Neoconservatives used to say that they abandoned liberalism because they were “mugged by reality.” [1]The line’s rhetorical punch was easy to grasp. Some political beliefs allow you to wander the world blissfully ignorant of its dangers. Sometimes, however, these dangers become impossible to ignore. They grab you, shake you out of your dreamworld, and force you to behold the world you tried not to see.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Roundtable Review 16-27
Matthew Specter, Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Political Thought Between Germany and the United States. Stanford University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781503603127.
14 March 2025 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-27 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Michael C. Behrent
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Bethany S. Keenan
Contents
Introduction by Michael C. Behrent, Appalachian State University. 2
Review by Lucian M. Ashworth, Memorial University. 6
Review by George Lawson, Australian National University. 11
Response by Matthew Specter, UC Berkeley and History & Theory 15
Introduction by Michael C. Behrent, Appalachian State University
Neoconservatives used to say that they abandoned liberalism because they were “mugged by reality.” [1]The line’s rhetorical punch was easy to grasp. Some political beliefs allow you to wander the world blissfully ignorant of its dangers. Sometimes, however, these dangers become impossible to ignore. They grab you, shake you out of your dreamworld, and force you to behold the world you tried not to see.
The school of International Relations (IR) known as “realism” is comprised of scholars and intellectuals who, in many ways, think of themselves as having been “mugged by reality.” Realists contend that the foreign policy must emancipate itself from moral considerations and utopian aspirations so that it can focus on national self-interest in a competitive international environment, in which other states are presumed to be similarly motivated, and all disputes risk being decided through trials of force. Realism is commonly associated with American foreign policy at the height of the Cold War, as advocated by such figures as Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Henry Kissinger.[2] The historian E.H. Carr, one of the school’s earliest theorists, wrote that “realism tends to emphasize the irresistible strength of existing forces and the inevitable character of existing tendencies, and to insist that the highest wisdom lies in accepting, and adapting oneself to, these forces and these tendencies.”[3]
On the first page of his book, Matthew Specter asks: “Who would not want to claim that theirs is a realistic view of politics?” (1). This question sets the agenda of his inquiry. His goal is to question the obviousness of the appeal to reality, and to resist being blackmailed, as it were, by the imperative of being “mugged by reality.”
Specter offers a highly original historical genealogy of foreign policy realism that runs counter to the narrative touted by its partisans, who present realism as a kind of Americanization and liberalization of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s notion of Realpolitik, retooled to serve the interests of the United States after the Second World War in its rivalry with the Soviet Union.[4] Specter shows that, far from being primarily an American phenomenon, realism began in the late nineteenth-century as a transatlantic dialogue between thinkers in Germany and the United States. Realism, he maintains, was always a binational tradition.
The underlying logic of this connection lies in the fact that both nations were, in the 1890s, experiencing a rise to globalism. Hence, in Specter’s account, Weltpolitik (“world policy”), not Realpolitik, is realism’s foundational idea. In their efforts to theorize the nature of global power, authors such as Friedrich Ratzel,[5] Alfred Mahan,[6] Isaiah Bowman,[7] and Karl Haushofer,[8] among others, debated such questions as the relative merits of sea and land power, nations’ need for “living space” (Lebensraum), and the Monroe Doctrine as a model for hegemony—forming, in this way, realism’s core vocabulary. Far from simply being a disenchanted way of seeing the world, realism, Specter maintains, was an “ideological justification for empire” (3).
Specter’s narrative seeks not only to tell the story of realism’s development, but to show the ways in which realism sought to cover its historical traces. German and American theorists were each inclined to deny what they had learned from one another. Specter also examines how realists who offered their intellectual services to National Socialism later downplayed their role in the Third Reich, while seeking to dispel the notion that realism was a rationalization of Hitler’s war aims. Specter thus shows how the legal theorist Carl Schmitt tried to promote his notion of Grossraum (“grand space”) in Nazi circles,[9] only to argue, once he had become the target of de-Nazification proceedings, that it was merely a scholarly concept.[10] After describing the early career of Wilhelm Grewe, whose work later became a mainstay of postwar realism, Specter concludes that Grewe’s worldview was “a residuum of the Third Reich’s violent destruction of democratic institutions and the rule of law” (117).
Yet Specter’s aim is not simply to provide a critical history of realism. He also deconstructs the concept of realism itself. Because Specter believes that realism is more about the quest for empire than a commitment to objective reality, he argues that scholars need to call realism’s bluff and to show that it constructed reality a particular way, generated its own “reality effects,” and used these effects to fashion a distinctive intellectual swagger. In addition to his meticulous historical research, Specter is engaged, throughout the book, in a critique of realism’s discursive and justificatory strategies. He refers to the “language of Weltpolitik,” while noting the “emptiness of the signifier ‘world power’” (18). He shows that Mahan’s conception of the real is simultaneously empirical and “ethereal” (46). He unpacks Haushofer’s injunction to “see things as they really are,” demonstrating how it was as much a posture and intellectual style as an epistemological commitment (66-67). With a nod to the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu,[11] Specter calls realism a habitus: that is, a patterned way of acting and thinking, a “set of mental habits and tools,” as well as a “sensibility” (3). This claim becomes particularly important in his analysis of Hans Morgenthau, who represents the book’s center of gravity. For Morgenthau, realism was associated with a distinctive Haltung, that is, with a “spiritual-intellectual posture” (142). Establishing realism as the dominant paradigm of international relations involved more than “academic infighting and disciplinary politics”; it was above all “an emotional style and a posture that Morgenthau cultivated and practiced.” It entailed the “performance of a role,” emphasizing realism as a “way of seeing and a way of being in the world” (167).
The purpose of these deconstructive strategies, which Specter deploys with great skill, is to call into question realism’s picture of reality. Not only is realism’s construction of reality tainted by the pursuit of empire; it is also tethered to realists’ conviction that they were immune from utopian delusions and the sense of superiority they derived from their disenchanted cynicism. Yet reality, Specter suggests, is too important to be left to the realists. In the book’s penultimate chapter, Specter considers the crisis of realism in West Germany in the late 1960s, discussing critiques leveled by Eric Fromm[12] and Herbert Marcuse,[13] which allows Specter to revisit his earlier interest in the Frankfurt School.[14]. Marcuse, for instance, observed that “the realist confuses the given reality with reality: That is, I believe, the essence of realism” (185).
Marcuse’s position is not that far from Specter’s. He argues the realism has been a handmaiden to the pursuit of American imperial ambitions and that it is invested in “an intoxicatingly romantic notion of power,” as Senator William Fulbright put it in 1972 (213). While Specter’s deconstruction of realism is highly persuasive, one wonders if realism can be entirely conflated with “reality effects.” Is realism’s disdain for utopianism mere intellectual bravado? Is its conception of power as a motive force in international relations nothing more than romanticism? Specter’s powerful critique has the great merit of raising these questions. One hopes that he will have more to say about alternatives to realism in subsequent works.
