Now, though, the unipolar moment that began in 1989 is over. Yet what we see today is not fragmentation or chaos — but a return to normalcy. The international system is reverting to its natural condition: a post-hegemonic, multi-nodal, and regionalized world where sovereign, civilizational powers coexist and balance one another within their historical spheres of interest. Elsewhere, I have called this process the Great Transition, one which emphasizes the re-emergence of geopolitical plurality and cultural multiplicity after a brief, artificial experiment in universalism.

If there is any coherence to a Trump doctrine, it is in recognizing this reality. And in this context, the Pentagon’s new “National Defense Strategy” (NDS) offers a much-welcome shift. Accepting the return of history and geopolitics, the proposed draft affirms the need to adapt to the changing international environment. It prioritizes defending the homeland and the contested boundaries of “American Sphere” from extra-regional interference — over the global military containment of China or Russia. Yet many in Washington, and even some Trump appointees, will abhor this shift.

From the moment he came down that golden escalator, Trump declared war on the foreign policy blob — the bipartisan consensus that treated America as a sucker, paying for others’ security, underwriting institutions that constrained us, and intervening in conflicts that made us less secure. Whatever one thinks of his style or execution, his insistence on “America First” was a necessary corrective, a reminder that the first duty of American statecraft is to its own people.

Still, these welcome bouts of realism are not only bound to be interrupted by the expected fervors of moralism and tired shibboleths about US global leadership, but also by a deeper, more entrenched force: globalism. This globalism is less about free trade or international cooperation and more reflects a broad cognitive bias. It is not a coherent ideology but an ideational reflex so deeply institutionalized that it pervades our foreign policy establishment, our universities, and even some among the MAGA counter-establishment. It is not a cabal to be purged but a mentality that saturates the very air of Washington.

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This mindset itself manifests in two forms. The first is the liberal universalism of the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas, who sought to expand alliances, international institutions, human rights organizations, and liberal democracy: all at gunpoint and in pursuit of a cosmopolitan dream of global homogeneity. In the post-Trump era, however, its more enduring variant is the militarized globalism of figures like John Bolton. This latter group insists on permanent unipolarity and American unilateralism, achieved via the primacy of the US military.

The Boltonians — and their acolytes in Jerusalem — weaponize a cartoonish idea of “Western civilization” in a Manichaean struggle against a caricatured notion of global barbarism and international terrorism. The liberal internationalists Trump deposed championed the universalism of US values and yearned for the “woke imperium”; for the Boltonians and closeted Neocons who successfully infiltrated the MAGA-verse, the universalism of imperial force reigns supreme. Nevertheless, both groups are globalist, both are dogmatic defenders of US global hegemony, and both find common cause in mortgaging American sovereignty at the altar of ideology.

Consider Ukraine. Nato expansion — promoted as the defense of liberal order — has in fact destabilized Europe and entangled America in an attritional war with no clear endgame. By offering promises America was neither willing nor able to fulfill, Washington walked Ukraine down a primrose path that left it devastated, Russia emboldened, and Europe vassalized. Instead of securing stability, then, Nato expansion has deepened insecurity and forced America into another open-ended commitment very far from its vital interests.

Or take the Middle East, where the Boltonians have hoisted their flag most strongly. Just weeks ago, the United States found itself dragged into the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran. Despite the IDF’s heavy bombardment of Iranian military targets and nuclear enrichment facilities, shadowed by America’s own strikes, the war demonstrated once again that force cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, technological know-how, or its will to rebuild. Iran emerged bloodied but resilient, its nationalism hardened. Yet Washington reflexively positioned itself as a co-belligerent — risking escalation, draining munitions, and distracting from higher priorities.

Besides the fact that both Europe and the Middle East are peripheral to America’s main strategic interests in the Western Hemisphere, as noted in the NDS, perhaps the highest priority for the savvy American strategist is ensuring US competitiveness in the 21st century through a project of national renewal. To remain a great power, Washington must urgently upgrade its infrastructure and manufacturing capacity, while creating regionally integrated supply chains for essential items like semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and microchips.

Instead, by remaining enmeshed in endless conflicts abroad, America has accumulated $37.5 trillion in debt, devastating communities and harming the middle class. For most Americans, bombing the Houthis — whom they have never even met in real life — to protect maritime trade to Europe could never justify the costs. Additionally, rampant US intervention has serious military consequences, compounding their societal and economic impacts. In June, over less than two weeks, the US spent billions to defend Israel, depleting its global stockpiles of advanced missile interceptors like THAAD, even as it exposed serious vulnerabilities in its munitions procurement and overall military readiness. All this, it goes without saying, makes America less secure.

