Fireside Friday, June 27, 2025 (On the Limits of Realism)

Fireside this week! Originally, I was thinking I’d talk about the ‘future of classics’ question in this space, but I think that deserves a full post (in connection with this week’s book recommendation and the next fireside’s book recommendation), so instead this week I want to talk a little about foreign policy realism, what it is and what its limits are.

Percy with his standard resting expression of mild annoyance. Although he seems quite happy with the way our little one stacked one of his cat beds ontop of another of his cat beds.

Longtime readers will remember that we’ve actually already talked about ‘realism’ as a school of international relations study before, in the context of our discussion of Europa Universalis. But let’s briefly start out with what we mean when we say IR realism (properly ‘neo-realism’ in its modern form): this is not simply being ‘realistic’ about international politics. ‘Realism’ is amazing branding, but ‘realists’ are not simply claiming that they are observing reality – they have a broader claim about how reality works.

Instead realism is the view that international politics is fundamentally structured by the fact that states seek to maximize their power, act more or less rationally to do so, and are unrestrained by customs or international law. Thus the classic Thucydidean formulation in its most simple terms, “the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must,”¹²⁶ with the additional proviso that, this being the case, all states seek to be as strong as possible.

If you accept those premises, you can chart a fairly consistent analytical vision of interstate activity basically from first principles, describing all sorts of behavior – balancing, coercion, hegemony and so on – that ought to occur in such systems and which does occur in the real world. Naturally, theory being what it is, neo-realist theory (which is what we call the modern post-1979 version of this thinking) is split into its own sub-schools based on exactly how they imagine this all works out, with defensive realism (‘states aim to survive’) and offensive realism (‘states aim to maximize power’), but we needn’t get into the details.

So when someone says they are a ‘foreign policy realist,’ assuming they know what they’re talking about, they’re not saying they have a realistic vision of international politics, but that they instead believe that the actions of states are governed mostly by the pursuit of power and security, which they pursue mostly rationally, without moral, customary or legal constraint. This is, I must stress, not the only theory of the case (and we’ll get into some limits in a second).

The first problem with IR Realists is that they run into a contradiction between realism as an analytical tool and realism as a set of normative behaviors. Put another way, IR realism runs the risk of conflating ‘states generally act this way,’ with ‘states should generally act this way.’ You can see that specific contradiction manifested grotesquely in John Mearsheimer’s career as of late, where his principle argument is that because a realist perspective suggests that Russia would attack Ukraine that Russia was right to do so and therefore, somehow, the United States should not contest this (despite it being in the United States’ power-maximizing interest to do so). Note the jump from the analytical statement (‘Russia was always likely to do this’) to the normative statement (‘Russia carries no guilt, this is NATO’s fault, we should not stop this’). The former, of course, can always be true without the latter being necessary.

I should note, this sort of ‘normative smuggling’ in realism is not remotely new: it is exactly how the very first instances of realist political thought are framed. The first expressions of IR realism are in Thucydides, where the Athenians – first at Corinth and then at Melos – make realist arguments expressly to get other states to do something, namely to acquiesce to Athenian Empire. The arguments in both cases are explicitly normative, that Athens did not act “contrary to the common practice of mankind” (expressed in realist dog-eat-dog terms) and so in the first case shouldn’t be punished with war by Sparta and in the latter case, that the Melians should submit to Athenian rule. In both cases, the Athenians are smuggling in a normative statement about what a state should do (in the former case, seemingly against interest!) into a description of what states supposedly always do.

I should note that one of my persistent complaints against international relations study in political science in general is that political scientists often read Thucydides very shallowly, dipping in for the theory and out for the rest. But Thucydides’ reader would not have missed that it is always the Athenians who make the realist arguments and they lost both the arguments the war. When Thucydides has the Melians caution that the Athenians’ ‘realist’ ruthlessness would mean “your fall would be a signal for the heaviest vengeance and an example for the world to meditate upon”¹²⁷ the ancient Greek reader knows they are right, in a way that it often seems to me political science students seem to miss.

And there’s a logical contradiction inherent in this sort of normative smuggling, which is that the smuggling is even necessary at all. After all, if states are mostly rational and largely pursue their own interests, loudly insisting that they should do so seems a bit pointless, doesn’t it? Using realism as a way to describe the world or to predict the actions of other states is consistent with the logical system, but using it to persuade other states – or your own state – seems to defeat the purpose. If you believe realism is true, your state and every other is going to act to maximize its power, regardless of what you do or say. If they can do otherwise than there must be some significant space for institutions, customs, morals, norms or simple mistakes and suddenly the air-tight logical framework of realism begins to break down.

