In an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN on Monday, President Trump’s aide Stephen Miller blithely articulated the outlook that has taken hold of the White House. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
His words seemed to deliberately echo Trump’s statement on Saturday that the capture and extradition of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his wife, Cilia Flores, was the product of “the iron laws that have always determined global power.” Not international laws, which prohibit the use of force to threaten the independence and territorial integrity of another sovereign state. Trump, for his part, said in a recent interview with The Times that “I don’t need international law.”
“America will never allow foreign powers to rob our people or drive us back into and out of our own hemisphere,” Trump said on Saturday. To that end, the administration is reviving the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in its neighborhood. “Under our new National Security Strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” the president said.
That National Security Strategy, released in early December, gave a name to one of the organizing principles supposedly governing the administration’s foreign policy: “flexible realism.” The document stated that the United States would pursue “peace through strength,” have a “predisposition to non-interventionism,” safeguard the “sovereign rights of nations,” first and foremost those of the United States. It would reassert American dominance over the Western Hemisphere.
The strategy maintained that there was “nothing inconsistent or hypocritical” about taking action in response to “a realistic assessment” about what could be achieved, nor in maintaining relations with undemocratic states if it served the national interest.
“If you look at the document carefully, it has a profound realist bent to it,” said John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and one of the country’s most prominent self-declared realist scholars. “The basic realist worldview is that the Western Hemisphere is the most important area of the world for the United States.”
The realist school of foreign policy is rooted in the belief that the world is fundamentally ungovernable and that politics comes down to power. While idealists might believe in the potential for international law to coerce states into good behavior, realists have never put much stock in such dreams. Realism is at heart “a pessimistic intellectual tradition about how the world of human politics is and how it is bound to be,” as the scholar Patrick Porter puts it in his new book, “How to Survive a Hostile World,” a kind of self-help manual for states.
While the varied strains of realism are plentiful and sometimes contradictory, the Trump administration is channeling one of its crudest forms. Scholars generally view realism as a theory for describing the world as it is; Trump and his team are using the term in an effort to redraw the world map. By invoking realism to justify their actions abroad, Trump and his associates are treating it as an alibi for a distinctly American imperialism, a pretext for belligerence.
“The Monroe Doctrine is like the ur-text of realism, at least in the American context,” said Matthew Specter, a historian and a senior fellow at the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Originally written to prevent further European colonization in the Western Hemisphere, in the 20th century it became a tool for justifying U.S. military interventions in the region. The United States invoked the doctrine during its 1941 occupation of Greenland, to protect it from falling to Nazi Germany. American troops have been stationed there ever since, and Trump seems to be focused on claiming the entire territory.
Raphael S. Cohen, of the RAND Corporation, has argued that the administration is engaging in a “grand experiment” in realism that will indelibly change the field of foreign affairs. In a speech last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the administration marked a new era of “hard-nosed realism.” Others argue that the president’s approach undermines his realist credentials and betrays a profound misunderstanding of the concept
“There are iron laws of world politics that they don’t understand,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Realism is all about realizing that in a competitive world, you want to be smart, and go for genuine strategic advantage, not just pointless displays of power.”
Whether Trump deserves to be called a realist will be debated for decades. But the National Security Strategy announced that a kind of self-described realism is now officially U.S. policy, and the abduction and prosecution of Maduro is one of its products.
Foreign leaders have quickly taken notice, responding in bellicose and foreboding terms. Over the weekend, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil said on social media that the attack on Venezuela was a “first step toward a world of violence, chaos, and instability, where the law of the strongest prevails over multilateralism.” Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland wrote that “neither enemy nor ally” would respect weakness. Jordan Bardella, the leader of the far-right French party National Rally, called for France to “strengthen our industrial and military capabilities.”
Yet a global drift toward realist thinking has been in motion for some time. At an E.U. retreat in February, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said that the bloc must acknowledge the “harsher, more transactional reality” of the day and needed to “deal with the world as we find it.” In March, Singapore’s foreign minister, Vivian Balakrishnan, said that the rules-based international order was “reverting to a time when the world is divided into blocs controlled by big powers.”
If we are now living through an age that rewards pessimism and power, its effects will not remain neatly confined to foreign policy.“Trump is not revealing the world as it is,” Specter said. “He is remaking the world.”
Nasty and Brutish
Realism is the kind of word that, as the Times columnist William Safire once observed, almost always comes with an “adjectival qualifier.” The field is populated by classical and neo-classical realists; offensive and defensive realists; progressive, ethical and now, apparently, flexible realists. As an academic theory and worldview, it is a “mansion of many rooms,” Specter said.
Trump Administration: Live Updates
Updated
- 5 Democratic states sue the Trump administration over $10 billion funding freeze.
- Amid protests, ICE told agents to take ‘decisive action’ if threatened.
- Trump orders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds.
Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes are often invoked as its oldest representatives; each warned of the fundamentally self-interested nature of humankind and the perilous conditions of the political world. One of realism’s founding creeds comes from Thucydides: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Machiavelli argued that “to help another ruler grow powerful is to prepare your own ruin,” that the ends justify the means, and that one must embrace the world as it is rather than as one might wish it to be. Hobbes constructed his theory of sovereign power, embodied in the idea of the Leviathan, to shield humankind from the “nasty, brutish and short” conditions of life in the state of nature.
But the most important historical antecedents of Trumpian realism may lie in the late 19th-century age of empire, when German thinkers coined terms like “Weltpolitik” and “Lebensraum,” or “living space,” to describe how empires should think, speak and act on the world stage. The great powers of the era took for granted that the world should be carved up into spheres of influence for the powerful to exploit as they wished. Hitler’s expansionist foreign policy was derived partly from this strain of realism. In 1939, he spoke of constructing a German Monroe Doctrine to justify domination over Europe.