In any case, these examples reveal the deeper truth. Universalism in all its forms — whether liberal or militarized — erodes sovereignty, global cultural pluralism, and the righteous spirit that undergirds anti-hegemonic movements like America First. It collapses the diversity of civilizations into a single template, one to be imposed by force and maintained by empire. It multiplies and extends permanent commitments that serve the imperium and its managerial class, along the way betraying the republic’s founding principles.

Even strands of neorealism, such as John Mearsheimer’s brand of offensive realism, fall prey to this globalist bias: by globalizing great-power competition and advocating for China’s military containment, they portray international relations as nothing more than a mechanistic, Hobbesian race for hegemony, everywhere and forever. But this, too, is not realism; it is rationalized universalism. And it has led Washington, like Athens in Thucydides’ history, towards imperial overstretch and decay.

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Ultimately, a state can be a conservative commonwealth serving its people, or an empire enriching its special interests, war oligarchs, and security-rentier class. But it cannot be both. Yet for decades, America, corrupted by its globalist reflex, has chosen empire. In fact, our “bipartisan” foreign policy consensus has corrupted and redefined the “national interest” itself, turning it into a justification for permanent war.

The danger today is that the globalist bias — be it liberal or realist, Neocon or Boltonian — will keep us chained to the illusions of unipolarity, luring us with enchanting calls to hegemony like the sirens of Greek mythology. Fixating our gaze on the 20th century, and the postwar status quo, they reduce the world to a zero-sum battlespace between perpetual black and white blocs — encouraging endless military intervention while resurrecting old dogmas to justify them. In short, the globalist cognitive bias prevents us from conceiving a cohesive grand strategy for the post-hegemonic era that has now arrived, keeping us vulnerable and hastening our decline.

What the country needs now, instead, is something I’d call sovereign realism: a radical foreign policy unburdened by ideology, freed from the conceits of universalism, and grounded in the conservation of American strength. That means privileging sovereignty over universalist crusades, regional balances of power over global policing, selective protection over blanket primacy, and renewal at home as the foundation of strength abroad. It means diplomacy without illusions: talking to adversaries and allies alike based on reciprocity and strategic empathy, not sanctimony or moralism.

Above all, it means adopting a new approach that shapes itself to the polycentric world at hand, rather than resisting it with futile bids for unipolarity. The Great Transition is not a threat to be conquered, then, but a reality to be navigated. For, in the end, the postwar “international community” was little more than a projection, international law a polite fiction, and globalization artificial and contrived. What lies ahead is not disorder but the world as it truly is — a concert of civilizational powers insisting, as America itself does, on their own sovereignty and resisting a managerial empire: whether run from Washington or Beijing.

As Secretary of Defense between 1961 and 1968, McNamara introduced systems analysis into decision-making, asserting that war could be rationalized and won through quantitative management that would later shape much of the activity of the American government. Vietnam became his proving ground, with progress measured by tons of bombs dropped, roads cleared, or Viet Cong killed. If the numbers looked good, so too would the future.

Yet the press conference betrayed the fragility of his vision, which mistook legibility for understanding. Beneath the seductive statistics lay deeper truths that were resistant to data’s neat columns. The jungle might be penetrated by special forces or removed by Agent Orange, but the culture and politics that flowed through it remained elusive. America’s failure to quell these currents would ultimately cost it the war.

McNamara’s tenure in Vietnam stands as a cautionary tale for rationalist governance, which seeks mechanistic mastery while ignoring human ambiguity. In confusing the map with the territory, McNamara charted not victory but a deepening mire. His story encapsulates the perennial tension in governance between legibility and judgment, data and reality. It is a tension we see today in Donald Trump’s tariff program, which relies on a blunt economic formula being applied wholesale to scores of countries, irrespective of their particular relation to the US economy. It is also one we see in the work of DOGE, in which the multidimensional work of government agencies has been reduced as far as possible to a single dimension: cost.

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Some institutions put legibility above all other considerations. On his way to the White House, McNamara ascended through a technocratic elite that, in this spirit, valued formal procedures and quantitative analysis. It was an elite he thrived in. Born in San Francisco in 1916, son of a shoe merchant, McNamara was an able student. By 1939, he had earned an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he absorbed the method of scientific management, an endeavor that seeks to transform human enterprises into optimizable systems. Specializing in case studies, McNamara dissected businesses into quantifiable parts, defeating ambiguity with numbers. In 1940, he returned as Harvard’s youngest and highest-paid assistant professor.