In the following roundtable, the contributors address both the historical and the theoretical and moral arguments raised in Specter’s book. Both reviewers are unanimous in their praise: one calls it as a “superb piece of scholarship,” the other “brilliant.” Yet they both raise reservations. Lucian M. Ashworth argues that Specter does not sufficiently emphasize the different interpretations admitted by the realist paradigm towards the sobering realities of competition between states in the international realm: some see this state of affairs as inevitable, while others might view it as a cautionary tale—while offering “a preferred escape route.” George Lawson accepts Specter’s claim that realism originates with Weltpolitik and its imperial ambitions, but wonders if, at a certain point, it frees itself from this legacy—if, “to all intents and purposes, realism became something other than Weltpolitik.” Ashworth also presses Specter on the relationship between progressivism and realism—and the place of Frankfurt School-inspired critical theory in this conversation—and asks whether progressives cannot learn from realists, “‘a ‘realist’ starting point” being necessary to imagining “how things might be otherwise,” realism’s limitations notwithstanding. Specter wrestles with these challenges in his engaging response.
Contributors:
Matthew Specter is Senior Fellow at the Institute for European Studies at UC Berkeley and teaches in the History Department at Santa Clara University. He earned his PhD from Duke University. He is the author of Habermas: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge 2010), and numerous articles on twentieth-century German political thought, including a chapter on Carl Schmitt in the Cambridge Companion to Continental Philosophy, forthcoming. His other recent work has appeared in Fascism in America: Past and Present (Cambridge 2023), Claves de política global (Arpa 2024), Global Studies Quarterly, and Analyse und Kritik.
Michael C. Behrent is a Professor of History at Appalachian State University.
Lucian M. Ashworth is Professor of Political Science at Memorial University, St. John’s, Canada. His main area of research expertise is the history of international thought.
George Lawson is a Professor of International Relations at the Australian National University. He works primarily on historical sociology and revolutions. On the latter, he is the author of: On Revolutions: Unruly Politics in the Contemporary World (Oxford, 2022) (with Colin Beck, Mlada Bukovanksy, Erica Chenoweth, Sharon Nepstad and Daniel Ritter); Anatomies of Revolution (Cambridge, 2019); and Negotiated Revolutions: The Czech Republic, South Africa and Chile (Routledge, 2016/2005). On the former, he is the co-editor of Global Historical Sociology (with Julian Go) (Cambridge, 2017) and The Global 1989 (with Chris Armbruster and Michael Cox) (Cambridge, 2010), and the co-author, with Barry Buzan, of The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations (Cambridge, 2015).
Review by Lucian M. Ashworth, Memorial University
An unintended consequence of the war in Ukraine has been to thrust realism, in its International Relations (IR) iteration, into the public consciousness. John Mearsheimer, an important contemporary realist scholar in the United States,[15] has been one of a minority of voices in the West skeptical of Western policy towards Ukraine, and consequently is seen as having given support and credence to the Russian position since the first invasion of 2014. While realists have taken many positions on the conflict, and the majority appear to support Ukraine, Mearsheimer’s role as a public intellectual has meant that, at the level of social media at least, realism has become associated with his pronouncements. The clearest example of this came in an article in The New Statesman by another public intellectual, the historian Adam Tooze, who took issue with Mearsheimer’s claim that the war in Ukraine was the West’s fault.[16] Tooze made reference to the unsettling origins of realism, and quoted freely from a recent book for which he had provided a supporting quotation on the book’s back cover. That book is the one under review here: Matthew Specter’s The Atlantic Realists.
Specter’s book, which is based on deep dives into various archives, both covers ground others have taken in their histories of international thought,[17] and also fills in gaps in the story by making new connections and telling new narratives in the history of realism. Overall, it is a superb piece of scholarship that adds to our knowledge about realism. The book and its argument are to be welcomed as an addition to the debates about the origins and history of realism in IR. Its major premise, on the role of the transatlantic exchange between the United States and Germany, should not be controversial, although it does argue against those works that are more positive about both the value of the realist approach and the progressive potential of scholars such as the classical realist scholar Hans J. Morgenthau.[18] Specter’s work also adds weight to the argument that the origins of IR in general, as well as realism in particular, are to be found in the late nineteenth century. This was the starting point, for example, of Brian Schmidt’s book on the discourse of anarchy.[19] The role of the second industrial revolution in creating a new global sensibility in response to industrialization, interdependence, and a new globe-covering imperialism is not discussed in this book, but the links to intellectual history are here.[20]
The book’s strengths lie in its superb research and its clear narrative which links together transatlantic scholars over the space of a century. A combination of archival sources and a familiarity with the IR secondary literatures gives force to the arguments made, while the connections made through the narrative brings the reader along. There is, though, an aspect of the book that is both a strength and a weakness: at 219 pages, it is a relatively brief study of an expansive subject matter. Specter deals with this by being selective about the topics he discusses in each chapter, and so the book becomes a series of deeper archaeological test-trenches, rather than a comprehensive summary. This is an effective approach, as it allows for strong case studies of the work of select scholars. This is gained, though, at the cost of leaving many of the other scholars in the story with only brief and tantalizing mentions. Still, it is worth it for the detail provided on key scholars, and I for one particularly appreciated being introduced to both the work of Wilhelm Grewe and to the debates on realism in postwar West Germany (see chapters 4 and 7). These were stories I did not know well until reading this book.
One scholar that Specter does go into detail on is Hans Morgenthau. Given the secondary work on Morgenthau, and also the size of the scholarly community that works on classical realism, I suspect that the lion’s share of the discussions around this book will focus on Specter’s treatment of Morgenthau. Because of this, I would like to focus my critical appraisal on an aspect of the argument that is likely to have a much smaller audience of scholarly experts: the treatment in chapters one and two of the links between political geography, geopolitics, and realism.[21]
Overall, Specter does a good job of introducing the political geographers. He points out how key scholars such as the American writers A.T. Mahan and Isaiah Bowman fit into realist thought, and also how links do exist between the German geopolitics tradition and American political geography. So far, so good. The argument of the book, however, does gloss over some important distinctions that make these relations between political geography, on the one hand, and realism and German geopolitics, on the other, just that much more complicated.
