Eurasia Press & News
Do Realists Hold the Solution to a World in Crisis?
For almost 30 years after the Cold War ended, American foreign policy elites argued that the United States should use its unmatched military and economic power as a force for transformation. For some, this meant working to expand the role of multilateral institutions such as NATO, promoting unfettered free trade, and protecting human rights worldwide, even by using military force. Others believed that the United States should wield its military power as democracy’s spear by subduing violent terrorists, overthrowing tyrannical regimes, and deterring potential revisionist powers. These views, however, were two sides of the same coin: underlying both was a belief that the United States must maintain its dominant position in the world and, when necessary, wield its might to defend liberal rights.
But after the failures of U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the rise of rival great powers, and the weakening of American democracy at home, this era of relative bipartisan consensus has ended. U.S. foreign policy is in disarray, with no obvious vision for what should come next. For Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, the path forward lies in what she calls “realist internationalism.” Grounded in a long tradition of realist thought, this strategy places the national interest—not ideology—at the center of foreign-policy making and views the pursuit of democratization abroad as unnecessary, even foolish.
Ashford also pushes back against what she sees as excessively purist calls for retrenchment or even isolationism. International engagement, she argues, is no longer a choice; the United States’ security and prosperity are tethered to an open global market. In practice, a Washington that followed her realist internationalism would retrench militarily from places where the United States lacks a national interest, such as the Middle East; draw down its support in places where partners can manage security threats on their own, such as Europe; and accept that it cannot determine Ukraine’s fate. Provocatively, Ashford encourages the United States to accept great powers’ “spheres of influence” while also ensuring that it can use nonmilitary instruments, especially economic tools, to counter aggression that could cripple the global economy.
Ashford’s effort to unpack Washington’s chaotic foreign policy debate is impressive, breaking down its strains of thought into four clear positions. And her own preferred position is prudent. Rejecting liberal triumphalism, she recognizes the need to hem in American ambitions to effect change abroad. Unlike hawks and isolationists, however, she also recognizes that only by nurturing robust relationships with other countries can the United States ensure security and prosperity at home.
But Ashford also acknowledges that realists have often had a hard time gaining influence in Washington. “No one loves a political realist,” she laments, quoting the realist political scientist Robert Gilpin. Historically, realists’ proposed strategies have been misunderstood, ignored, or even mocked as cold and immoral. In Ashford’s view, however, this public relations problem is a secondary obstacle. Realists’ more urgent task is to define and articulate a coherent strategic paradigm, which should then appeal to policymakers thanks to its sound reasoning, especially at a moment of geopolitical turmoil.
This is where the book stumbles. It understates the degree to which realists’ obsession with cool-headed reason has too often left them unwilling to contend with the need to galvanize both elite and public opinion. Good ideas are not enough. If realists such as Ashford cannot figure out a way to capture the imaginations of policymakers and ordinary Americans, all the reason in the world won’t matter.
FROM CHAOS TO ORDER
Washington’s foreign policy debate now seems cacophonous. Each view represented in it, Ashford writes, “repudiates some core part of the post–Cold War consensus: nation-building, democracy promotion, globalization, trade, or . . . military primacy.” But the various camps cannot coalesce. Some “remain decidedly ideological in orientation, whereas others hew toward more traditional realpolitik approaches to the world.” Adding to the confusion, these views no longer “map neatly onto partisan political lines.”
Yet Ashford contends that a useful taxonomy can be imposed on this debate. She argues that in essence, U.S. foreign policy thinkers and practitioners now take one of two sides on two key foreign policy questions, yielding four distinct blocs. The first question concerns the role of ideology in U.S. foreign policy: Should the United States seek to reshape the international order in its image? The second question is about what drives violence and instability in international politics: Does insecurity arise when large powers fail to restrain “determined, revisionist actors”? Or, conversely, are threats to use force most often unnecessary provocations, creating misperceptions that drive escalatory spirals?
In Ashford’s view, the two possible answers to each question “produce four often highly distinctive visions” for the United States’ global engagement. Some of Ashford’s schools of thought resemble Walter Russell Mead’s well-known categories of strategists (Hamiltonians, Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, and Wilsonians), but they differ in that they go beyond description and instead define these cohorts by their core assumptions. “Liberal-order primacists” (people Mead called Wilsonians) remain fiercely committed to the idea that liberal values should drive American foreign policy and believe that deterrence failures invite autocratic aggression. At the heart of liberal primacy is “the notion that an American-led order of liberal international institutions can stabilize the international system, overcome rivalries, and bring peace to the world.” This camp includes many neoconservatives, such as the Brookings scholar Robert Kagan, as well as traditional Democratic foreign policy hands, such as Samantha Power.