The Second World War tested these principles on a grand stage. In 1943, McNamara joined the Office of Statistical Control, applying analytical rigor to military logistics. There, he optimized bomber deployments and reduced aircraft losses for General Curtis LeMay in Southeast Asia. The mechanics of war became a statistical laboratory for McNamara, one that reaffirmed his faith in optimization and data.

After the war, McNamara joined the Ford Motor Company with other wartime analysts — dubbed the “Whiz Kids” — and introduced statistical methods that streamlined production, improved inventory control, and analyzed markets. Ford rebounded from financial struggles, becoming a model of corporate efficiency. President Kennedy, having read about McNamara’s brilliance in TIME magazine, hired him as Secretary of Defense in 1961.

McNamara was hailed as one of the “best and brightest” in government, a moniker that would later resound with irony. McNamara’s belief in the supremacy of quantitative analysis left little room for the qualitative dimensions of leadership — the interactions of culture, behavior, politics — that eluded metrics. In the early Sixties, American involvement in the Vietnam War began to escalate. McNamara, a hawkish voice in Kennedy’s cabinet, would find his faith in data was tested against reality. His strategy of gradual escalation, designed to incrementally compel the North Vietnamese to capitulate, presumed that war was a machine that could be tuned for optimal results.

Quantitative metrics became the measure of success: body counts, sortie rates, bombing tonnage. Yet, reliance on these numbers obscured the true nature of the conflict. The data showed roads cleared and villages controlled, but could not capture the loyalties of Vietnamese elites or the political will that sustained the insurgency.

This focus on metrics induced distortions that exemplified Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Commanders inflated body counts; villages were bombed to produce favorable statistics, alienating populations. The numbers became a channel of deception, prioritizing legibility over reality.

Even accurate metrics proved irrelevant. Body counts could not measure enemy resilience; bombing tonnage could not gauge political impact. By 1968, the mirage of legibility had begun to vanish. For all the metrics pushed in the right direction, the US was no closer to achieving its objectives. The gap between data and reality widened. As McNamara’s vision faltered, critics offered alternative frameworks. Among them, Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger advanced a realist approach that rejected McNamara’s technocratic abstraction in favor of judgement, restraint, and recognition of empirical reality.

Morgenthau’s view was that successful foreign policy required a deep understanding of power and human nature, not formulas and data. In his 1948 work Politics Among Nations, he argued that national interest — not ideology or numerical targets — should guide policy. Morgenthau entered government service during the Kennedy administration and stayed to serve Johnson, but was dismissed on account of his criticism of McNamara’s reliance on metrics. Morgenthau became one of the most public critics of the war.

Henry Kissinger, who came to prominence during the Nixon administration, similarly embodied the realist tradition, though his methods were more controversial. His policy of Vietnamization, which sought to transfer combat responsibilities to South Vietnamese forces, reversed McNamara’s strategy of incremental escalation. As National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State under Nixon, Kissinger sought to extricate the US from Vietnam, not through a decisive military victory, but through a combination of negotiation, battlefield maneuvering, and pragmatic compromise. His strategy acknowledged the political realities on the ground and the limits of US power, focusing on achieving a “decent interval” that would allow an orderly withdrawal while maintaining American credibility. He prioritized détente with China and the Soviet Union, seeking to isolate North Vietnam diplomatically. Kissinger’s handling of Vietnam, including the Paris Peace Accords, reflected an awareness that wars are ended through political settlements, however imperfect. Realism, embodied by Morgenthau and Kissinger, valued prudence over certainty, judgement over the illusion of control. Kissinger had it that, in the end, McNamara “repeatedly implored” him to negotiate an end to the war.

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Though the US withdrew its combat troops in 1973, the war’s epilogue was written not on the battlefield but in the halls of Congress. Under the Case-Church Amendment, Congress cut off funding for further military involvement, and in 1975, South Vietnam — lacking US support — succumbed to a full-scale North Vietnamese invasion. Yet even as Saigon fell, McNamara’s rationalist methods endured, resurfacing in later military strategies and institutional management, continually exposing the limits of quantitative rationalism.

The strategy, and its failings, endured into the 21st century. Following 9/11, US responses in Afghanistan and Iraq repeated past technocratic errors. Databases became a cornerstone of counterinsurgency efforts, cataloguing everything from drone strike targets to population movements. Advanced surveillance tools allowed the collection of vast amounts of information, and algorithms promised to detect patterns and identify threats with precision. While these systems provided tactical advantages, they exposed rationalism’s limits in asymmetric warfare. Metrics like insurgents killed or districts cleared echoed the body count metric used in Vietnam, but took no account of the ethnic grievances fueling the insurgencies. As a result, these tools yielded tactical victories but strategic stagnation. The deeper causes of hostility remained untreated.