That latter vision gives rise to constructivism (‘international relations are shaped by ideology and culture’) and IR liberalism (‘international relations are also shaped by institutions, which can bend the system away from the endless conflict realism anticipates’). The great irony of realism is that to think that having more realists in power would cause a country to behave in a more realist way is inconsistent with neo-Realism which would suggest countries ought to behave in realist ways even in the absence of realist theory or thinkers.

In practice – and this is the punchline – in my experience most ‘realists,’ intentionally or not, use realism as a cover for strong ideological convictions, typically convictions which are uncomfortable to utter in the highly educated spaces that foreign policy chatter tends to happen. Sometimes those convictions are fairly benign – it is not an accident that there’s a vocal subset of IR-realists with ties to the CATO Institute, for instance. They’re libertarians who think the foreign policy adventures that often flew under the banner of constructivist or liberal internationalist label – that’s where you’d find ‘spreading democracy will make the world more peaceful’ – were really expensive and they really dislike taxes. But “we should just spend a lot less on foreign policy” is a tough sell in the foreign policy space; realism can provide a more intellectually sophisticated gloss to the idea. Sometimes those convictions are less benign; one can’t help but notice the realist pretensions of some figures in the orbit of the current administration have a whiff of authoritarianism or ethnocentrism in them, since a realist framework can be used to drain imperial exploitation and butchery of its moral component, rendering it ‘just states maximizing their power – and better to be exploiter than exploited.’

One question I find useful to ask of any foreign policy framework, but especially of self-claimed realist frameworks is, “what compromise, what tradeoff does this demand of you?” Strategy, after all, is the art of priorities and that means accepting some things you want are lower priority; in the case of realism which holds that states seek to maximize power, it may mean assigning a high priority to things you do not want the state to do at all but which maximize its power. A realism deserving of the name, in applied practice would be endlessly caveated: ‘I hate, this but…’ ‘I don’t like this, but…’ ‘I would want to do this, but…’ If a neo-realist analysis leads only to comfortable conclusions that someone and their priorities were right everywhere all along, it is simply ideology, wearing realism as a mask. And that is, to be frank, the most common form, as far as I can tell.

That isn’t to say there is nothing to neo-realism or foreign policy realists. I think as an analytical and predict tool, realism is quite valuable. States very often do behave in the way realist theory would suggest they ought, they just don’t always do so and it turns out norms and expectations matter a lot. Not the least of which because, as we’ve noted before, the economic model on which realist and neo-realist thinking was predicted basically no longer exists. To return to the current Ukraine War: is Putin really behaving rationally in a power-maximizing mode by putting his army to the torch capturing burned out Ukrainian farmland one centimeter at a time and no faster? It sure seems like Russian power has been reduced rather than enhanced by this move, even though realists will insist that Russia’s effort to dominate states near it is rational power-maximizing under offensive realism.

For my own part, I think declaring one’s self a specific ‘school’ of policy thinker is a bit silly, for the same reason I don’t declare myself a specific school of historian. These ‘schools’ are really toolboxes, with different tools valuable in different situations. Declaring one’s self a resolute ‘wrench guy’ becomes a problem if you are trying to hang paintings. I suppose I tend to be most skeptical of international law and institutions, which I often view simply as expressions of hegemonic power, but on the other hand customs and morals matter a lot, in no small part because they shape the perceived interests states pursue.

But these are, rightly understood, analytical and predictive tools, not normative ones. A school of IR thought can suggest what another state might do, or what might happen if you do something, but it cannot tell you what you should do. There is, after all, a reason that every realist appeal in Thucydides, the father of realism, is rejected by its audience – Sparta goes to war, the Melians reject the Athenians and in the end, after much misery, Athens loses the war. Realism can tell you how states generally act, but it cannot tell you how you should act.

Vertical Cat Stack (Ollie is in the chair, Percy atop the tower).

On to recommendations.

Speaking of realism and ideology in foreign policy, I wrote a response to Emma Ashford’s analysis of the Trump administration’s foreign policy. Ashford presented four explanatory models for the administration’s foreign policy (realism; domestic policy; first term priorities; GOP infighting), to which I responded that ideology as a fifth category offered more explanatory power than the other four, though all of these factors are clearly at work. I think it is deceptively easy for folks who have found their views excluded from the previous administration – and this certainly seems to be how many of the realists think – to rush to the new administration and proclaim whatever it does ‘realism.’ But many of the actors shaping foreign policy in this administration are strongly ideological and it shows.

