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A
When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want, like all the way. Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your cha chings from every channel right in one spot. And turn real time reporting into big time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today.
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History as it happens January 27, 2026 what is realism?
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We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.
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Out with utopian idealism, in with hard nosed realism.
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By definition, we are in charge because we have the United States military stationed outside the country.
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D
We set the terms and conditions.
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America will never allow foreign powers to rob our people or drive us back into and out of our own hemisphere. That's what they did.
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B
President Trump promised to be a peacemaker. The new national security strategy promises a foreign policy of flexible realism. Meantime, the President invaded Venezuela, threatened Greenland and has not created peace in the Middle east or Eastern Europe. Is this realism? What does that term mean anyway? An answer in why it matters. Next, as we report history as it happens.
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I'm Martin DeCaro and what we see is a policy of flexible realism, very clearly outlined in the national Security strategy that was released in early December, just weeks ahead of the capture of Maduro. But even before that, you know that I was looking into the question of realism and how it was being activated within the Trump administration for some months prior and had observed for people in the field of foreign policy, they were making the claim that Trump was a realist par excellence and that the Trump administration was engaged in a, quote, grand experiment in realism.
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D
Whereas internationalists, their kind of defining impulse in the early 20th century and going back a bit into the late 19th century was to say, yes, the international system is anarchic, but we're going to make steady progress towards an international society, maybe even a world government to transcend this war prone system of anarchy.
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Spring 1945. Nazi Germany surrenders.
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Admiral Hans Georg von Friedenburg surrenders all German armies in North Germany, Holland, Denmark and Norway. Montgomery signs for the triumphant finish of a fighting crusade all the way from the gates of Egypt. For this victory, we join in, offering our thanks to the providence which has guided and sustained us through the dark days of adversity and into light. Much remains to be done.
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In an essay for the New York Times, the scholar Linda Kinsler writes, after World War II, realism became a framework for rethinking the nature of politics. The collapse of the Weimar Republic, the failures of the League of Nations and the cataclysm of the Holocaust had left a generation of political scientists, men like Hans Morgenthau, Paul Nitze, Henry Kissinger and Reinhold Niebuhr, convinced that politics was fundamentally irrational and that the state was not intrinsically a force for good. They set out to construct a clear eyed philosophy of international relations founded on the idea that great power politics is a fact of life. She goes on to say realist thinking prevailed during the Cold War when the United States and the Soviet Union were rival hegemonic powers. The establishment of NATO in 1949 was a realist response to the nuclear threat posed by the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, realism fell out of favor because the world had entered a unipolar era. Linda Kintzler, writing in the New York Times, she and historian Stephen Wertheim will be here in a moment. So the unipolar moment is long over and we're a decade into the age of Trump, a man who wants to be known as a peacemaker. One of the 20th century's most notable realists, the late Henry Kissinger, delivered a speech in Norway in December 2016, just a month after Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton. Kissinger said then, Trump is a personality for whom there is no precedent in modern American history. And his campaign included rhetorical elements challenging patterns heretofore considered traditional. But before postulating an inevitable crisis, an opportunity should be given the new administration to put forward its vision of international order. Kissinger said the international debate should be over evolving American strategy, not campaign rhetoric. He also foresaw serious problems for the so called rules based order.
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Unilateral action is on the rise.
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Sovereign borders are becoming ambiguous, ignored or violated.
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Again, that was a decade ago. Today, the second Trump administration is operating under a national security strategy that calls for flexible realism. As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth puts it, it is a return, at least in his opinion, to, to real Reaganism. Our department will not be distracted by democracy building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change, climate change woke moralizing and feckless nation building.
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D
We will instead put our nation's practical, concrete interests first.
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B
Well, there are words on a piece of paper. And then there is Trump's outrageous and illegal unilateralism, bombing Iran, blowing up suspected drug boats, invading Venezuela to kidnap Maduro, and most recently trying to extort Greenland from Denmark. Understanding ideas, understanding motivations is critical. If someone calls themselves a realist. That should tell you something about how they might conduct foreign policy. Is Donald Trump a realist, or is this theory simply giving him license for unilateral aggression? Linda Kinsler is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Historian Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Our conversation next Remember, you can enjoy 24. 7 access to my entire catalog of more than 500 episodes, ad free listening and bonus content, all by tapping. Subscribe now in the show Notes or go to historyasithappens.com Linda Kinsler, welcome back to the podcast.
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E
Thank you for having me.
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Steven Wertheim, good to see you again.
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D
You as well, Linda.
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B
Thank you for writing another thought provoking essay, this one in the New York Times, about realism or something called flexible realism. Why is this the right time to try to define these terms and whether Donald Trump is pursuing some kind of realist foreign policy?