Beyond battlefield strategy, the technocratic emphasis on theoretical efficiency, often measured through projected cost savings and unified platforms, has persisted in American defense procurement — to America’s detriment. We can see this in the development of the F-35 joint strike fighter. Conceived as a universal platform intended to streamline production and serve multiple military branches, the F-35 instead faced significant delays, cost overruns, and design compromises, all of which stemmed from its attempt to satisfy varied, often conflicting, operational requirements. The program became a case study in how theoretical efficiency, pursued through complex system integration, could result in a product that was over-engineered and operationally challenged.

The contemporary reach of technocratic rationalism extends beyond military hardware, shaping education, climate policy, and public health. Educational policy increasingly rests on standardized testing and performance metrics, numerical indicators designed to capture student achievement and institutional quality. Such metrics promise clarity and accountability but frequently incentivize reductive practices — teaching to the test, narrowing curricula, and prioritizing quantifiable short-term outcomes over actual educational attainment. Similarly, the global response to climate change hinges on carbon accounting and emissions targets, quantifiable benchmarks intended to guide environmental stewardship. Yet these numeric frameworks, focused solely on domestic figures, can foster practices that are both superficial and deceptive. “Carbon outsourcing”, for instance, allows a nation to lower its reported emissions by shifting heavy industry abroad, while continuing to import and consume the goods produced there.

Such maneuvers meet the quantitative target but merely displace the environmental cost, creating an illusion of progress rather than reducing net emissions. Perhaps most vividly, the Covid pandemic highlighted the limitations inherent in the technocratic approach, as policymakers leaned heavily on epidemiological models to dictate broad social measures. Although models provided important guidance, their reductive assumptions about human behavior and societal response fostered rigid policies that induced political polarization, economic harm, and social fatigue. The Trump administration’s tariffs program is itself a response to an over-reliance on simple metrics. The architects of Nafta had economic growth in mind when they designed the project, but did not fully understand the resentment that would arise as a result of the consequent relocation of manufacturing.

Amid these challenges, leadership remains central. To wield quantitative tools effectively, a leader must master them, not be mastered by them. Leadership is not defined by the sophistication of systems but by the use of them toward chosen ends, requiring competence beyond the technical. Great leaders adapt, innovate, and operate beyond established scripts. Franklin D. Roosevelt, confronting the abyss of the Great Depression, improvised the New Deal not from orthodoxy but from experimentation, forging new institutions to match the crisis at hand. Dwight D. Eisenhower, wary of rigid doctrines during the Cold War, balanced deterrence with diplomacy, crafting a strategy of containment without cataclysm. In a different era, Václav Havel, playwright turned president, navigated Czechoslovakia’s peaceful transition from communism with strategic clarity and imagination, showing that leadership could be both principled and inventive. Such figures continuously improvise, foster tight coordination, and explore uncharted territory. Unconstrained by prevailing models, they wield tools creatively within a larger vision, guided by wisdom and foresight. Leadership demands flexibility, vision, and the courage to pursue paths not yet mapped.

The allure of legibility — of reducing the world to what can be measured, managed, and optimized — remains potent. While McNamara left government in 1968 and assumed the presidency of the World Bank, the US military continues to operate within the framework he helped to establish. As illustrated by Afghanistan and the F-35, the armed forces still rely on the methods McNamara championed even as these tools repeatedly fail. The history of these efforts challenges us to reconsider the relationship between data and decision-making, efficiency and effectiveness, tools and leadership.

In the end, the persistence of rationalism confronts us with a question as urgent as any McNamara once charted on a graph: how do we harness analysis without becoming captive to its illusions? The answer is not more data, but deeper discernment, a leadership that sees beyond the spreadsheet, hears what the numbers cannot say, and resists mistaking clarity for truth. In every era, the temptation endures to confuse the map with the territory, the metric with the meaning. If McNamara’s story warns us of anything, it is that legibility is not understanding, and that wisdom begins where the numbers end.

