets a lot of support and made the United States into the bad guy. This should have been something easy. The question is, how did he do that?

The way he did it was all of the boat strikes going on for months leading up to this already started to generate massive ill will internationally about the U.S.’s use of force in the Caribbean, seemingly using force for the sake of it, violence for the sake of violence. That is making people highly skeptical of anything the United States is doing.

This is versus if the United States had taken a more prudent approach of, “You know what? We are going to remove him. He is a problem. Yes, we recognize this is going to be a violation of international law, but it is something we need to do. We are going to build up our forces, carry out this operation, and try to do it in as clean and straightforward a way as possible to minimize casualties, and then we are going to move on.” I think that would have generated a lot of support.

I use that as an example of creating unnecessary drama and doing unnecessary things is in many ways self-defeating to something that could be and indeed is a key policy priority even for this administration.

KEVIN MALONEY: Great point. The Chicago Council, which you are affiliated with as a Fellow, does amazing public policy and geopolitical research on U.S. domestic views on foreign policy. I think this is an extension of the Trump administration using a hammer when they could have used a scalpel in the lead-up to it because they are basically playing to that 30 percent of the electorate.

I think this is a big normative political shift where the presidency now in the United States, even at very tough times—think of the 2000 election—the position of the president was always, “Yes, it can be dicey on domestic issues, child tax credit or healthcare, but from a foreign policy perspective I am governing for the collective interests of the American people.”

It seems that a lot of these foreign policy decisions, whether it is the rhetoric or actual policies, are playing to a certain common denominator. It is like primary season on the international stage. That is concerning from a U.S. interest perspective. I would highly recommend the Chicago Council if you want to understand the U.S. electorate’s view on foreign policy. Amazing resources.

PAUL POAST: A hundred percent. Every year they do a massive survey of the American public’s views. Last year was the 50th year of it, so there are 50 years of polling data with views of the American public on its role in the world. It is fascinating data because you can see bipartisan and how it has evolved over time.

That is exactly right. There is definitely a segment of the American public that I guess you could say likes the drama, but it is not the majority, and it is bipartisan in terms of people who would prefer not to have the drama.

KEVIN MALONEY: That is empirically true. I was looking at the Chicago Council data the other day on support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and it has not really dropped, even though that is being hammered and hammered.

I am going to close with one more question before I let you go. We have talked a lot about the traditional writers and texts. If somebody wants to get their hands around realism right now and you are in the classroom, Paul, what are you assigning? If someone wanted to go deeper into this today, what should they read and who should they be following?

PAUL POAST: I love that question. Well, they can follow me. They can link me as always. For example, I wrote a piece in Foreign Affairsin 2022 titled “A World of Power and Fear: What Critics of Realism Get Wrong,” and I use that as a primer. That was during that last moment talking about the role of realism. It is a fairly short piece and I think a good one to work with.

I do like having my students go back to some of the work by Morgenthau and having them read this to understand the view of realism as it is understood now. That is if you want to go a bit longer. In that case, I would be the book I have recommended already several times, Scientific Man versus Power Politics.

Another work that I have assigned many times, going back to what I consider “classic” works, not ancient works going back to the Peloponnesian War, but what I also referenced earlier, which is Philip Kerr and his paper in 1928 titled “The Outlawry of War.” That was in what is today called International Affairs but at the time was the journal of the Royal International Society, Chatham House’s inhouse journal.

That is a great paper. That is where he uses the phrase “practical people.” He is writing that at the time they were trying to sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact to literally ban war, and he talks about how this is just not going to happen. It is a nice piece to see very clearly, “Oh, this is what people are talking about, this is the alternative view, and this is where these ideas came from.”

Again, I am going to recommend my own piece, but I am also going to recommend going back to the classic piece of Morgenthau or that paper by Kerr.

KEVIN MALONEY: Paul, this was such a great conversation. I know my audience really appreciates it.

PAUL POAST: Thank you so much for having me. This was a great conversation.