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E
I mean, I think it's important to look at the words that people are actually using to describe the policies. And what we see is a policy of flexible realism very clearly outlined in the National Security Strategy that was released in early December, just weeks ahead of the capture of Maduro. But even before that, you know, that I was looking into the question of realism and how it was being activated within the Trump administration for some months prior and had observed for people in the field of foreign policy, they were making the claim that Trump was a realist par excellence and that the Trump administration was engaged in a, quote, grand experiment in realism and that there had been several prominent realist scholars appointed to various roles. So I think it was very much in the air and I wanted to understand what it would mean mean. And it was actually kind of surprising in December to see it enunciated quite clearly not only in the National Security Strategy, but also, you know, Pete Hegseth gave a speech not long after that saying, you know, in with hard nosed realism, saying that this is the kind of defining concept of a new day that had arrived.
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B
And you had quoted some scholars in your piece who agreed that Trump, when I say agreed, not necessarily your position, they said Trump is a realistic. Stephen, what did you think of Linda's essay or what was your takeaway from it?
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D
Well, I thought it was a terrific essay and I heartily recommend it to your listeners. I think, you know, one of the great moves that Linda makes in the essay is to suggest I don't want to put words in your Mouth, Linda. So thankfully you're right here, so you could literally correct me if I'm incorrect. But one of the things I appreciated was, I think where the piece seemed to be coming down was that the Trump administration uses a vote vocabulary of realism, but that a lot of what we're seeing is more like a mocked politic, the performance of power politics, the performance of realism, if you like, and that maybe the showmanship, the self presentation, is more realist than the underlying policy itself.
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B
Well, flexible realism means whatever you want it to be, I guess.
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E
Yeah. To me, what's interesting is that why does realism always, you know, very frequently require this adjectival modifier that precedes it? You know, in the first Trump administration, the National Security Strategy advocated for principled realism, which, you know, in my conversation, some people said, you know, that at least has values behind it. Right, principles. Whereas flexible realism doesn't seem to have anything underlying it. It's very tactically opaque.
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B
How would you define realism, Linda? And then we'll get Stephen's definition.
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I don't know that I'm the best person to define it, but in my conversations with people who are established realist scholars, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, they underscored again and again that it is a theory of international politics. It is a theory of how states behave.
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B
It's not an ideology. It's not an ideology, right?
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A theory, yeah.
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It's a theory, not an ideology.
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Certainly not an ideology. But then I think there's another strain of realism that kind of comes from the Christian tradition that gets at this, its relation towards sin and the self, that identifies realism more as an ethos, as someone described to me, a sensibility, a collection of ways of going about the world. So it's a very slippery concept.
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D
I think it's useful to think of realism, first of all as a kind of broad school of thought where people can have family resemblances that might fit them into realism. But not everyone who's a realist would subscribe to all the different defining elements of realism. I think it's useful to think of realism in the context of its antonyms, and I would propose two that are especially important. So realism is often opposed to idealism, and that's the way the great thinker E. H. Carr set up his realist tract at the end of the 1930s, the 20 years crisis. That's a great book, a tremendous book. Interestingly enough, it's a critique of what he sees as overly idealistic international relations. But at the same time, he calls for not the Replacement of idealism with realism, but rather striking a correct balance between realism and idealism, almost in a kind of Weberian sense of the politics of vocation, where there are moments when it's appropriate to say, here I stand, I do no other. And there are other moments when it's appropriate, maybe most moments, to think closely about consequences of one's actions and reason that way. But. But it's not like one is always and everywhere correct and the other is not. So I think the realist, idealist dichotomy is important, and I think that's really what the Trump administration, when it invokes. Realism is appealing to the sense that US Foreign policy making has been afflicted by excessive idealism in the past, and it wants to get away from that. By the way, flexible realism is a really odd phrase because usually the modifier of is something like principled, as you say, to somehow say, well, you know, yeah, it's realist, but it's not that kind of nasty amoral thing. There are also principles and values behind it. And so flexible realism, that the modifier doesn't seem to get you anything. And then to make it even stranger, the national security strategy at one point says that President Trump's foreign policy is realistic without being realistic.
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Right.
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So it actually disclaims realism as an international relations category. It says, we're not doing realism. I don't really recall other administrations positively claiming to reject realism as this one has done. So it's all over the map when it comes to the invocation of realism. All right, I'm actually doing the weave right now in this answer, so I'm now going to return. I promised a second antonym, and I'll give it to you. The second antidote I'd propose is internationalism. I think one of the foundational realist insights as it developed as that school of thought developed in the 20th century began with the identification around World War I, of the international system as being anarchic. It's a system of self help for states because there is no overarching world government. And even though there might be international law, international norms, the notion of an international public opinion, those are things that do not function on the international level as government authorities function on the state level within states.
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Sure.