Well, sort of. On Monday, His Majesty released The King’s Music Room, an hour-long program celebrating music from across the Commonwealth, chosen (we are told) by the King himself. The segues between individual tunes were read, or at least sounded as though they were read, by the King. The show was released to coincide with Commonwealth Day, which is (again, we are told) celebrated in the 56 Commonwealth countries around the world. It was marked in the UK with a ceremony in Westminster Abbey, and is, according to its website, “an opportunity to celebrate the strong unity, diversity and shared values” of the Commonwealth countries.

But what does any of that mean in practice? This is more difficult to establish, especially when my straw poll of acquaintances across the Commonwealth indicated they were no more aware than I had been that “Commonwealth Day” was even a thing. In turn, though, as I listened to Charles’s podcast and pondered it as an event, it’s come to appear a subtler royal comment on this question than it might seem at face value.

The King’s Music Room was an enjoyably eclectic enough listen: a tour through the musical memories of a particularly cultured and well-traveled British upper-class boomer. Though they’re getting on a bit now, there are lots of this type still around in Britain, remnants of a caste that in earlier eras would have made a life somewhere overseas as colonial administrators, traders, or do-gooders. Most have adapted genteelly to the changed world in which they lead their lives, and retain the eclectic, international aesthetic interests of their imperial forebears as a kind of cultural muscle-memory.

Their bookshelves might hold Geraldine Elliot’s collections of African folk tales, alongside Kipling and Macaulay. They would have played Charles’s pick, mid-century South African singer Miriam Makeba, on a tape in the car (probably a Rover) years before Radio 3’s Late Junction launched in 1999. And for many of them, the Commonwealth was self-evidently a good thing, not least propagating that vague sense of international and multicultural fraternity they liked, from which all this nice music and interesting food and culture seemed to flow — just without the uglier aspects of empire.

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As a substantial political body, though, what has the Commonwealth actually achieved? Perhaps the thing we can say with most confidence is that it gave Britain’s monarchy something to do, having lost their role as heads of state for a globe-spanning empire. Charles’s mother, the late Queen, handled this transition gracefully, pivoting from Empress to global ribbon-snipper with quiet stoicism. And Charles the podcaster seems to be doing his best to continue in the same vein, promulgating the Commonwealth aspiration to “strong unity, diversity and shared values” through the medium of a world music playlist.

But in crunchier terms, there have always been skeptics — notably, in the Commonwealth’s relatively early days, the Cassandra-in-chief of postwar politics: Enoch Powell. Powell is, of course, known today mainly for the notorious 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech that tainted his legacy forever with the unforgivable sin of racism. On this basis, we might just dismiss his Commonwealth skepticism as an early sign of general animus against foreigners. But as Aris Roussinos has noted, Powell’s views on domestic politics have long overshadowed his insights on international affairs. In particular, he was a foreign policy realist: that is, he viewed geography, resources, relative power and national interest as more salient guides to what states can and should do, than questions of values. And it is this outlook, which fell out of fashion following the war in favor of a more utopian, internationalist approach, which forms the basis for his skepticism about the Commonwealth.

In one 1964 speech, Powell dismissed the idea that British voters gave much credence to the idea of “belonging to a Commonwealth” formed of every country once colonized or protected by, or otherwise connected to Britain. For Powell, this idea always had too many internal contradictions to achieve much. He noted that of its constituent states, “a number of these countries are antipathetic to one another”, while many show a visible, public “antipathy to Britain”. Brits, on the whole, don’t take this antipathy personally, Powell thought. But “it is difficult after all this to be told that all these countries form with us a great Commonwealth which is the world’s best hope for international and inter-racial cooperation”.

Powell didn’t buy it, and didn’t think the British electorate did either. Nor, it has seemed more recently, do many Commonwealth countries. The Union Jack has been steadily disappearing from national flags since the end of the empire. Others, meanwhile, seem to sense an opportunity to shake down relatively wealthy Britain, via historic guilt: Keir Starmer has come under sustained pressure from leaders of several Commonwealth members to pay reparations to former colonies for slavery. Elsewhere, it is unclear what if any contribution membership of the Commonwealth has made to smoothing the uneasy relation between (say) India and Pakistan, or the ongoing and vexed negotiations over whether it should be Britain or Mauritius who controls the Chagos Islands.

But as Powell also noted, this Commonwealth was not and never aimed to be any kind of defense or even trade alliance. It flourished mainly in the context of Pax Americana, as a kind of sentimental afterglow of the empire that Pax replaced and helped to dismantle. And now, as well as expressing the Commonwealth’s overt aspirations to vague unity and cultural diversity, King Charles’ podcast can be read as a diplomatically complex response to the decision by America herself, under Trump, definitively to abandon sponsorship of Pax Americana.