First off, there is the blurring of the lines in American and British realist thought between the desired outcome and the warnings of a dire future. The place to start here is with the links between the British geographer Halford Mackinder, and the German geopolitician and Nazi supporter Karl Haushofer.[22] Specter correctly points outs that Mackinder’s ideas about the future primacy of land power directly influenced and inspired Haushofer’s geopolitics. While the link is clear, what makes this relationship more complicated than Specter’s argument seems to imply is that in Mackinder’s work this idea is a warning, while in Haushofer it is presented in positive terms as Germany’s opportunity. A similar logic is at play in the comparison between Bowman and Haushofer, which is explored in the book. Here, too, there is another similar distinction: both Mackinder and Bowman advocated ways out of the grim dictates of geopolitics. For Mackinder, it was a reordering of the world around the League of Nations that would prevent his predictions about the land power domination of the Eurasian heartland coming true, and for Bowman it was a replacement of the old imperial order with an American-led system of free trade and free labor mobility that would lead to the circumventing of the logic of the geopoliticians.[23]
Both Mackinder and Bowman were racist imperialists,[24] and both saw the world in similar ways to the geopoliticians, but despite that there is still a crucial difference between how they and Haushofer saw the world: Mackinder and Bowman saw a way out of the grim logic of geopolitics, Haushofer saw it as Germany’s opportunity. This also puts clear blue water between them and the earlier works of Mahan.[25] Mahan’s coming race war, for which his realism was a preparation, was, in his opinion, not something that could be avoided. Thus, we can say that there is a distinction between a realism that is completely contained within geopolitical axioms, and another that presents these axioms as realities that need to be transcended. Indeed, much of the analysis of post-1945 classical realism has pointed out how these scholars often made a sharp distinction between their grim prognoses about state-based power politics, and their preferred solutions for escaping those realities.[26] Morgenthau, for example, famously endorsed British-Romanian IR scholar David Mitrany’s functional approach as the best means for progress beyond the power-political realities of the nation state.[27] Morgenthau’s support for global integration via function-specific international organizations was one way in which he explored ways of escaping a power-political logic. Thus, in analyzing realism over the last century, we also need to keep in mind the different ways that the perceived realities of global politics are interpreted. Are they seen as an inescapable reality, or even a desired outcome, or are they presented as a warning, placed alongside a preferred escape route? I would have liked to see more discussion on what precisely were the goals of the different thinkers discussed.
A second issue related to political geography that is glossed over is the extent to which classical realism rejected political geography after 1945, and how this involved much more than just a rejection of an American reformulation of geopolitics.[28] In Specter’s argument, the team-written book criticizing German geopolitics (German Strategy of World Conquest),[29] for which the American geographer Derwent Whittlesey was the lead author, is used to put Whittlesey into the same category of American geopoliticians as Bowman (125-6). This does gloss over the extent to which Whittlesey’s position was quite different from Bowman’s, and also represented a different path for American political geography. Whittlesey had been a student of Ellen Churchill Semple, and, while building on her work on diverse topics such as the role of frontier zones,[30] he consciously broke with her environmental determinism. In Whittlesey’s work, the environment does not merely dictate the rules of power politics, as it did for many geopoliticians, but rather, there is a fungible inter-relationship between ecology and human society, where humans also leave their impress on the environment. This position made Whittlesey’s political geography distinct from the geopoliticians, and it is no surprise to see that Whittlesey’s criticism of geopolitics also extended to the work of the Dutch-American geopolitician Nicholas Spykman and other American advocates of geopolitics.[31]
Why does this matter? In the late 1930s and 1940s, Whittlesey was in the process of developing an environmental approach to international politics. With the rise of classical realism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, all forms of political geography were excised from the post-war development of IR.[32] Sometimes this was justified by reference to German geopolitics. Thus, there is another story here that is also a central part of the story of realism, which is the erasure of political geography from IR via the growth of classical realism. This meant not only the disappearance of the realist-adjacent figures like Semple and Bowman, it also meant that an emerging political and cultural geography was also cut out. This almost complete marginalization left the later field of American IR ill-equipped to deal with the politics of the Anthropocene in the twenty-first century. More needs to be made of this path not taken in the development of a trans-Atlantic realism, especially given its effects on the lateness of IR’s engagement with environmental crises.[33]
Both of these criticisms, though, would best be described as lacunae, rather than weaknesses in the argument. They should also not take away from what is, overall, a fascinating and provocative argument. Any criticisms I may have pale beside the accomplishments of this superb piece of scholarship. Specter brings us back to two issues about realism that need to be part of any discussion of the history of international thought. The first is that the story of realism in IR cannot be disentangled from its late nineteenth century origins, while the second is the important role played by the transatlantic exchange of ideas between Germany and the United States. Realism is the product of very particular forces and intellectual exchanges in the wake of the second industrial revolution, and this book explores this history very well.
Review by George Lawson, Australian National University
“A Realistic Utopia?”
Atlantic Realists is a brilliant book: deeply researched, carefully constructed, and powerfully argued. Matthew Specter’s main contention is that the roots of realism lie not in Realpolitik, as is often assumed to be the case, but in Weltpolitik, a tradition that emerged in 1880s Germany and was relayed across the Atlantic to form the basis of realism in the United States. Rather than the Realpolitik accommodation with, or pragmatic restraint on, power politics, Weltpolitik is an expansionist doctrine that speaks to “spatially deterritorialized imperialism, a combination of colonies and preferential access to trade” (245). In making this argument, Specter overturns a lot of what we thought we knew about realism.
Specter’s book forms part of a broader milieu of writing that emphasizes the ways in which the period between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the crucible within which many of the concepts and debates that animate modern International Relations (IR) emerged: geopolitics and race, imperialism and international administration, great power conduct and strategy.[34] One of the unusual dimensions of Atlantic Realists is the centering of Germany rather than the Anglosphere within this crucible.[35] As Specter writes, “the realism which shaped US conduct and conceptualization of the Cold War was, in large part, the work of German or German-speaking emigres” (8).
Some of the figures Specter highlights are familiar to H-Diplo audiences: IR scholars John Herz, Hans Morgenthau, Arnold Wolfers. So too are the affinities Specter draws between their thought, as well as the networks generated by realists to popularize their worldviews.[36] What is less well known is the taproot of these worldviews, which Specter argues lie not in the failures of inter-war European liberalism, but in late nineteenth century imperial geopolitics. In this era of “competitive globalisation” that was marked by inter-imperial competition (9), first-generation realists were “expansionary ideologists of empire” concerned with projecting power on a global scale (10, 18). In this way, Specter argues, the heart of realism is concerned with global struggles for domination, rather than the politics of prudence, balancing, or tragedy. And, to a great extent, this libido dominandi (lust for power) remains at the core of realism today.
