Defensive realism is a theory of international relations that’s a useful lens to look through in order to analyze international politics today. The essence of defensive realism is that as a state ...

Why do people hate realism so much? It’s a thoughtful question asked by Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy. Walt is a card-carrying foreign policy realist, his work on alliances and his theory of balance ...

In this ambitious work of political theory, Bagg argues that defenders of Western democracy tend to struggle because they fail to grapple with underlying material disparities of economic and social ...

During Russia's terrible and ongoing total war on Ukrainian civilians, it has become clear that one strain of so-called "realist" thought in international relations theory is a source of confusion and ...

My issue of Perspectives on Politics arrived just before I left town for the holidays, which gave me just enough time to look over John Schuessler and Sebastian Rosato’s article “A Realist Foreign ...

Foreign policy realists, for all of their intellectual heft, have historically struggled to translate their academic theories into actual government policy. Not only have realists failed to prevent ...

Some clarification is desperately needed. The release of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) report has caused the chattering classes to swoon over the “return of the realists.” Now the spectacle of people who ...

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I defend a realist commitment to the truth of our most empirically successful current scientific theories— on the ground that it provides the best explanation of their success and the success of their ...