FOR ivory tower international relations experts, ‘Realism’, with a capital ‘R’, is a doctrine based on the stark understanding that powerful states do whatever they want to weaker states, tempered only by the degree to which more powerful states exercise wisdom in using limited resources, and thereby curb their ambitions in a world of rivals.

Law, and indeed common sense, is brushed aside in the pursuit of interests. In this rough universe, there are no purely good or bad guys because everyone operates opportunistically under pressures and temptations. Still, states try to get along insofar as circumstances and interests allow. Realism as a philosophical outlook, then, lacks optimism, and leans towards endorsing, if not preserving, the status quo.

The sole virtue it champions is the exercise of prudence when relating desires to the means available, which annoys superpowers that don’t see the point of self-restraint in grasping for their goals. Realists, to their credit, rarely fall for pious official cant. Less convincingly, they focus on the high strategic realm of diplomacy, and so pay scant attention to national politics even though most nations deploy propaganda to persuade citizens that their leaders act nobly. Still, foreign policy mandarins aren’t always sound in their scheming. Realists can only admonish that nations will pay a high price for excesses, although usually, it is hapless citizenries, and not culpable elites, who suffer most.

Realism has become a reprehensible perspective, especially because its sour sages regard the US unromantically. No worse than other imperial powers on the butcher’s bench of history, mind you, but no better either. The difference in performance depends on the quality of leadership which, in a US administration brimming with aggressive neoconservatives and liberal internationalists, is deplorable. High officials intoxicated by overestimates of US military and economic power are like children hovering impudent feet over a line when they are told they must not cross and stamp them down. That juvenile pattern sums up Nato’s expansion up to an incensed Russia’s borders. What does a state do, according to realists, when threatened with encirclement by determined rivals? It does not matter who is in charge. Realism predicts the provoked state must fight if the other states do not back off. How does such elementary wisdom get disregarded? Because threatening powers believe they can get away with it, and so far they have. Russia, and only Russia, is painted in the Western media as the villain. In the vaunted liberal rules-based international system, based on US rules, there is no law against merciless provocation, only against responding to provocation.

How does elementary wisdom get disregarded?

So, the University of Chicago’s realist John Mearsheimer is excoriated for courageously pointing out what is obvious, that Nato (meaning the US) baited the Russians into its ‘special military operation’ in the eastern-most region of Ukraine already under assault from Western Ukrainian forces during a civil war which the Western press ignores. Mearsheimer’s heretical case is not remotely inaccurate, just inconvenient to indignant authorities. The atmosphere could not be more hostile. No Russian-guided missile, according to Western media, can help but strike a kindergarten or a crowded shopping centre whilst smart Nato-supplied Ukrainian munitions miraculously never explode around civilians.

Nixon-era realist Henry Kissinger, no hero of ours, likewise created ructions among super-sensitive elites when breaking ranks to urge negotiations to end the Ukraine war before it “created upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome”. Even Kissinger hits it right occasionally. Foreign policy, though, remains in the hands of shallow ideologues who are on the verge of scoring one of the greatest ‘own goals’ of all time, especially in terms of blowback in the US and Western Europe. How long can they continue this bloodbath farce of fighting Russia to the last dead Ukrainian?

The US government will swallow its press releases until the war hurts its own citizens in acute ways, and that point approaches. The Cold War reflex against Russia is unlikely to survive price surges that are the entirely avoidable result of sanctions. What of Ukraine’s sovereignty? No realist will tell you a given state has a ‘right’ to sovereignty. Ukraine’s government, already indebted and corrupt, is bankrolled by the US and Nato, who in 2014 aided the overthrow of its elected government and did so to cheers. Nato’s advisers afterwards trained neo-Nazis with no misgivings about deploying them in the Donbas war. We do not agree in all particulars with Realism but in time figures such as Mearsheimer and Kissinger will be proven painfully correct. Nothing is more foolish than to disregard Realism in any appraisal of world politics.

The writers are authors of No Clean Hands, Parables of Permanent War and other books.

Published in Dawn, July 19th, 2022