Specter notes that the relationship between American and German realism travelled in both directions: the journey through America taken by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel helped to generate his notion of Lebensraum (living space), just as Hitler adopted the notion of a “Germanic Monroe Doctrine” to underpin claims of continental hegemony (11). This was truly an “Atlantic Realism.” The structure of the book reinforces this point, tacking between American and German settings in narrating the development of realism through key individuals and debates. In this sense, Atlantic Realists operates highly effectively as a transnational history of ideas. It is also a book that cautions us to look beneath the hood of claims about world-order making. Oftentimes, IR scholarship assumes a normative position in which order is axiomatically a good thing, and certainly preferable to its alternatives: disorder, crisis, and so on. But one warning contained within Specter’s book is that international ordering is a violent process, one which is premised on the subjugation of non-conforming political expressions. Even when world order-makers see themselves as benign, processes of order-making are necessarily coercive.
With these appreciative notes as background, I would like to raise two points that I hope will contribute productively to discussions about Atlantic Realists. Both concern the book’s scope conditions.
First, I wonder how much contemporary realists owe to the Weltpolitik tradition. Is there a point when, to all intents and purposes, realism became something other than Weltpolitik? Specter notes in the book’s conclusion that Atlantic Realists began as a study of three canonical German jurists and IR scholars: Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, and Wilhelm Grewe. Over time, the study expanded in scope and scale. For me, this ambition is one of the book’s greatest strengths. However, it also means that its central plotline branches out to the extent that, by the time I was reading about the ‘realist fundamentalists’ of West Germany in the 1980s (191-201), I wondered whether I was in the same, or even a similar, habitus as that occupied by imperial geopoliticians a century earlier. Over time, the tightness of the relationships Specter draws in the early parts of the book loosen, so much so that contemporary realists are tarnished more by association than direct lineage. Specter does not generate a “sins of the fathers” argument. But I would have liked to see a bit more attention to change and variation within realist thought, and to have read a little more about the processes through which the habitus of realism (seeing like an empire) and its central rationale (imperial world-order making) have been reproduced and, perhaps, challenged by realists themselves.
Second, and relatedly, if we accept Specter’s argument, which I do, about the centrality of German-American realist entanglements around Weltpolitik to the development of realism in the first half of the twentieth century, then it is possible to identify two different versions of this argument. The first is a maximalist conception, in which Weltpolitik forms the only strain of realism. The second is a more minimalist argument, in which Weltpolitik constitutes a central, but not singular, form of realism. Personally, I accept the latter, but not the former. In my reading, there are multiple lineages and plotlines to realism. One is the restraint strand that, if something of an overblown and overly comforting story, nevertheless is a key part of the realist tradition, indeed quite an important one in the contemporary world.[37] I think Specter is right to highlight, as he does in the book’s conclusion, the ethical limits of the restraint school: that it accommodates and, thereby, reproduces existing power asymmetries. But the bigger question for his project is the extent to which this perspective is drawn from the same taproot that animates expansionist visions of realism.
Again, to his credit, Specter recognizes this point, arguing that there is an “ethical seriousness” and “Burkean caution” to some elements of the “family tree” of realism, particularly those strands that are concerned with its “dissenting, pragmatic” tradition (209, 213). Yet he is also clear that the roots and branches of the Atlantic realist tradition can be found elsewhere, in its imperial logics. If so, it is a long and winding road from the German Colonial Society (Kolonialgesellschaft) to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Indeed, I am unclear whether, beyond some broad-brush affinities, there is much that connects the two.
This is even more the case if we consider other stops on the transatlantic crossing between European and American realisms. As Specter notes, the Anglo-German relationship intersected with realists in Britain (such as E.H. Carr), France (such as Raymond Aron), and elsewhere (16). In the case of Carr, this crossing speaks to a tradition of realism that is bound up with radical progressive politics.[38] Again, I think Specter is right to argue that realism alone cannot serve as a sound ethical basis for progressive politics. But when combined with a progressive set of principles around redistribution, anti-imperialism, and more, then I think a case can be made.[39] Indeed, I would argue that progressive politics in the contemporary world has to begin with a conjunctural analysis that surveys the specific characteristics, dynamics, and instabilities of a social order as a first order question. Only from this “realist” starting point is it possible to assess how things might be otherwise. To use a medical analogy: the effectiveness of the treatment relies on the quality of the diagnosis.
This conversation between realism and progressive politics is neither a surrender to the immanence of power nor a vision that embraces imperial world-order making. Rather, it is what Carr called a “realistic utopia,” one that roots progressive projects in a zeitdiagnose (diagnosis of our times).[40] In this way of thinking, before progressive responses can be conceived and enacted, a realistic appraisal of challenges and opportunities must be undertaken. This version of a realistic utopia, or a “progressive realism,” seems, to me, to take us a long way from Weltpolitik, so much so as to belong to a different family tree altogether. As with Atlantic Realists, I would argue that the roots of this tree can be found in Germany. However, their point of origin lies not in fin de siècle imperial geopolitics, but in Frankfurt School critical theory.[41] Given that another of Specter’s interests lies in precisely this form of critical theorizing, he is well placed to carry out a comparative study of these multiple realisms. That is a study, like Atlantic Realists, that I would very much enjoy reading.[42]
Response by Matthew Specter, UC Berkeley and History & Theory
Firstly, I wish to thank Michael Behrent for his excellent introduction and for all the organizational work necessary to create such a forum. I am very grateful to both Lucian Ashworth and George Lawson for their close and constructively critical readings of my work. It is an honor to be in dialogue with them. I am particularly gratified by three of their observations: 1) that the work succeeds methodologically as a transnational history of ideas; 2) that they find convincing my effort to relocate the origins of IR realism from the usual time frame, from the 1930s to early 1950s, to a period much earlier, the 1880s and 1890s; and 3) that my choice to focus on the German and American contributions to realist discourse has significant purchase on the identity of realist international thought as a whole. At the same time, both Ashworth and Lawson raise legitimate concerns that the work’s ambitious temporal span of a century generates some lacunae as well as questions about the overall salience of the argument.
Lawson poses excellent questions regarding my claim that the realisms of the mid-twentieth century and since originate in a fin de siècle moment when German and American imperialism began to operate on a global scale (“Weltpolitik”), displacing the mid-nineteenth century traditions of intra-European Realpolitik. Lawson notes that my thesis captures “a central but not singular form of realism,” but suggests that there “is a point at when to all extents and purposes, realism became something other than Weltpolitik.” Because I tend to speak of Atlantic realism in the singular, or of a “realist habitus,” Lawson rightly wonders to what extent my “realist fundamentalists” in 1980s West Germany, or contemporary realists on both the left and the right, occupy “the same, or even similar, habitus as that occupied by imperial geopoliticians a century earlier.” In particular, he is skeptical that the “restraint” tradition within realism, which is at times affiliated to an anti-imperial politics, could “draw from the same taproot that animates expansionist traditions of realism.” By pointing out that it is a “long and winding road from German Colonial Society to the Quincy Institute,” Lawson asks whether my Atlantic realism is unitary, and if so, how it accounts for moments in realist tradition that critiqued imperialism rather than tolerating or requiring it.