Meanwhile, for the logistics lowers out there, Drachinifel has a long discussion with Sal Mercogliano (of What’s Going On With Shipping) on the logistics of US Navy operations in the Pacific during WWII. And if you like that, I should that Sal also did a sit down interview on his own channel with Jon Parshall (one half of the author team of Shattered Sword, everyone’s favorite Midway book) on shipping in 1942 in particular.

In modern military affairs, CSIS brought Michael Kofman on to their Russian Roulette program for a battlefield update from Ukraine, covering both the recent Operation Spiderweb (the impressive drone attack on Russian airbases) but also conditions on the front line generally. I think Kofman is one of the more sober and careful voices on the conflict in Ukraine and so it is well worth listening to him, as a curb for both excessive enthusiasm or inordinate despair. I should also note that Kofman has been discussing lessons on airpower from both Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Iran on his own podcast, the Russia Contingency over at War on the Rocks, but it is behind the member paywall there (but I’d argue well worth the price of admission if you are interested in security affairs).

As an aside, I have a precis on the Battle of Cannae (216) set to come out at War on the Rocks not next week but the week after, so keep an eye out for that if it interests.

For this week’s book recommendation, I want to present a bit of ‘meta-classics,’ as it were, W. Scheidel’s What Is Ancient History? (2025) which I suppose I must note, I was given by the author. This is one of those books with a somewhat narrower focus, not about the history of antiquity but rather about the study of the history of antiquity and in particular its place within the structure of the academy in the United States. It is thus a book about what ancient history, as a field of study, has been and an argument for what it ought to be. That sort of inside baseball might have somewhat narrow appeal, but the argument is necessary.

The essential background to this argument, discussed by Scheidel in the introduction and returned to later in the work, is the ailing state of classics, which is the name in most Anglophone¹²⁸ universities for interdisciplinary departments focused on the study of ancient Greece and Rome, built around the initial core pillar of language and literary study of the corpus of surviving ancient Greek and Latin literature. The essential context is that these departments are broadly fading, besieged by falling enrollments, limited public funding and the (substantially accurate) sense that they are the product of an imperial European moment now past but not forgotten. The question, then, of what to do with the study of antiquity, is quite a pressing one: the house in which ancient history as a field was born is now collapsing.

Scheidel presents a strong argument that rather than attempting to save the house as it is, what we ought to do is build a new one. That is what this book is about: what is ancient history, what sort of institutional structure does that definition most fit and how do we get there.

Scheidel moves the argument in four steps, each with its own chapter. In the first chapter, he effectively presents a definition of ancient history designed to be more logically and intellectually consistent than the old definition of Greece-n-Rome. Instead, Scheidel argues that antiquity is an identifiable process (as much as a period), the processes by which the basic infrastructure of ‘civilization,’ – social complexity and stratification, writing, cities, literature, complex economies based on farming, states and so on – emerged. That definition certainly includes Greece and Rome, the latter representing a late stage in this process in the Mediterranean, but it is also much broader than just Greece-n-Rome because it turns out by this definition ‘antiquity’ was independently invented in several places (in modestly different forms) and thus happened at different times in different places. Scheidel thus presents early on his answer to the title question, “What is Ancient History?” – it is the study of antiquity (in any place), the period during which this process took place.

That definition in hand, the rest of the book is about the kind of structure – both historigraphical and institutional – such a definition demands. The second chapter looks at how we ‘missed’ the broad, global definition of antiquity in favor of a weaker, narrower one focused on Greece-n-Rome, as well as developing the failures of this definition. The third chapter then argues for a shift to an institutional structure based on conceiving of ancient history as a form of ‘foundation’ history, rather than one locked into either a junior position in classics departments (dominated by philology and archaeology) or in history departments (dominated by modern history) and in either case, divorced from specialists in other parts of the ancient world. The fourth chapter at last gets to the elephant in the room: what about classics, as a field: why Scheidel thinks it needs to go and how it can be made to do so.

As you might imagine, I have a lot of thoughts on Scheidel’s argument and the broader question of the study of antiquity and Rome’s place in it – so many thoughts they wouldn’t fit here. Instead, I expect at some point later this year to write something more substantive on my vision for where the study of Mediterranean antiquity ought to go – though my view coincides with Scheidel’s far more than it differs. That said, even if one is on the opposite side of the ‘classics wars,’ Scheidel’s careful argument demands consideration from anyone looking to have an informed opinion on where the study of Greece, Rome and global antiquity should go from here. If that’s a topic that interests you, Scheidel’s manifesto – his word, not mine! – is well worth a read.

And that’s the week. Next week is, of course, the week of the fourth and I think I might try to say something about the history of the civil-military relationship in the United States.