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Well, whereas internationalists, their kind of defining impulse in the early 20th century and going back a bit into the late 19th century was to say, yes, the international system is anarchic, but we're going to make steady progress towards an international society, maybe even a world government, to transcend this war prone system of anarchy. And so the realists say, no, you can't do that. Either you can't do that, it won't work, or you shouldn't do that, because the only way to get to world government or something like that that would transcend anarchy would be through empire.
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Well, Steven, if you're doing the weave, listeners can blame the host for not cutting you off.
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D
You tried and then I cut you off.
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That's fine. We want to hear from the experts, not me. But I'm glad that, Steven, you started to introduce some historical context here. We're going to get to the origins of these terms. It's okay to be floating around in the realm of theory right now, but we all know that there's theory and then there's human experience, or just how policymakers, once they're in the seat of power, put these theories into practice. Nothing is 100% consistent over time. People have to be tactically flexible. Okay, that's my weave. Linda, you can respond to Steven's antonyms, because I was gonna ask what is the opposite of a realist? But I also want you to define another term that pops up in your essay, mocked politik.
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E
Yeah, I mean, I think first responding to Steven's very helpful, I think, survey of realism and its contours. I think what's interesting, first of all, there have been efforts to kind of create a globalist realism, or a kind of realism that wouldn't be even, you know, liberal realism, a kind of realism that would be more accommodating to the international system. I think the way that China regards international law as essentially a kind of tool of sovereignty is a kind of realist approach to the international system that nevertheless plays the game but uses it for the purposes of state power. And I was really struck when I raised this with John Mearsheimer about how realists would view the international system, that he said, you know, realists are invested, vested in it, but only to the extent that it serves their ends. Right. That the United States has had such a prominent role in authoring a lot of international laws, such that it serves our ends and that we can choose which ones to follow or not. And that was for me, a very interesting qualifier of how this kind of school of thought would regard places like the icj, for example. But with Machtpolitik, I mean, that term comes from Patrick Porter, whose wonderful book how to Survive in a Hostile World just came out. And you know, he kind of describes it as this evil cousin of realism, this possibility that Realism can mutate into macht politique if power isn't wielded responsibly, that it is rule by strength alone, and rule for the purposes of strength, rule that enriches only those in power and those around them, that does not actually have state interests first and foremost at heart. And I think what he argues is that we are actually seeing machtpolitik emerge in the place of realism in several places around the world, certainly in Russia, perhaps already in the United States, and that that puts the state at grave risk.
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B
Yeah, I think Trump is closer to that than realism. I don't believe Trump is a realist. I think you're probably on board with that. Linda and Steven, what do you think? No, Trump not a realist. Do you agree?
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D
It's hard to say. Is any president a realist? Is any president an idealist? You know, I think George W. Bush, you could say he was an idealist and he was an internationalist. Woodrow Wil, um, Woodrow Wilson. Yes, to both. Although scholars have engaged in a whole lot of ink spilling, claiming that Woodrow Wilson was also something of a realist, that he was cautious and self interested in the pursuit of power as well.
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We're talking about gradations here. No one is 100% of one or the other.
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D
That's right. I think it's true, first of all, that there are genuine realists who have been attracted to Donald Trump in the academy and some who are in the Trump administration. But I think on balance, what we have seen so far from the Trump administration's policymaking is not realism. Maybe it's a form of what is sometimes called offensive realism, in which the state tries to maximize its power. The kind of realism that I have a certain sympathy with, however, is different, sometimes called defensive realism, and it's about states seeking to preserve their security. When it comes to preserving security, I don't think that that goes very far to explaining Donald Trump's foreign policy here at the one year mark. So maybe he's trying to assert American power. But I think Linda is onto something in highlighting the kind of performative status, conscious power as an end in itself quality to Trump.
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E
What for me was the most alarming thing and what you know, Stephen, you were one of the first people I talked to when I started working on this piece was just this question of to what extent can we speak of realism at home in domestic politics as well. And I think this question of how power as an end in itself definitely speaks to the way we see the use of the armed forces being deployed at home.
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Understanding motivations is critical. We understand this in history, even if people aren't 100% consistent one way or the other. So I do think it matters. These are not just arcane debates or esoteric debates that take place in the Ivy League. What do they call that? What's the academic tower?
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E
Ivory tower.
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Take place in the ivory tower. So ideology. Donald Trump is not an ideologue. Neither is Vladimir Putin, in my view. There's no ideological system underpinning Putinism. But he is a practitioner of machtpolitik. Henry Kissinger, one of the most famous realists. Right, but he was also a primacist. He was a cold warrior. He never intended, even with detente, he never intended to rule the world together. Well, Nixon was his boss, but the intention was never to split the world with Brezhnev. Brezhnev's idea of reaching an accommodation with the United States, rule the world together as equals. So I'm just bringing this up and Stephen, you can address this. And we talk about these terms and try to define them and then apply them to history or what's happening now. It gets very tricky. I'm just using Kissinger as an example here. A realist who was also a primacist. He was not against interventionism. Can an interventionist still be a realist? Why don't you pick it up from there? Why don't you try to untangle that Gordian knot of words I just shared with the audience?
