The destruction of U.S.A.I.D. Threats to make Canada the 51st state. The humiliation of Ukraine. What is going on with U.S. foreign policy? Some see it as driven by President Trump’s personal greed or fondness for dictators. Both might ring true, but neither tells the whole story. What matters most to Mr. Trump is not the wealth or ideology of a country but how powerful it is. He believes in dominating the weak and giving deference to the strong. It’s a strategy as old as time. It’s called realism.
Don’t get me wrong. So much of what Mr. Trump does abroad, like what he does at home, is ham-handed, shortsighted and cruel. But I also detect in his administration a recognition that the liberal international world order was possible only because of U.S. military might and that Americans don’t want to pay the bill anymore. That’s realism — a crude, unstrategic, “Neanderthal realism,” as the political scientist Stephen Walt once called it — but a form of realism nonetheless.
Realists see the world as a brutal, anarchic place. For them, security comes not from spreading the ideology of democracy and creating international laws that we then must enforce but from being the strongest bully on the block — and avoiding battles with other bullies. Mr. Trump wants to avoid a war with Russia. That means hardening our hearts to Ukraine’s plight.
The origin story of realism dates back to the Peloponnesian War, when Athens, a superpower of that era, laid siege to the island of Melos and announced that if its people didn’t pledge their loyalty, the men would be slaughtered, the women and children enslaved and the island colonized.
The Melians protested that Athens had no right to do that. Athens didn’t care. Noble ideas are only as durable as the army enforcing them. The Athenians uttered the still famous line in Thucydides’ history: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
If I’m honest, I probably would have bent my knee and lived to fight another day in secret resistance. But the leaders of Melos were braver than me. They chose to fight. The result? The men were slaughtered, the women and children were enslaved, and the island was colonized. Were they heroes or fools? If you think of them as heroes, you are a liberal internationalist, who believes that peace and security depend on just governments that abide by enlightened rules. If you think they were fools, you’re a realist.
Last week at the White House, Mr. Trump played the part of an Athenian. When he told President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, “You don’t have the cards right now,” he was speaking of the country’s strategic position, not of noble ideas or shared values. One reason this administration is so disorienting is that U.S. foreign policy has been guided for decades by the opposite of realism. The key fights in Washington, especially in recent decades, were between neocons who wanted to spread democracy through war and liberals who wanted to spread democracy through soft power like U.S.A.I.D. contracts to bolster civil society.
For years, realist thinkers have been banished to academia or ignored. Hans Morgenthau, a major 20th-century political scientist who was one of the most famous realists of his generation, advised the Johnson administration not to expand the Vietnam War and was dismissed in 1965. George Kennan argued against NATO expansion in these pages in 1997, predicting that it would inflame Russian militarism and undermine Russian democracy. No one listened. Brent Scowcroft told President George W. Bush that invading Iraq would be a grave mistake. He was treated as an outsider after that.
But in recent years, realism has been rising in Washington. Realist policy shops like the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Defense Priorities and the Center for Analysis of U.S. Grand Strategy at the RAND Corporation have appeared. The “realist” label is being thrown around to describe people across the new administration, such as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. One of the most important realist thinkers of this era, Elbridge Colby, is Mr. Trump’s nominee for under secretary of defense for policy.
“We’re entering into a new age of American realism,” Senator Eric Schmitt, Republican of Missouri, declared recently on Fox News.
What’s brought about this turn? In part, it is insecurity, the motivation of all bullies. Back when the United States was the world’s unrivaled superpower, Americans could afford to use their military might to promote democracy, essentially ignoring China’s interest in Taiwan and Russia’s interest in Ukraine. Today Russia and China have hypersonic missiles that the U.S. military does not yet know how to counter effectively. China already has the ability to knock out U.S. satellites in space, destroying the GPS systems upon which the American military and our economy depend, and Russia is believed to be testing such weapons.
Americans are not ready for a war with China. In fact, much of the industrial capacity needed to fight such a war is now in China, thanks to the naiveté of liberal internationalists who decided to make China the world’s factory. Even so, the United States and its allies are stronger than Team Russia and China if they stand together. But a lot of Americans no longer want to fight with our allies for noble ideas overseas, especially after disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The question now is which flavor of realism Mr. Trump will embrace. Offensive realists like John Mearsheimer see war with China as a very real and deadly serious possibility and everything else as a distraction. Defensive realists argue that great powers should avoid doing things that trigger weaker states to build up their own strength. That’s where Mr. Trump parts ways with many realists. No true realist would threaten to annex Canada, Gaza and Greenland, Mr. Walt told me.
While Mr. Trump embraces some elements of realism — giving in to the strong and sacrificing the weak — his tariff wars and threats against peaceful neighbors could end up being as costly as the military adventurism of the previous liberal order. Rajan Menon, a professor emeritus at the City College of New York, told me that people who expect the Trump administration “to follow the playbook of realism” by showing restraint “are going to get very disappointed.”
At the White House meeting, Mr. Zelensky reminded Mr. Trump that the war could hurt Americans, too, one day. “You don’t feel now, but you will feel it in the future,” Mr. Zelensky said.
Mr. Trump took offense, retorting: “You don’t know that. Don’t tell us what we are going to feel.”
To Mr. Trump, America is a great power that Russia wouldn’t dare attack, and Ukraine is a pawn that can be sacrificed. But here’s the thing about great powers: They all decline eventually. Neanderthal realism doesn’t save them. After Athens sacked Melos, word of its brutality spread. Its allies turned against it. Athens lost the war. Noble ideas, it turns out, do matter.