U.S. foreign policy thinkers have separated into four distinct blocs.Members of a second group, which Ashford dubs the “progressive worldbuilders,” draw from an “anti-war, socialist” heritage. Like liberal primacists, they “believe in building a better world,” but primarily “through non-military tools.” Quoting the foreign policy expert Robert Farley, Ashford notes that this sometimes incoherent movement has, until recently, been united around just two core convictions: that “the United States should refrain from fighting stupid, random wars” and that “the U.S. defense budget is far, far too high.” But this camp (whose adherents include Matthew Duss, Senator Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy adviser in his 2020 presidential campaign, and the Chat-ham House fellow Heather Hurlburt) is making efforts “to build a more nuanced, and distinctly ‘progressive,’ foreign and defense policy framework . . . preferably with a redistributionist bent.”
Among those who believe U.S. foreign policy should be less ideologically motivated, “America-first hawks” (Mead’s Jacksonians) seek “peace through strength,” the deterrence of aggressors through military might rather than international institutions. Members of this cohort (including some within President Donald Trump’s administration, such as Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby) believe that the United States must strive to remain the dominant power in international politics. They are not ideological crusaders, but they are more than willing to use force to coerce aggressive powers, rogue nonstate actors, or even U.S. allies and partners.
Those in the fourth and final group, the “realist-restrainers,” also believe that interests should trump ideology in U.S. foreign policy. But they are far more skeptical than the America-first hawks when it comes to Washington’s ability to achieve primacy through military strength. This camp includes a motley assortment of academics, progressive Democrats, conservative Republicans, “libertarians and anti-imperialists for whom restraint is a moral issue,” deficit hawks, veterans’ groups—and Ashford herself. “It might be simplest to say that realist-restrainers are united primarily by their opposition to primacy (or ‘deep engagement’) and its tendency to overreach,” Ashford explains. “This is the core factor that divides them from . . . America-first hawks.” Their goals are confined to preventing the emergence of a hegemon that could threaten the global free-trade system on which the United States’ political and economic health depends.
Critics might charge that collapsing grand strategic debates into a two-by-two matrix is an oversimplification, one that glosses over important disputes about the utility of military force or the value of institutions. But Ashford’s taxonomy is an important contribution. By contrasting foreign policy positions in terms of a few core assumptions, she suggests paths for constructive dialogue among competing factions.
PEACE IN RETREAT
Like all realists, Ashford bases her own preferred strategy on several key assumptions about the nature of international politics. The United States (and all countries) should wish to preserve its security above all else. It should seek to advance the national interest, not act on behalf of the universal good. And it must do so in a world that is fundamentally anarchic—one that lacks a global government. But she differs from traditional realists by recognizing that maintaining an open and free global economy is vital to the United States’ prosperity, and thus the national interest is not easily separated from an international one. And she questions long-standing realist assumptions about the primacy of military power, arguing that economic and diplomatic instruments are often just as effective in securing the national interest.
If Washington adopted a realist–internationalist strategy, Ashford argues, U.S. foreign policy would head in a radically different and more pragmatic direction. It would no longer make sense for the United States to claim, for instance, that aggression against Taiwan poses an existential threat, especially when a pledge to defend the island’s sovereignty at all costs could mire the U.S. military in a catastrophic war. And with the return of multipolarity, U.S. policymakers would have to “learn to again live with the reality of spheres of influence.” They would have to acknowledge that Taiwan lies squarely in China’s sphere.
Such a recognition need not mean abandoning small states to domination. Rather, the United States should seek to shift the burden of protection to its allies and partners and rely on nonmilitary means to deter aggression. In Ashford’s view, there is no reason that Japan and South Korea could not take chief responsibility for supplying Taiwan’s security. In Asia, Ashford suggests that the United States should deploy a limited set of air and sea assets oriented toward protecting global shipping lanes. She also argues that Washington can leverage a variety of political instruments—economic tools, diplomatic talent, and intelligence know-how—to keep itself secure without provoking unnecessary military conflict.
Ultimately, Ashford believes that the United States’ privileged geographic position and nuclear deterrence make it fundamentally secure. Once one accepts that premise, there is no reason for Washington to invest huge amounts of resources in maintaining military might. It is easy to see the appeal of such a world. But as Ashford herself wonders, if a realist approach to foreign policy is so reasonable, why is it that time and time again U.S. administrations have rejected realist approaches in favor of hawkish or liberal-internationalist ones?
THE POWER OF PARABLE
Ashford mainly blames forces beyond realists’ control. U.S. partisanship often undermines a moderate, rational approach to foreign policy. Public opinion, she argues, tends to follow the whims of elites, who tend to favor more grandiose narratives. Entrenched bureaucracies fiercely oppose prudent budget cuts. And the United States’ democratic allies abroad often encourage U.S. leaders to adopt a Wilsonian framework.