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D
It's a large knot with many tangles. You know, I think in the case of Kissinger, he's a great example. And there's a connection here to tromp of somebody who really liked the self image, the self presentation of I'm a realist. I would say he was more playing the part of a realist than he deeply reflected all the tenets of realism. I think above all, Henry Kissinger was. It's not that he wasn't a realist, but he was a practitioner who liked to wield power. He was overt about that. But he stayed very well within the lines of the U.S. foreign policy establishment throughout his career. So, yes, he was willing to make pragmatic bargains with the Soviets and advocate better relationship with China in order to put pressure on the Soviets and put distance between Moscow and Beijing at the same time. He continued, as the historian Mario Delpero argues in his book, he continued to practice linkage, trying to link one issue in one continent to another issue and negotiate with the Soviets over that, as if there was still a communist monolith, even though in theory he rejected that practice. And then if you look at sort of Kissinger's career from then on, he basically never takes a position that's very much at odds with where US Foreign policy thinking is. So he's supposed to be a realist and advocate the use of power only for the purposes of US national interest. And yet he said the United States should have intervened to stop the Rwandan genocide when it was fashionable to say so. And many other examples. And I do think that's very relevant to Trump because Trump is. You're right, in a sense that Trump is not ideological in the typical way that we know American foreign policy figures to be ideological. Right. To say that we're in a world of democracy versus autocracy, for example. But in another way he is very ideological. He likes hard nosed justifications for what he's doing. He is more interested in sounding like he's taking the oil in Venezuela than he is in taking the actual oil. So realism is being sort of elevated as a kind of language of legitimation by President Trump. And I think that's kind of how he views the world too. It's not just a. Like the performance is his own real calculus about how things work. He wants Greenland. Why exactly does he want Greenland? You know, I don't know. It just seems like he wants it and anything short of having it is unacceptable. Although now apparently it's acceptable as of 48 hours ago.
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E
Sure.
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B
And you can make a realist or some other ist argument as to why the United States needs control of Greenland although it's already in the NATO alliance, that fact notwithstanding, Linda, how do you mesh these terms that seem to be contradictory? Realism while being an interventionist. Realism while also believing in primacy. There's also now the restrainer versus interventionist debate. I mean, in my view, I think many Americans would just prefer more restraint in foreign policy, no matter which school of thought it comes from.
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E
Yeah, I mean, I think that speaks to how realism, as Steven said, can be used as a form of legitimation for any number of foreign policy agendas or as an alibi for whatever decision the leader takes on. What was interesting to me is that it's speaks to the ambiguous nature of the term itself. And if we can all agree that there is this one kind of ur realism that E. H. Carr identifies, then we can maybe track how it kind of mutates over time. It's a very, very. I think it has an attractive pull because everyone wants to be realistic of Course. And then I think to describe oneself as a realist, even if you're not kind of familiar with all of the meanings of the term, can follow closely afterwards. I do want to say something about the question about whether Trump is an ideologue. I think one way where you see a kind of ideology forming is in his obsession with peace and his, you know, in quotes, of course, but the formation of the Board of Peace, which has its own perverse logic behind it, but it is a logic all the same. So I do think there's something interesting going on there that perhaps we can look to realism or at least how they're using it as an explanation. Explanation.
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B
Well, Linda, let me ask you a follow up question, and Stephen is free to answer this as well. How do these debates actually fall short in helping us understand what's going on in the world today?
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E
Well, I mean, I don't think we can ever know. Obviously we can't know how our age will be defined in the present, but I think we can have some clues. And I think one of the things that I kept hearing in my interviews was, oh, you know, we live in a pendulum and history is a pendulum between realism and idealism. And we bounce back and forth and we're just in a time where we're reverting to realism and that's that. And in some remarks by world leaders saying, you know, we are now in a phase, right. As Stephen pointed out, that history kind of moves back and forth, I think that's one symptom of the kind of realist point of view that perhaps is not.
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B
Yeah, you know, I've been talking about that on my show as to whether we're really moving into a new era because there's so many continuities between eras. Stephen, if you want to address that question, I'm doing a great job here as host, just layering on the questions about how these debates maybe fall short, but also tell us a little bit about the historical origins of modern realism. We don't have to go back to Thucydides or whoever else. Machiavelli, do the weave.