Realism is not unitary. It is a mansion with many rooms. Duncan Bell for one describes a “variety of different realist orientations”—conservative, liberal and radical—adding that “Morgenthau, for one, oscillated between all three.”[43] Realism is notoriously hard to define, and therefore it is no surprise that it is also difficult to historicize. I have always conceived of my ideal type of the “Atlantic realist” as a catch-all for an extended family of realists who resemble one another but are not identical to one another. For most of the years I was working on the book, the working title was “Atlantic realisms,” in the plural. In terms of Lawson’s “minimalist/maximalist” question, I would say I am a “strong minimalist.”
On the one hand, there is a Weltpolitik-like tradition, combining presumptions about human nature (the libido dominandi [lust for power]) and “objective” geopolitical arguments that can be traced from Alfred T. Mahan to Nicholas Spykman, and from Colin S. Gray to John Mearsheimer. That is the truth of the “maximalist” interpretation. But while this is central, it is definitely not the singular face of realism. Defenders of Hans Morgenthau have difficulty swallowing my portrait of him as architect of an “American power politics” because of his strong stand against the Vietnam War. Realist critics of the Iraq War, or more recent restrainers, use Morgenthau’s concept of the national interest as criterion to weigh interventions and commitments.[44] Is the restraint tradition historically or conceptually distinct from the Weltpolitik tradition? Conceptually it can be parsed out and should be so parsed to support an anti-imperial politics.
But while the two branches of the family tree do not share the same taproot in Weltpolitik, I am not convinced that the critical theory of the Frankfurt School is the real taproot of restraint. If the writings of Quincy’s founding director, Andrew Bacevich, are indicative, the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, American pragmatism, and conservatism are the intellectual pillars of restraint, not socialist thought.[45] Moreover, while the restraint motif in realism is at odds with the offensive realist mode of thought, I fault restrainers for a weak grounding of their anti-imperialism. The argument that maintaining an empire is not in the national interest may be a more effective political argument than a normative or structural one, but it has little to do with a critique of domination qua domination from the standpoint of universal human emancipation.
As I have argued elsewhere, I think that many realists in the global North are in many ways still the contemporaries of our nineteenth-century imperial forbears.[46] Today’s discourse on the return of great power competition pours old wine into new bottles. The affaire Mearsheimer on Ukraine was symptom of a fixation on great power politics to the exclusion of other perspectives on human suffering and planetary survival.[47] Great power realism is characterized by an imperial mode of seeing, one can be traced from President James Monroe and Mahan to Archibald Coolidge and Paul Reinsch, Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz and Mearsheimer. Ever the Niebuhrian, Morgenthau emphasized the restraint motif.[48] I am not sure where one could draw the line exactly between the prudential pragmatic balancers and the power-maximizers, since we find both threads in thinkers like Henry Kissinger for one.[49]
Perhaps what unites offensive realists and restrainers is a certain sense that great power competition, or simply, imperialism, is hard-wired into the international system—either due to human nature, geopolitics, or some other covering law of history. Given these constants in the human experience, it makes sense to cultivate a realist habitus: a sober and unsentimental mode of seeing, alert to the tragic nature of all political action, and especially attuned to the geopolitical prerogatives of great powers. Realism is a tree with many branches and more than one root. But the realist habitus is an effort to bundle all of these tensions and contradictions between realism as art and science, theory and practice, facts and norms, restraint and power-maximization into a coherent ensemble.
I appreciate Ashworth directing his critical remarks to my treatment of the nexus of political geography, geopolitics, Geopolitik, and realism, as these form a very important part of my argument, one that I continue to refine in my work.[50] Ashworth raises two major concerns: the first is that while he acknowledges that “links do exist between the German geopolitics tradition and American political geography,” he thinks I have glossed over some important distinctions, ones that are important to getting the relationship between “realism” and what I will calls the broadly geographical tradition in international thought (subsuming both the German and Anglo-American, and political-geographical/geopolitical poles of the continuum) correct. His second concern is that by paying insufficient attention to the divergent goals of the thinkers I study I elide important distinctions between realist diagnoses that endorse the status quo (e.g. Mahan) and those that seek to warn against the danger of the status quo and oftentimes identify exit routes from it. In sum, Ashworth argues that by eliding fundamental differences between geopolitical thinkers who are deterministic and those that are not, by collapsing political geography too fully into geopolitics, and by neglecting the reformist dimension of many realist thinkers, my book risks oversimplifying and distorting the realist tradition in late modern international thought.
Ashworth is more expert in the full oeuvre of Harvard-based American geographer Derwent Whittlesey than I, and I accept his reading that Whittlesey was a more subtle and less deterministic thinker than the American and German geopoliticians whom he criticized on that score.[51] By drawing a bright line between “geopoliticians” Isaiah Bowman and Nicholas Spykman on the one hand, and a more sophisticated “political and cultural geography,” represented by Whittlesey, Ashworth aims to highlight aspects of the “road not taken” in IR when classical realism came to dominate it in the early 1950s.[52] Whether or not Whittlesey is better categorized as a political geographer or a geopolitician is important from the perspective of getting Whittlesey and his legacy right, as well as explaining IR’s contemporary geographical deficit, as it were. But my goals were different. The correct categorization of these thinkers was less interesting to me than the way the distinction itself came to symbolize the contrast (drawn by Americans) between their own allegedly objective, scientific and pacific political geography —and a dangerously politicized, bellicose (German) geopolitics on the other.
I accept Ashworth’s correction of my reading of Whittelsey, but also note the evidence that I provide that Whittlesey was in the early 1940s part of a network that included Isaiah Bowman, Edward Mead Earle, Herman Beukema and William S. Culbertson, all figures who were part of a project of salvaging what Walsh called the valuable kernel of geopolitics from its decadent German husk (chapter 5). This points to an interpretative difference of the significance of Whittelsey’s contribution on Karl Haushofer (to the Earle-edited volume Makers of Modern Strategy, 1943). Whittlesey distinguishes between a “good” Ratzelian tradition of political geography from its allegedly degenerate Haushoferian cousin on the grounds that Ratzel understood that the idea that a state was only analogous to an organism, not actually an organism; and that Ratzel’s paradigm was not as clearly politicized and oriented to conquest as Haushofer’s. But whatever the merits of the distinction, it does not obviate the fact that Whittlesey was part of a broad effort from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s to construct a more realistic international relations through use of insights from geography.