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 cleareyed philosophy of international relations founded on the idea that great-power politics is a fact of life.
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.
Critically, 20th-century realists accepted that all power is necessarily bound by constraint, hemmed in by the limitations of geography, politics and human nature. To lose sight of this is to risk slipping into much darker territory. Thucydides’ claim that the strong will do what they can was not meant as a prescription but rather as a warning. The use of unbridled power against the weak was “a sign that Athens had gone off the deep end, lost a sense of strategic restraint, and has become depraved and decadent,” Walt said.
For Walt and other realist thinkers, Trump’s aggressive and chaotic actions on the world stage — his antagonism of U.S. allies, his threats of territorial conquest and assertions that the U.S. is not afraid of putting “boots on the ground” — undermine any claim he could make to practicing a realist foreign policy. Realists largely opposed the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, preferring policies of restraint. The failures of those episodes vindicated the realist worldview.
“Flexible realism is a beautiful neologism because it doesn’t point you in any particular direction, and it doesn’t steer you away from any direction,” Walt said. The incoherence of Trump’s foreign policy is explicitly memorialized in the National Security Strategy. On one page, the document states that Trump’s foreign policy is “realistic without being ‘realist.’” On another, it lays out a distinct strain of realism that purportedly governs its actions.
For Porter, it is not realism that defines the Trump era but rather its “corrupt cousin,” machtpolitik, which pursues power for its own sake and is defined by a “sort of violent exhilaration of destruction, nihilism and vengeance.”
Trump’s penchant for theatrics and bombast, his obsession with status, and his use of power to enrich himself and his family — all these are characteristic elements of this darker ideology. Machtpolitik is realism gone wrong, the kind of phenomenon that it was ostensibly invented to prevent.
“By losing all restraints, you destroy yourself,” Porter said. The perpetual threat of machtpolitik is why, he says, “realists can never relax, never just sit back when people invoke the philosophy for the sake of imperial hubris.”
A War Mentality
That loss of restraint was on full display during Trump’s address to the nation hours after the attack on Venezuela. At one telling moment, the president paused his excoriation of the Maduro regime to praise the actions of the National Guard in American cities, singling out their police presence in Memphis, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C. To these cities he issued much the same threat that he had addressed to Venezuela’s new interim president, Delcy Rodríguez. “We’ll go back if we have to,” he said of Los Angeles. “We are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,” he said of Venezuela.
It has long been realist orthodoxy that while the international arena is anarchic and ungovernable, the opposite is true of domestic affairs. Every state has a sovereign that keeps order, upholds the law and safeguards its citizens. But for Trump, the threats posed at home and abroad are seemingly the same, and so is his response. Armed government agents have arrested and killed U.S. citizens as part of Trump’s anti-immigration policies; the federal government has strong-armed universities into accepting its agenda by withholding research funding; the Federal Communications Commission uses mergers as leverage to influence media coverage.
“In a number of places, including here in the U.S., confidence in the social contract is eroding,” Walt said. “This is reflected in the polarization of American politics and also in the nastiness, the worship of violence, and the tendency to depict other members of society as not just people with whom one disagrees, but as the enemy.”
The ongoing debates over the nature of realism and its contours are, among other things, a symptom of this imperiled state of affairs. “Democrats feel besieged and believe that Trump has brought a kind of war mentality into our civic life,” said Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That makes our domestic politics resemble what realists say that international politics is like — a situation of anarchy where the only real way to check a powerful actor who wants to do you harm is to build up your own power.”
Under these conditions, the return of realism makes sense as a strategy for navigating a world caught in perpetual crisis — a world unable to prevent the commission of the worst crimes or to slow climate change, and which seems to have lost faith in the loftier aspirations of international law.
“We’ve spent 30 years in a period of extreme liberal overextension,” said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “We swung so far in that direction that a course correction was almost inevitable. Now the question is, what form does that course correction take?” In addition to the bitter legacies of Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of China and the return to a multipolar world have pushed realism back into politics.
Trump rose to power in part because he explicitly rejected liberal moralism and spoke frankly about the brutal and often transactional nature of politics. “His depiction of America in the world mirrored how a lot of people felt about how their own lives were going,” Wertheim said. “It seemed to at least recognize a certain kind of base-line reality about the competitive nature of the world. For decades, American leaders had told a happy story about producing peace, stability and democracy, and the results were quite different.”
The president seemed to believe that after decades of failed American interventions commissioned in the name of democracy, the public would be more willing to accept foreign meddling for self-interested reasons. The attack on Venezuela and, especially, Trump’s pledge to seize its oil production infrastructure is the result.
The second Trump administration may very well mark the start of a violent global age of machtpolitik. “Trump is different than all of his predecessors because of his contempt for international law and international institutions,” Mearsheimer said. Whenever past presidents blatantly violated international agreements, he said, “they felt compelled to try to justify it, to put a velvet glove over the mailed fist, because they correctly understood that those laws and institutions were in America’s interest.” Over the past week, Trump and his deputies have revealed how profoundly they disdain the norms of global governance and demonstrated their willingness to use force to get what they want. On Wednesday, the president signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from dozens of international organizations.
But to acknowledge that we have entered a pessimistic and belligerent era is not to give in to it. Realism offers many lessons for the present moment — about the profound dangers of unrestrained power and the tragic bent of contemporary politics. “What is important is that we use pessimism as a starting point in a human sense,” Porter said, “to work out what is possible and to strive for that.”
The post The Theory That Gives Trump a Blank Check for Aggression appeared first on New York Times.