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D
I certainly have no standing to complain about a weave from you or anyone else. I do think we are in some sort of realist, zeitgeist moment in our politics in general, not just in how we talk about foreign policy. In Trump's first term, this was not the case. And people who were arguing against Trump asserted with a lot more confidence that he was destroying the liberal order. There was on the Democratic Party, on the left, a Surge of sort of idealistic thought, still grasping towards maybe more ambitious political programs right now. You know, you might think given some of the things that have happened, like the war in Gaza, there would also be, or Trump pointing on a map and saying, I want that. I want to annex that. There might also be a strongly idealistic backlash response to what Trump is doing. I think we're not really seeing that. I think basically Trump's critics are saying, well, we don't like that, but we recognize that Trump is onto something, at least in sort of centering the real needs and interests of the United States in foreign policy. And that is something to hold on to. In other words, like the response to America first isn't to say, no, globalism is great, actually. Yes. But Trump isn't doing America first. And maybe also America first doesn't need to mean either America alone or being pointlessly cruel and nasty to others. So I think that's what makes Linda's essay so timely. And that's kind of why we need to think very broadly about realism, not just in international relations context.
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B
So it's the issue of American empire, American hegemony, sprawling security commitments, also called primacy, 100% primacy all over the world. For instance, is it worth trying to prevent China from becoming hegemonic in East Asia? Can the United States prevent China from becoming hegemonic in East Asia? Something that you've brought up recently, Stephen, in your work is whether or not realists observe or recognize spheres of influence. You say Trump is actually not recognizing a sphere of influence for Russia and Ukraine. Well, maybe there a little or not. Certainly not for China in East Asia. Again, I'm trying to locate or identify a Trump thought on a issue, and it's always liable to change in 45 seconds. But I mentioned Kissinger before he was torched during the detente years for recognizing the 1975 Helsinki Final act, recognizing the borders of Eastern Europe post1945. In other words, the Communist bloc. Kissinger would have said, well, being a realist here, Gerald Ford famously said in a debate there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.
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F
There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration. I'm sorry, could I just follow. Did I understand you to say, sir, that the Russians are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence and occupying most of the countries there and making sure with their troops that it's a communist zone, whereas on our side of the line, the Italians and the French are still flirting with I don't believe, Mr. Frankel, that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don't believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don't believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.
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B
The conversation continues. Tap. Subscribe now in the show Notes to skip ads. All right, so let's bring it back. Talk about a weave, Steven. We'll bring it back to Trump today. So realism and spheres of influence, are they compatible?
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D
I think you're bringing up a really important point, which is that for my money, the categories that are most important for explaining U.S. foreign policy today and orienting us to where we need to go, it's not realism versus some opposite. It's not even, you know, liberal internationalism versus something else. It is primacy. That's what I think the US has been fundamentally pursuing since the end of the Cold War. That's what Trump now seems to be pursuing in a different way, with a different justification, with some different methods. As somebody who advocates restraint, obviously, I disagree with that. And so there are strands of liberal liberalism that justify American primacy. There are strands of realism that justify American primacy. Trump is using a kind of amped up imperialist, realist lingo with some kind of novel tactics in the use of quick military strikes. But if I'm writing a book about U.S. foreign policy today and since the end of the Cold War, like, that's the central category that I would personally use.
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B
You know, I'm not against American hegemony. Pulling back a little bit. Alfred McCoy, the historian, says it's happening and there's nothing we can do to stop it. It's just the way history is developing right now in this multipolar world.
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E
Matthew Spector, who's an intellectual historian at Berkeley, makes this argument. You know, he sees imperialism as being at the root of realism and that any attempt to disentangle the two is perhaps futile. You know, that he does say there are two strands of realism. One is more kind of oriented towards restraint. One of them is kind of more overtly interventionist and ultimately imperial. But I don't know that you can separate the two. And he talks about how you can trace them back to the late 19th century to German thinkers who are coming up with terms like Weltpolitik and Lebensraum, you know, living space. Now we know it because it's the term that Hitler used to justify his expansionist policy. So his argument is to kind of link what we would think of as 20th century realism actually to this 19th century imperial worldview. And of course, we can debate that. But I do think that at least some strands of realism come from this seed. And the macht politique that Patrick Porter describes is not really kind of dissimilar from that. But their point of disagreement is whether it's kind of intrinsic to realism or whether it's a deviation from it.
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B
What about realism in this multipolar world? We're living in a multipolar world. Even during the Cold War, there was multipolarity, There was a non aligned movement. A rather large country known as India was a big part of that non aligned movement. Multipolarity and realism. It would seem that we need a real realism, pardon the term, because the unipolar moment, if it lasted at all, is long over.