But Ashworth has put his finger on a larger area of disagreement than that concerning the distinction between two branches of geographical thought. Ashworth argues that classical realism “involved much more than a rejection of the American reformulation of geopolitics,” because “all forms of political geography were excised from the post-war development of IR.” But I did not claim that classical realism involved a “rejection of American geopolitics.” Rather, I argued something closer to its opposite: that realism “provided a semantic refuge” from a discredited German geopolitics (135). My admittedly speculative hypothesis was based on the fact that while the semantic register of the realist thought-style or sensibility shifted dramatically from geopolitics to “power politics,” much of the conservative and radical conservative geopolitical imagination from the 1880s to the 1940s was conserved thereby. Ashworth and I agree that it is “not surprising that the German emigrés Morgenthau and John Herz would not wish their realism to be associated with geopolitics (eg. Whittelsey 1942).”[53] The shift in semantic register had multiple sources and causes. The influence of Reinhold Niebuhr was authentic; it did not merely mask the influence of Carl Schmitt, Friedrich Meinecke, Max Weber, and the geopoliticians.
Where we disagree is that just because Morgenthau and Herz sought to distance themselves from geopolitics in general and Halford Mackinder in particular does not mean that there was no effective influence of the geographical tradition on the mid-century realist tradition.[54] I took care in the book to acknowledge that realism and geopolitics were not coterminous or entirely convergent discourses: they were overlapping discourses with tensions between them (135). On the question of the family resemblances and affinities of thought and sensibility between the discursive formations of fin de siècle and interwar geopolitics with postwar realist international thought, one might say I am more of a “lumper” than a “splitter” than Ashworth.[55] Similarly, Ashworth brilliantly identifies “glaring differences” between the geopolitical orientation of Mackinder and the power-politics orientation of Morgenthau:
While both rest on a common realist assumption that human power relations rest on a set of laws rooted in human nature, they look to two different natural phenomena. Morgenthau looked to laws of history rooted in nature, while Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman looked to laws of history rooted in the interaction between human societies and their natural environment. The different natural sources of these two strands of realism also account for the different views of the possibility of transcendence.[56]
This is a profound insight. But at a higher level of abstraction, both are “naturalizing” moves that emphasize immutable structural constraints on man’s capacity to make history. To give a further example, Ashworth’s characterization of Spykman shows the value of the “lumper” perspective:
Spykman was the bridge from the political geographers like Bowman, Whittelsey and Mackinder to the founders of the postwar classical realist school; Spykman stands on the cusp between political geography and what we would now call a classical realist interpretation of IR.[57]
Indeed, Ashworth’s characterization of Bowman and Semple as “realist-adjacent” figures supplies confirmation of the continuities between the geopolitical and power-political faces of realism.
And Spykman is just one of several “cusp” figures who bridge the gap between paradigms. Beginning in 1938, Edward Mead Earle gathered a group of scholars around him at Princeton like John H. Herz and Felix Gilbert who are generally recognized as “realists,” but also included thinkers with a robust commitment to political geography such as Harold and Margaret Sprout, whose major influences included Ellen Churchill Semple and Alfred Mahan.[58] Spykman’s death in 1943 interrupted this cross-fertilization of traditions, but the Sprouts continued it. Moreover, if we zoom out from the narrower disciplinary history of American IR, where classical realists gave “the cold shoulder” to geopolitics and political geography, in Or Rosenboim’s words,[59] to the broader field of transatlantic international thought, geopolitical thinkers like Bowman and Mackinder exerted major influence on US global economic policy (what Neil Smith calls the “American Lebensraum” of free trade, and the doctrine of containment.
To give a final example, just two years after the famous Rockefeller Foundation conferences that sealed classical realism’s dominance over American IR, Morgenthau and William T. Fox were happy to endorse a grant proposal by the Sprouts, on the grounds that a lamentable gap had opened up between geography and political science! As Fox wrote, “Neither can make its full contribution to International Relations unless a bridge is built to connect the two disciplines.”[60] Thus while Ashworth and Drolet-Williams depict a spectacular collapse of the geographical paradigm in 1945,[61] I see a realism haunted and shadowed by its disavowed geopolitical sibling—an account better able to explain the persistence of geopolitical reasoning in the practice of US foreign policy throughout the Cold War.
Let me turn to the problem of transcendence and Ashworth’s claim that “much of post-45 classical realism has made a sharp distinction between their grim prognoses and their preferred solutions for escaping.” As William Scheuerman has taught us, Morgenthau’s thought had a strong reformist dimension, arguing that a world-state was ultimately necessary if the conditions were for it still premature.[62] There is ample evidence that Morgenthau was no amoral Realpolitiker. But despite this, in Scheuerman’s words, that, “Following [Carl] Schmitt, his ideas about the political and its roots in philosophical anthropology made him exceedingly skeptical of many proposals for international reform.”[63] He saw himself as a “balancer” of power considerations, never losing sight of ethics. But Morgenthau was tragically the victim of his own success: the degree to which he succeeded in popularizing the antinomy of power and ethics in the public sphere weakened his perceived commitment to the transcendence of the antinomy.
Ashworth makes a similar case for E.H. Carr and Mackinder—thinkers who sought to tame or transcend the stark realities of a world of nation-states under anarchy. Carr is an important figure and made serious errors in judgment such as the appeasement of Third Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Morgenthau for one believed that he succumbed to the “immanence of power,” and a “Machiavellianism without virtū.”[64] Morgenthau may have been wrong about Carr, but it shows that even subtle, dialectical arguments can invite misreadings. Part of the problem lies with the disparity between the rhetorical force of the arguments Carr and Morgenthau made against the “utopian” character of “liberalism.” They faulted the “liberal” theory of international order for its abstract moralism, rationalism and legalism—then complain that their commitment to cosmopolitanism, legal formalism, or transcendent values of social justice is unappreciated. Torbjørn Knutsen may be right that the complexities of Carr, Morgenthau, George Kennan and Niebuhr were “casualties” of the fact that scholars of the 1940s treated “idealism as a straw man to knock over,” but it wasn’t politically realistic of the realists, in the context of the early Cold War, to think this wouldn’t happen.[65]
By way of conclusion, I turn to Lawson’s effort to delineate a progressive realist foreign policy perspective rooted in critical, conjunctural analysis. Lawson echoes Ashworth’s insistence that many of the classical realists like Carr, Morgenthau, and Herz sought to combine recognition of power’s hard wiring with a project to rewire the system. I agree with Lawson that “this version of a realistic utopia —or a ‘progressive realism’—seems, to me, to take us a long way from Weltpolitik, so much so as to belong to a different family tree altogether.” Indeed, it does. The new foreign minister of the UK, David Lammy, also argues that a new “progressive realism” is necessary to deal with the logics of competition in economics and security.[66] While leftists and realists can make common cause in questioning whether specific foreign or economic policy serves the national interest, I do not think realism has historically been very good at defining national interests or national security in terms that recognize the ultimate indivisibility of national and international security. As Van Jackson writes, “the geopolitical games nations play [are] symptoms of a security deficit.” We need to move “upstream” by “us[ing] and constraining the power of the state in a manner that, as much as possible, deals with underlying causes of insecurity.”[67] Conjunctural analysis of limits and opportunities is a start, but “transcendence” demands more. Thus I find the materialist dimension of Lawson’s description of progressive realism both appealing and essential: “Placing a redistributive logic at the heart of order-building activities recognizes that any global order premised on unequal, unjust distributions of wealth, power and status will be neither stable nor sustainable.”[68] Even if some scholars are inspired in part by Carr’s materialist and conjunctural method, I do not think that both attune us to, and help us escape, our dangerous conjuncture.