At a deep level, Ashford writes, Americans also want their foreign policy to appear to be rooted in morality and are fundamentally resistant to realists’ “skepticism about transformative change” and their somewhat “pessimistic view of human nature.” Ashford is hardly the first American realist to recognize that realist grand strategy has rarely mobilized public support. At the end of World War II, there was little consensus about what direction U.S. foreign policy should take. Should the United States return to isolation or dedicate itself to building a liberal and international order? Should it work with the Soviet Union or treat that power as an ideological rival?
Realists such as George Kennan, President Harry Truman’s director of policy planning, advocated for a prudent strategy based on the national interest. Believing that the Soviet Union was motivated foremost by insecurity, Kennan urged Washington to pursue containment using economic and political instruments and prioritize defending industrial centers such as Germany and Japan. The political scientist Hans Morgenthau, an influential realist, counseled Washington to avoid embarking on a liberal crusade lest it provoke war with Moscow.
Kennan has been immortalized as the father of containment and thus the architect of the United States’ Cold War strategy. But in truth, Kennan’s broader realist vision lost out. Instead, Truman and his successors painted the Soviet Union as an existential and ideological threat. Embracing the domino theory, Washington treated every part of the globe as integral to the fight against communist aggression, justifying military interventions with appeals to universal liberal values.
This happened because hawks and liberal internationalists proved able to weave grand narratives that resonated with the public and with partners abroad, sidelining realist grand strategy for decades. After the Cold War ended, realist strategists again urged U.S. leaders to restrain their global commitments and reap a peace dividend at home. Public opinion seemed to be in these realists’ corner: a 1993 Pew survey found that only ten percent of Americans wanted their country to adopt a role as the “single world leader” and expand NATO. But, as Ashford understands, the general public would not lead the way. Under President Bill Clinton, liberal primacists took the reins of foreign policy by appealing to a moral high ground. NATO’s expansion east, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright argued in January 1997, could “defeat old hatreds” and “deter conflict.” Later that year, another Pew survey found that a majority of Americans had come to support NATO’s expansion.
THE PRAGMATIST’S TRAP
Ultimately, Ashford seems to have faith that rational arguments can overcome realism’s public relations problem. But here, Ashford repeats the mistake of so many realists: they are so convinced of their superior ability to reason that they neglect to stress the ethical foundation of that reasoning. Failing to cast a strategy in terms of ideals can easily lead to the perception that realists are selfish and amoral, especially in the United States. This error has led some to mislabel Trump as a realist, mistaking his “crude transactionalism . . . unencumbered by morality” for a principled commitment to the U.S. national interest.
In truth, realists could fairly cast themselves as the truest defenders of American ideals. At the heart of much (although not all) of realist theory lies a normative commitment to democratic processes. Indeed, Ashford argues that “morality . . . can be the foundation of realist thinking.” She writes that a “second core interest” that realist policymakers must seek to ensure—after the United States’ protection from basic threats such as a nuclear attack—is “democracy and prosperity at home.” The very concept of a national interest incorporates the idea that a country’s aims abroad must be both collective and contested. A foreign policy based on the national interest must appeal to different interests within a society; its aims and means have to make sense to the public as a call for collective action.
Not all realists are fervent democrats. But the realist vision of a collective national interest creates, at least in theory, more space for contestation than its counterparts. America-first hawks silence alternatives by instilling fear, as when Senator Roger Wicker applauded the Trump administration’s strikes on Iran as necessary to “eliminate an existential threat.” Liberal primacists appear more democratic, with their devotion to multilateral forums and procedures designed to create a level playing field. But their commitment to universal liberalism as a set of nonnegotiable principles shuts down contestation in practice by excluding and stigmatizing those who disagree.
Realists need to develop a moral narrative.Because realists recognize a variety of national interests, and because they see power politics as a normal condition of international affairs, they are willing to engage in a more pluralistic manner and forge paths to cooperation with both partners and rivals. They could be far more explicit about the moral value of these approaches. For instance, they could emphasize that by advocating for a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine, they do not merely want to save cash at the expense of saving democracy. Instead, they seek to end a conflict that still threatens to become a devastating great-power war, consolidate the Ukrainians’ gains, and allow the vital task of rebuilding to begin.
Ashford has done policymakers a service by offering a clear-eyed assessment of contemporary global power dynamics, a well-reasoned argument in favor of international partnerships, and a sober warning about the consequences of provoking catastrophic conflict. It is an eminently rational foreign policy blueprint. But her too-brief treatment of realism’s public relations problem falls into a familiar and unnecessary trap. For realist internationalism to prevail as a grand strategy, its adherents need to develop a moral narrative that can win hearts, not only minds.