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E
Right. And it's interesting, actually, at one point as I was working on the piece, I went and looked at all the national security strategies that have been published because they don't go back very far. And you can see that, you know, certainly during the Reagan years, it appears in every single single one. And then it's there until the late 80s and basically it kind of drops out completely until the first Trump term. So you can kind of see the unipolar blip right there. What's been interesting is to see how this return or this realist zeitgeist, as Stephen put it, has registered not only in US Policy, but also, you know, in the remarks of world leaders who are, to various degrees, rushing to adjust to this new world order. And I was really struck by remarks that the Singaporean foreign minister made saying, you know, we are returning to a world of spheres of influence where large countries will dominate small ones. And certainly in the wake of what has happened at Davos, we're seeing that all the more. And the response has been to respond with strength. And that has been actually working. That is the kind of realism at play. I don't know, Stephen, if you would agree with.
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D
I mean, I'm tempted to say that, you know, the United States basically claimed the whole world as its sphere of influence after the Soviet collapse. But policymakers would tell themselves that what we're doing is preventing anyone from having a sphere of influence. You know, there's some truth to that. We were preventing other powers from having one while having one ourselves.
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B
Sure. Because the world was moving in our direction.
- [35:29]
D
Yeah. I think you could see why some people who are interested in more foreign policy restraint by the United States might be tempted by the spheres of influence root, because then you have, like, A hard limit to what is the US Vital interest? What are its defense responsibilities in the world? And you can draw a perimeter around it and say beyond that, it's really not our business. And there's great historical foundation for that in the United States going back to the Monroe Doctrine. That said, you know, that's not what Trump is doing, I think. Right. As of today, he is asserting American power across the board. He's not offering China a sphere of influence in the Indo Pacific. He's not even offering Russia a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe or Central Asia. He is, I think, more in a pragmatic mode, supporting whatever will end the war in Ukraine. And that includes Russia keeping territory that it already occupies, maybe taking a bit more of a chunk, if that's what Putin tells Trump that he needs. But there's no kind of broader offer on the table besides that. So that doesn't seem to be Trump's own vision.
- [36:41]
E
Yeah, I mean, I think with Ukraine, it's an interesting question, right. If there is a broader vision, because at least in what we saw originally, the terms being quite favorable to Moscow, you could argue, you know, that the vision was a perimeter around NATO expansion, for example. Right. Very limited possibility of further Ukrainian integration, that kind of thing.
- [37:05]
D
Trump is sort of ushering in a. It seems like a halt to the expansion of U. S. Alliances. The national security strategy talks about NATO needing to not be an endlessly expanding alliance. So that's a little bit different from saying NATO couldn't expand a little bit further. Yeah, but, you know, Trump's been president for five years, and he simply has not been interested in making a broad deal with Russia over European security arrangements or just pulling large numbers of troops out of Europe. And I think actually what he continues to want is control over. Over European security and European allies and alliances give him a platform for exerting leverage on them.
- [37:51]
B
I mean, that would take real work, doing a lot of these things. He's not capable of that. He's erratic. He is an interventionist. But I think, Stephen, you've made this point. Maybe, Linda, you have as well. He wants interventions that appear clean, not messy, won't get as bogged down, that are effective, that are spectacular, that are theatrical. Right. That fits his style. And then where he can claim a brilliant masterstroke of victory.
- [38:17]
C
The United States armed forces conducted an extraordinary military operation in the capital of Venezuela. Overwhelming American military power. Air, land and sea was used to launch a spectacular assault. And it was an assault like people have not seen since World War II.
- [38:43]
B
So here's what I'm dealing with now as I try to make sense of this world. So many of not just America's problems, but other powers have this problem as well, discerning between vital national interests and peripheral ones. Linda, aren't realists supposed to be good at that?
- [39:02]
E
I suppose so, although I'm not sure that if you look at the historical record, that that's what we see. What I trying to, I guess, interrogate was this collapse of an ability to distinguish between threats abroad and threats at home and this flattening of the approach.
- [39:22]
B
Stevens made that point as well. As far as how Trump views threats, they're the things that cross the border. You know, in the Cold War, it was what, thermonuclear war. In Trump's world, it's people crossing the border, drugs crossing the border, etc. Go ahead, Linda. I interrupted you.
- [39:39]
E
Yeah, no, no, and I was just thinking, I mean, there was a very good essay by Nikhil Palsing in the Equator, I think, last week that was called Homeland Empire, which, you know, kind of made this point about primacism and how this kind of same approach that is being deployed abroad, right, to bully our friends, is also being rampantly deployed against US cities. That is perhaps one of the useful frames of describing our time. It's not realism, for sure. It's, you know, Machtpolique, as you said earlier. And what are, what are the implications of that? We're only beginning to see.
- [40:14]
D
If I were going to defend Troup to some degree for, like, displaying some affinity with realism, and sometimes in a good way, it would be that he seems very aware of the costs and risks of no kidding conflict, military conflict with major powers, Russia and China. He warned in the campaign about the risk of World War Three.