His Majesty is in an invidious position here. He is under pressure from pro-Ukraine voices in Britain to snub the President following cooling US support for Zelensky’s war against Putin. Canadians, meanwhile, are outraged by repeated US expressions of interest in annexing Canada — a Commonwealth country of which, nominally at least, Charles III remains the head of state. But he is also obliged to stay out of politics. Thus, despite some Canadians calling on the King to “stand up to” Trump, he has refused to comment on these annexation threats.

And indeed, Charles might retort to the stander-uppers: what would “standing up” achieve? Recent polls suggest that more than half of Canadians already feel their country should cut ties with the monarchy; perhaps these felt only vindicated. Charles’s obdurate silence in the face of possible Trumpian expansionism cannot have endeared him to the remaining loyalists. And yet, as commentators have noted with varying degrees of approbation and alarm, the Trump administration has made clear its decision to pivot from internationalism to foreign policy realism of a kind that would have been immediately intelligible to Enoch Powell. And from a realist perspective, what matters is hard power and spheres of influence. You don’t “stand up” to anyone unless you’re willing to follow through. And, here, Charles has nothing. Trump knows this: the fact that his proposal to annex Canada simply ignored the Commonwealth, and Canada’s links to Britain, suggests he has assessed both these and concluded accurately that they are essentially irrelevant to his doing whatever he wants.

So, with American sponsorship of a “rules-based international order” now replaced by apparent American sponsorship of a muscular international anarchy, we must ask: absent pax Americana, can the Commonwealth even survive? And if so, what for? If this entity has a future at all, it might be in the caucus recently endorsed by some Canadians for mutual support, in response to Trumpian policy: a sharp contraction from the current 56-nation Commonwealth into “CANZUK”, an alliance of Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK.

Such an alliance might, after a fashion, thread the needle between the grim Powellist realism invited by the unfolding contemporary geopolitical picture, and the residual British tendency to keep one eye always on the horizon. Powell himself acknowledged “compelling ties of blood and sentiment” with these scattered states; ties that surely don’t obtain to the same degree with (say) Kenya, saving perhaps in the dim recollections of those few surviving colonial boomers born there before the Emergency. So per Powell, ethnic and historic factors argue for closer links; meanwhile, the territories themselves are far-flung enough to perhaps gratify that Anglo wanderlust.

But though such ties (and, often, literal extended family connections) might combine with Commonwealth history to argue for closer alliance, would Britain’s legacy ruling caste accept this? It’s a fairly safe bet that many of those colonial boomers, and some of their children too, would recoil from the ethnocentrism of Powell’s formulation. We might infer from King Charles’s playlist that he would be among the recoilers: his choice of tunes grants no particular favor, after all, to the CANZ components of a would-be CANZUK.

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But if the content argues overtly for a pluralistic “soft power” and greater Commonwealth of international cultural diversity, the choice of format quietly acknowledges that the real enabling soft-power context for all such statements rests outside his control. The recording wasn’t released on the BBC — let alone the run-down old imperial broadcaster, the BBC World Service, which recently announced that it would cut 130 jobs in a cost-saving exercise. No: the royal playlist dropped on Apple Music, an American corporate titan that, unlike the BBC, has genuinely global reach. And the King’s choice of platform tacitly acknowledges this key backdrop to many contemporary upheavals including, arguably, the Trumpian revolution: the fact that digital media is now a — perhaps the — key vector for “soft power”. Whether or not America wishes to sustain a hard-power Pax Americana, its soft-power digital domination is almost total: the lion’s share of digital media is currently American.

The King’s choice of platform, and even of final playlist entry, discreetly acknowledges this reality. Beyoncé is not a Commonwealth artist — she’s American. And when we put all this together, we can read The King’s Music Room as a statement with overt and covert sides, addressing multiple aspects of his diplomatic conundrum.

On one side, his obligation to speak to, celebrate, and acknowledge an impossibly broad and internally fractious greater Commonwealth, whose rationale for assembling has long since faded and whose existence always tacitly relied on America keeping the peace. On the other, the King’s politically far more sensitive obligation to sustain good relations with an America that has lost interest in keeping that peace — and for that reason needs more emollient handling than ever, just without offending a Commonwealth some of whose members now view America as hostile. It is not an easy feat.

As an artifact, The King’s Music Room squares that circle with a grace that would not have shamed the late Queen. But as a balancing act, we have to wonder how long it can be sustained. Should King Charles slip, we can only hope there is a CANZUK there to catch us.