[1] This expression was first used by Irving Kristol. See Sidney Blumenthal, “Mugged by Reality,” Salon, 14 December, 2006; https://www.salon.com/2006/12/14/jeane_kirkpatrick/.
[2] See Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (Alfred A. Knopf, 1948); George F. Kennan, Realities of American Foreign Policy (Princeton University Press, 1954); Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932); Henry Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812–1822, (Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
[3] E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (MacMillan and Co., 1946), 10.
[4] See, for instance, Jack Donnelly, Realism and International Relations, (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
[5] Friedrich Ratzel, Politische Geographie (R. Oldenbourg, 1893).
[6] Alfred Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History (Little, Brown, and Co., 1890).
[7] Isaiah Bowman, The New World-Problems in Political Geography (World Book Company, 1922).
[8] Karl Haushofer, Geopolitik des Pazifischen Ozeans: Studien über die Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Geographie und Geschichte (Kurt Vowinckel Verlag, 1925).
[9] Carl Schmitt, “Großraum Versus Universalism: The International Legal Struggle over the Monroe Doctrine” (1939), trans. Matthew G. Hannah, in Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos, ed. Stephen Legg (Taylor & Francis, 2011), 46-54.
[10] Wilhelm Grewe, Epochen der Völkerrechtsgeschichte (Nomos, 1988).
[11] Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge University Press, 1977).
[12] Eric Fromm, May Man Prevail? An Inquiry into the Facts and Fictions of Foreign Policy (Doubleday, 1961).
[13] Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Beacon Press, 1972).
[14] Matthew Specter, Habermas: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
[15] John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Powers (Norton, 2001). See especially his “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-08-18/why-ukraine-crisis-west-s-fault.
[16] Adam Tooze, “John Mearsheimer and the Dark Origins of Realism,” New Statesman, 8 March 2022. https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/03/john-mearsheimer-dark-origins-realism-russia.
[17]. See, for example, Brian Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (State University of New York, 1998), and Sean Molloy, The Hidden History of Realism: A Genealogy of Power Politics (Macmillan, 2006).
[18] See, for example, Michael Williams, ed., Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans J. Morgenthau in International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2007).
[19] Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy.
[20] For more on the nineteenth-century origins of IR, see Barry Buzan and George Lawson, The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
[21] I have discussed these links in terms of pre-1914 German-American links in Lucian M. Ashworth, “From Emulation to Enmity: the Changing View of Germany in Anglo-American Geopolitics,” in Jens Steffek & Leonie Holthaus, Prussians, Nazis and Peaceniks: Changing Images of Germany in International Relations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 64-81.
[22] See Ashworth, “From Emulation to Enmity.”
[23] On this distinction, see Ashworth, “Realism and the Spirit of 1919: Halford Mackinder, Geopolitics, and the Reality of the League of Nations,” European Journal of International Relations 17:2 (June 2011): 279-301.
[24] See Gerry Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire. The Legacy of Halford Mackinder (Oxford University Press, 2009); and Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (University of California Press, 2004).
[25] On Mahan’s international thought and its racist underpinnings, see Ashworth, “Warriors, Pacifists and Empires: Race and Racism in International Thought Before 1914,” International Affairs 98:1 (2022): 281-381.
[26] See, for example, the discussion in William Scheuerman, “The (Classical) Realist Vision of Global Reform,” International Theory 2:2 (2010): 246-282.
[27] Hans J. Morgenthau, “Introduction,” in David Mitrany, ed., A Working Peace System, and Other Essays (Quadrangle, 1966), 11.
[28] See the references and discussion in Ashworth, “Realism and the Spirit of 1919,” 293-295.
[29] Derwent Whittlesey, German Strategy of World Conquest (Farrar and Reinhart, 1942).
[30] Derwent Whittlesey, The Earth and the State: A Study of Political Geography (Henry Holt 1939). Ellen Churchill Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-Geography (Constable, 1911).
[31] Ashworth, “A Forgotten Environmental International Relations: Derwent Whittlesey’s International Thought,” Global Studies Quarterly 1:2 (June 2021), https://academic.oup.com/isagsq/article/1/2/ksab006/6292058.
[32] See the discussion and references in Ashworth, “Mapping a New World: Geography and the Interwar Study of International Relations,” International Studies Quarterly 57:1 (2013): 138-149.
[33] See, for example, the argument in Anthony Burke, Stephanie Fishel, Audra Mitchell, Simon Dalby, and Daniel Levine, “Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44 :3 (2016): 499-523.
[34] See for example: Duncan Bell, Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America (Princeton University Press, 2022); Patrick Cohrs, The New Atlantic Order: The Transformation of International Politics, 1860–1933 (Cambridge University Press, 2022); Joseph Leigh, The Emergence of Global Power Politics: Imperialism, Modernity, and American Expansion 1870–1914, PhD diss. (London School of Economics and Political Science, 2021); Vineet Thakur and Peter Vale, South Africa, Race and the Making of International Relations (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020).
[35] For an important work that also stresses this link, see: Michael Williams, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
[36] See, for example: Nicolas Guilhot, After the Enlightenment: Political Realism and International Relations in the Mid-20th Century (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
[37] The work of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft provides an obvious example: https://quincyinst.org/. See, more generally: Patrick Porter, The False Promise of Liberal Order: Nostalgia, Delusion, and the Rise of Trump (Polity, 2020); Barry Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for US Grand Strategy (Cornell University Press, 2014); Williams, Realist Tradition.
[38] William Scheuerman, The Realist Case for Global Reform (Polity, 2011).
[39] Nick Bisley, Robyn Eckersley, Shahar Hameiri, Jessica Kirk, George Lawson, and Benjamin Zala, “For a Progressive Realism,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 76:2 (2022): 138-160; Campbell Craig, Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz (Columbia University Press, 2017); Van Jackson, “Left of Liberal Internationalism: Grand Strategies Within Progressive Foreign Policy Thought,” Security Studies 31:4 (2022): 553-592.