- [40:40]
C
Are we on the brink of World War Three? I think we're the closest that we've ever been. And you know, Joe, this won't be a regular war. This is not going to be, as I say, army tanks running back and forth, shooting each other. These are weapons of mass destruction the likes of which nobody's ever seen. I've seen, seen. I've seen them. And this is obliteration. This is not a world war like we are used to. World War I, World War II were terrible, horrible. This is so much bigger than that. This is, you know, like annihilation.
- [41:13]
D
I think that that was a legitimate concern when it comes to Ukraine. If you think back to the ugly spat with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office a year ago, Zelensky was basically doing a version of the domino theory. Well, Ukraine may seem far away to you, Mr. President, but if the Russians take over Ukraine or more of Ukraine, then they could take over X, Y and Z. And then pretty soon that ocean doesn't look so big. And Trump waved him off. No, no, no, we'll be fine.
- [41:43]
B
Even you, but you have nice ocean.
- [41:45]
F
And don't feel now, but you will.
- [41:47]
B
Feel it in the future.
- [41:49]
E
Future.
- [41:49]
C
God bless. You don't know that.
- [41:50]
B
God bless. God bless. You are not.
- [41:53]
C
Don't tell us what we're going to feel. We're trying to solve a problem.
- [41:56]
D
You know, Trump is displaying in that moment a sense that Ukraine implicates only peripheral US Interests, not vital ones. And I think this is important to explaining why Trump has declined to do much to escalate in the war in Ukraine. I think Trump does, in his own weird way, have a sense of peripheral and vital interests, but he also is incredibly short termist. So if he doesn't think there's going to be a conflict, that he's not necessarily concerned that the US Is leaving military assets in place somewhere and leaving an alliance commitment in place, he's not worried about. Well, 20 years down the line, the balance of power across the Taiwan Strait could be really in China's favor. And then how is it going to look if the United States is still staking its credibility on defending Taiwan, et cetera, et cetera. So that kind of short termism, I think short circuits whatever productive policymaking might come from his limited but not non existent ability to distinguish vital from peripheral interest.
- [43:11]
B
We can begin to wrap up. I want to introduce something else here that along the lines of this debate between peripheral and vital, there are real falling dominoes, but there are also psychological dominoes. And that brings in the issue or the curse of credibility in Vietnam. The US Nightmare in Vietnam was a product of Cold War ideology. Had it not been for the Cold War, South Vietnam would not have been important to the United States. But Fred Logeval has argued ideology, domino theory become less important in the minds of decision makers as the 1960s unfold. And upholding US credibility abroad by assuring our allies that they can rely on us. If we let down the South Vietnamese, our allies elsewhere in the world won't be able to rely on us.
- [43:55]
F
There are those who wonder why we have a responsibility there. Well, we have it there for the same reason that we, we have a responsibility for the defense of Europe. World War II was fought in both Europe and Asia. And when it ended, we found Ourselves with continued responsibility for the defense of.
- [44:18]
B
Freedom, and that our enemies get the message, too. If we don't show strength in South Vietnam, it might embolden our enemies elsewhere. That's a psychological domino theory linked to the issue of credibility. There's personal credibility, too, not just international credibility. Trump, to him, of course, his own personal self image. Right. Is very important.
- [44:37]
C
The war would have never happened if I were president. Would have never, not even a million years. And Putin knows that, too. Would have never happened.
- [44:44]
B
I'm gonna get to a question, Linda, but just hang in there because I got a couple other thoughts here on this. I'm trying to introduce a number of subjects so people can think about these questions. I just revisited Sergei Radchenko's book To Run the World for a different episode about the decision making in the Soviet Union in the Politburo in 1979 to invade Afghanistan. Was that a matter of strategic importance? Can allow a Muslim revolution to take hold in our weak underbelly? All the Soviet republics in those days were Muslim majority. Afghanistan was adjacent to them. So a peripheral. Maybe what could be seen as a peripheral interest to the Soviets or Vietnam to the United States becomes vital. Or was it an ideological war? Gotta have a Soviet client. We can't allow, you know, a Soviet government to be toppled. In Afghanistan, actually, there was like a civil war among the Communists in Afghanistan. The Soviets invaded to put their chosen toady in charge. I guess what I'm getting at here is our ideology influences our view of vital versus peripheral, our sense of strategy, our sense of history, our own personal credibility. So I don't know where realism falls in all of that, but you might even say the war in Iraq was a realist concern. Melvin Loeffler, the historian, the dean of foreign policy historians, says that the US invasion in 2003 was driven primarily not by ideological crusading, but by a genuine concern over the physical security of the United States. You may take as much time as you'd like to peel away the layers of that onion I just served up here.