The Fox News interview with America’s Secretary of State, Mark Rubio, in which he remarked “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power… that was an anomaly,” is one such historic turning point, almost lost in the sheer profusion of dramatic events. As Rubio stated, in a rejection of the Biden doctrine of the United States as the indispensable power, the guarantor of global democracy, America’s hegemonic era “was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet”.

Rather than posing as their moral and strategic opposite, America is becoming more like China and Russia — a regional great power whose statecraft is increasingly amoral and purely self-interested. Critics of the moral cant with which post-Cold War America masked its quest for global domination will soon experience Washington’s successor ideology as threatening in a different way. Where the Biden administration failed to live up to its own self-proclaimed morality in Gaza — the war there was as much an American venture as an Israeli one — Trump’s scheme to depopulate and annex Gaza as a glitzy beachfront Outremer pays no heed to human rights, as historically understood, at all. Even for Realist critics of liberal internationalism, it is a proposal so outside the moral framework of the world we have known that it may as well come from some alien intelligence. Threatening Denmark over Greenland, and Canada with annexation, the new America is a revisionist power turning its strength on the client states it formerly flattered with the fiction they were allies. It is not enough for Trump to exert pressure on leaders like Trudeau: they must be humiliated too, as symbols of a repudiated order, as suddenly overtaken by history as the court eunuchs packed off into exile with the last Ottoman sultan. Trudeau, and our own European equivalents, simply represent the surplus elites of an extinguished political order.

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We see a local equivalent of Trudeau’s shock and betrayal in our own surplus elites, as represented by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart observing with horror on their podcast that the British armed forces, by design, cannot function except as an auxiliary to a United States they now view with anxiety. Campbell, who spun Britain into America’s disastrous war in Iraq, and Stewart, who served as an unsuccessful American colonial administrator in the same war, have both belatedly learned there is a downside to making your nation dependent on the whims of an imperial master. Their predicament is an existential one: Britain’s political and security apparatus is too tightly integrated into the American empire for the local comprador class to risk total rupture, and yet the statecraft and governing ideology of the Washington successor state is morally and politically unpalatable to our rulers, stranded by the imperial metropole’s shifting tides. The result, almost certainly, will be domestic turbulence.

The German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck observes in his recent book, Taking Back Control?, that, while the neoliberal order birthed by America’s unipolar moment is now firmly dead, we still inhabit a political “interregnum”, in Gramsci’s terms, where its successor order, whatever that may be, has yet to reveal itself: “a transitional situation without a foreseeable end and with an open exit.” Surveying the politics of the early 2020s, in which the guardians of the old order had lost the faith of their voters and still refused to relinquish their power, Streeck suggests that “the situation recalled Vladimir Lenin’s definition of a ‘revolutionary situation’: ‘when the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way.’”

It is not hard, after all, to discern a similar, increasingly angry, and almost revolutionary mood in Britain. The riots that marked Labour’s entry into power have set the tone for its time in office: the Government is constantly firefighting, unable to fund the grand infrastructural projects it promised in opposition and is forced into increasingly absurd and authoritarian postures — like considering blunting kitchen knives — to suppress a smoldering popular anger. An emergency state, Streeck suggests, has developed in the post-Covid West; one reliant on fiscal giveaways drawn from burgeoning public debt to fend off collapse, while casting around desperately for new sources of prosperity to balance the books and prolong its popular legitimacy. Yet this can only be a transitional state, Streeck notes, “not a social order, like neoliberalism aspired to be, but a condition of disorder”. America may have moved on, but we in Britain are still trapped in this long and disorderly interregnum.

If the order now being born in Washington is the successor state to America’s era of unipolar empire, whatever follows here will be the successor state to the new Britain established by Blair in 1997, as our provincial franchise of the now-vanished globalized imperium. The Britain of the Nineties, the terminal form of the social-democratic state established in 1945, is as alien and unpalatable to our rulers as the replacement order now dawning across the West. So earnestly did our rulers plunge Britain into the borderless world of globalization that Blair’s Britain — a more or less homogeneous Northwest European nation state notable to academic specialists as the West’s foremost “Zero Immigration Country” is not only unrecognizable, but even to say it was preferable to its replacement is deemed extremist.