[40] E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis 1919–1939 (Palgrave, 2001); Nancy Fraser, “Abnormal Justice,” Critical Inquiry 34:3 (2008): 393-422; Clive Gabay, “Ever Failed. No Matter. Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better: IR Theory, Utopia, and a Failure to (Re)Imagine Failure,” International Theory 14:2 (2022): 285-310; George Lawson, “A Realistic Utopia? Nancy Fraser, Cosmopolitanism, and the Making of a Just World Order,” Political Studies 56:3 (2008): 881-906.
[41] See for example: Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002/1947); Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (Ark, 1941); Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (MIT Press, 1985); Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (Verso, 2003).
[42] One initial attempt to do so can be found in: Duncan Bell, ed., Political Thought and International Relations: Variations on a Realist Theme (Oxford University Press, 2009).
[43] Duncan Bell, “Introduction: Under an Empty Sky—Realism and Political Theory,” in Political Thought and International Relations: Variations on a Realist Theme, ed. Duncan Bell (Oxford University Press, 2009), 16.
[44] See for example, Emma Ashford, “In Praise of Lesser Evils: Can Realism Repair Foreign Policy?” Foreign Affairs 6 September 2022, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/praise-lesser-evils-realism-foreign-policy-emma-ashford; Steven Wertheim, “The Crisis in Progressive Foreign Policy: How the Left Can Adapt to an Age of Great-Power Rivalry,” Foreign Affairs 24 August 2022, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/crisis-progressive-foreign-policy.
[45] See Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (University of Chicago Press, 2008); Andrew J. Bacevich, The Short American Century: A Postmortem (Harvard University Press, 2013).
[46] Matthew Specter, “Realism after Ukraine: A Critique of Geopolitical Reason from Monroe to Mearsheimer,” Analyse und Kritik 44:2 (2022): 243-267.
[47] The nucleus of the argument can be found in John Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions that Provoked Putin,” Foreign Affairs (Sept./Oct. 2014), 77-84, 85-89. For the controversy, see Isaac Chotiner, “Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine,” The New Yorker, 1 March 2022, and Mearsheimer, “Playing with Fire in Ukraine,” Foreign Affairs 17 August 2022. For a weighing of the debate, see Nicholas Ross Smith and Grant Dawson, “Mearsheimer, Realism and the Ukraine War,” Analyse und Kritik 44:2 (2022): 175-200.
[48] See for example, Morgenthau, “To Intervene or Not to Intervene,” Foreign Affairs (April 1967). For a discussion of his broader critique of the US war in Vietnam, see Lorenzo Zambernardi, “The Impotence of Power: Morgenthau’s Critique of American Intervention in Vietnam,” Review of International Studies 37:3 (2011): 1335-1356.
[49] See for example, Henry Kissinger, The Troubled Partnership: A Reappraisal of the Atlantic Alliance (McGraw Hill, 1965).
[50] “Realism,” in Postliberal Orders: Geopolitics and the Intellectual Right, eds. Ian Klinke and Jean-François Drolet, under review at Oxford University Press.
[51] Derwent Whittlesey, German Strategy of World Conquest (Farrar & Rinehart, 1942).
[52] Lucian Ashworth, “A Forgotten Environmental International Relations: Derwent Whittlesey’s International Thought,” Global Studies Quarterly 1:2 (2021): 1-10.
[53] Lucian Ashworth, “Realism and the Spirit of 1919: Halford Mackinder, Geopolitics and the Reality of the League of Nations,” European Journal of International Relations 17:2 (2010), 294.
[54] Ashworth, “Realism and the Spirit of 1919,” writes that “John Herz wrote off all of geopolitics in a single footnote.” 293. For Morgenthau’s critique of Mackinder, see Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (Alfred A. Knopf, 1985): 178-179. For Herz, see “Power Politics and World Organization,” American Political Science Review 36:6 (1942): 1043, fn.2.
[55] Jean-François Drolet and Michael C. Williams, “The Radical Right, Realism, and the Politics of Conservatism in Postwar International Thought,” Review of International Studies 47:3 (2021): 273-293. Drolet and Williams argue that geopolitics was successfully confined to a right-wing constellation of ideas in the US context between 1945 and 1965.
[56] This does not seem consistent with Ashworth’s thesis about Mackinder, namely that having imbibed the reformist “spirit of 1919,” Mackinder was as much “idealist” as “organizer.” Ashworth, “Realism and the Spirit of 1919,” 291.
[57] Lucian Ashworth, A History of International Thought: From the Origins of the Modern State to Academic International Relations (Routledge, 2014), 209.
[58] John H. Herz, Political Realism and Political Idealism (University of Chicago Press, 1951); Felix Gilbert, “Machiavelli: The Renaissance of the Art of War,” in Edward March Earle, ed. with Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert, Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler (Princeton University Press, 1943), 11-31; Harold H. Sprout and Margaret T. Sprout, The Rise of American Naval Power, 1776–1918 (Princeton University Press, 1939); Ellen Churchill Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-Geography (Henry Holt & Co., 1911).
[59] Or Rosenboim, “The Value of Space: Geopolitics, Geography and the Search for International Theory in the 1950s,” International History Review 42:3 (2020): 639-655. For discussion, see Specter, “Apostates from Realism: Harold and Margaret Sprout, Princeton, and Geopolitics: 1931–1965,” Global Studies Quarterly 3:1 (2023), 1-12, here 3.
[60] Specter, “Apostates from Realism,” 8.
[61] Ashworth, A History of International Thought, 213.
[62] See William E. Scheuerman, Hans Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond (Polity, 2009): 122-134
[63] Scheuerman, Hans Morgenthau, 124.
[64] Hans Morgenthau, “The Political Science of E.H. Carr,” World Politics 1:1 (Oct.1948): 134.
[65] Torbjørn L. Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory, 2nd edition (Manchester University Press, 1997), 242.
[66] David Lammy, “The Case for Progressive Realism: Why Britain Must Chart a New Course,” Foreign Affairs (May/June 2024). For a critique, see Séan Molloy, “Labor’s Embrace of Realism: Progressive or Problematic?” E-International Relations, https://www.e-ir.info/2024/05/02/opinion-labours-embrace-of-realism-progressive-or-problematic/#google_vignette.
[67] Van Jackson, Grand Strategies of the Left: The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking (Cambridge University Press, 2024), 16.
[68] See Nick Bisley, Robyn Eckersley, Shahar Hameiri, Jessica Kirk, George Lawson and Benjamin Zala, “For a Progressive Realism,” Australian Journal of International Affairs, 76:2 (2022), 140.