- [46:18]
E
I mean, we have discussed how realism can be used as an alibi for, you know, any matter of interventions. Whether that is legitimate realism or not, I think is open to debate and has been the subject of ample debate. But I think what you're, you know, this question about credibility and even the kind of personal whims and desires of political leadership is also something that the realist tradition speaks to and appeals to. And, you know, there was this among the early realists, that this sense that it Kind of comes down to the individual and that the individual must have this wise and discerning approach to what should be prioritized and what should not be right. And at first, at least, there was this kind of allergy to the quantifiable mode of foreign policy. So I think that realism definitely kind of appeals to this moment of personality politics, if you want to describe it in that way.
- [47:13]
B
Yeah. Or as Alex Duvall calls it, the political marketplace, Global mafia politics. Stephen Wertheim. I won't repeat that monologue, but the curse of credibility and realism.
- [47:27]
D
I mean, I think realism at its best is a good antidote to these problems that United States has had coming from a concern with credibility among allies, et cetera. Realists tend to, again, at their best, tend to say, wait a minute, let's think about the specific interest the United States has in this specific place. By the way, other countries don't just see U.S. behavior as a monolith, a repetition of the same. No matter where the United States is doing something, they judge their own situation in specific terms and appraise what they think the US Interest is in their own security. This is one of the reasons why I've argued that a defense of Taiwan, should it ever come to that, God forbid, would not be pivotal to the balance of power in the Indo Pacific. A lot of people argue that, well, if the United States, maybe Taiwan isn't worth, you know, World War III with China, but if the United States doesn't defend Taiwan, then it will lose its credibility among allies, the Japanese won't trust us, so they too will, will fold to Beijing, etc. I think I have a basically realist reaction to that, which is, why would they do that? That doesn't make any sense. They will understand that Taiwan is not Japan, that the United States has a treaty commitment to Japan, but not Taiwan, that Japan is, in geographic terms, more significant, etc. Etc. Also, countries don't like to be bullied and bossed around by other countries. So balancing not just bandwagoning is something that states tend to do. And if the United States is giving Japan the option of having a continued alliance with the United States, I suspect Japan will make the choice to do that or in a worst case scenario, acquire nuclear weapons, which is not desirable in my view. But if we're talking about the alternative being paying the upfront costs of World War three with China over, Taiwan becomes significantly more palatable to me. So for my money, that's an application of realist reasoning that I think is useful and that Just leads me to one final point that I've wanted to invoke at various points in this conversation, which is that I think there's a lot of discussion about spheres of influence right now. I heard it in India when I was there last week as well. What people are missing is a concept that comes from the realist vocabulary, and that is a balance of power. If the United States is losing a position of global dominance and the world is no longer unipolar, it's not just that big powers will get to rampage over small ones. There is an option of balancing. We really miss that option in our political discourse, and I think we do that at our peril. Could Europe, even without the United States, balance against Russia in conventional military terms? I think it could. It'll take quite some time to get there. And it doesn't mean the United States doesn't need to be involved in some fashion in European security. But I think the sort of realist discourse is valuable here, whereas the liberal hegemonic discourse tends to make it seem as though the choice is the liberal order slash US Global hegemony, or we retreat to a world of spheres of influence or complete chaos. Chaos, yeah.
- [51:03]
B
Linda, I'll give you the final word here. I just want to say it's like the world is trying to pull us all into the 21st century with problems that transcend national boundaries, climate change, migration, which is a reality of the world. It's only going to get worse, especially if climate change gets worse. Yet we're still being dragged backwards with these wars, brutish wars over territorial domination, and we forget about soft power. You haven't, Linda, but we forget about soft power. There are other ways to exert influence other than military domination. Certainly the Chinese have figured that out. They go around the world with big smiles on their faces and suitcases full of money. It's called the Belt and Road Initiative, however flawed it might be or unfair in some ways.
- [51:46]
E
But, yeah, that's interesting. I mean, one of the Trump administration's policies has been to get countries in South America to pull out of the Belt and Road Initiative. I mean, I think, you know, of course, soft power is very much alive. I think realism has much to say about the benefits of soft power. You know, I think we could think about this whole discussion about why. Why is realism important? Why is it vital to get a grasp on this zeitgeist that we're in? I think it's because we all want to understand the terms in which we are kind of navigating the world. You know, I think there's no question that we see a retrenchment of US Soft power in this moment and basically very little interest in using that as a tool of statecraft, much to our regret.
- [52:30]
B
On the next episode of History As It Happens, historian Roger Griffin returns to answer the question, is Trump a fascist? Now that I vice thugs, A paramilitary army has invaded Minnesota to conduct violent immigration raids, assaulting American citizens, even shooting some to death. Is it safe now to say this is fascism? Remember, sign up for my newsletter. It is free. Just go to Substack and search for History As It Happens.