Just as the new Trump regime repudiates its predecessor, our current Westminster has repudiated the values of its Nineties predecessor, the Britain of Britpop and Euro 96, as something entirely beyond the pale — even as much of the country remembers it simply as home. The “British Values” conjured by Labour from thin air to manage its new experiment are simply the rulebook for a globalized, multicultural polity that no longer exists. The top-down, state-enforced cosmopolitanism that has since become Westminster’s ideology has had its lodestar extinguished at source in Washington. And yet our rulers still cling to a dead project, with Starmer and the Attorney General, Lord Hermer, making extravagant offerings of Britain’s remaining overseas territory to placate a demanding god, international law, which simply doesn’t exist, and with the parallel unilateral commitment to Net Zero. Isolated by history, we are now trapped trying to implement globalization in one country, the backwater Transnistria to America’s vanished imperial regime.

There is a tendency on the younger British Right, representative of an age cohort now increasingly disenchanted with liberal democracy, to satirize the Britain created by Blair and vastly ramped up by his Conservative successors, as “the YooKay”. This successor state to the Britain of recent memory is as alienating in its strangeness and squalor, overlaid on a recognizable urban fabric, as the near-future Britain of Cuarón’s Children of Men which it increasingly resembles. There are surely few nationalisms which view their own notional state as a source of alienation and object of derision, but this is the threat Labour is forced to suppress for its own survival. The decades since the end of the Cold War were wasted, turning the country down a long and rutted dead end, yet the British state can neither admit its errors nor manage their consequences. 

As Streeck observes of the West’s emergency states: “all this adds up to a crisis of political legitimacy, with intense struggles over nothing less than the constitutive foundations of the political order.” Who is the British state now for? What is its purpose, other than keeping alive the lost order of the globalized era for as long as it can? The 1997 British state feels as if it is palpably coming apart at the seams: what will replace it, and when?

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Since Brexit, the British electorate has been casting around wildly for total reform, bringing the legacy parties of the postwar British state into office with dramatic majorities and immediately destroying them, like ritual sacred kings raised to power purely to be sacrificed to restore the realm. The Conservatives have been brought to the brink of extinction; Labour look set to follow them into oblivion; as it stands, unimaginable though this would have sounded just a few years ago, the most likely next government increasingly seems to be the party that, significantly, chose to name itself Reform. Whether Reform can itself survive the volatile popular mood is another question entirely. Essentially Nineties Conservatives, as wedded to Right-wing Atlanticism as Labour was to its progressive equivalent, Reform will struggle to demarcate the space for a politics of British national self-interest, as distinct from the demands of a waning hegemon who may be an unpredictable ally at times, but is certainly no friend. 

The second largest party in Scotland and Wales as well as England overall, Reform reflect, in part, a nascent British nationalism which, largely unconsciously, sets itself against the current Westminster state. Yet it is hard to believe that Farage fully understands, or can fill the role that history has prepared for him, in ushering in the successor state to Blair’s new Britain. Like France or Germany, Britain may simply become ungovernable, adrift on historical forces it cannot control. 

In any case, the victory of Trump’s new American successor state is itself not guaranteed; it may yet itself collapse into chaos, as most revolutions do. It is futile to predict the outcome of any of this. Still trapped in the interregnum, we exist in a state of political unreality, torn between returning to a Britain that no longer exists, and yet to embark down a new road, as yet untraveled, whose final destination is unknowable. As the world reshapes itself in an unrecognizable form, Britain’s political life has become an endless, troubling dream from which we are unable to wake.

It is admittedly hard not to enjoy the spectacle. Whether Trump is humiliating the Canadian or Danish governments, the EU or Lord Peter Mandelson, he is forcing through the end of global technocracy. Yet while there are plenty of Western leaders cheering this, as evident in the delight of Right-wingers such as Nigel Farage and Giorgia Meloni in being invited to Trump’s inauguration, the fact that they’re happy to be pulled along by Trump’s coattails suggests that they, too, are still thinking in globalist rather than national terms.

The fact, moreover, that these populists assume Trump’s victory is their victory too tells us that their political calculations are cast in terms of the ebb and flow of global culture wars, rather than the progress of their own countries. The national interest is, by definition, a national affair, not a matter of narrowly partisan politics. That so many on the Right are thrilled by the new President reveals a mentality still trapped in the bygone era of the first Cold War, in which the success of one’s politics was measured in terms of the strength of one’s international alliances and ideological devotion to a foreign superpower.

This struggle to articulate or defend national interests is not just a matter of the age of the populist leaders, or folk memories of global ideological rivalries. It also reflects the political structure of populism, and how much it remains defined by its opponent: globalist liberalism. Ultimately, both sides represent two sides of the same coin: the absence of institutionalized representation and legitimate mass parties that once comprised the substance of national political life.

The populist shuns representative institutions because it undercuts his efforts to rule directly through personal charisma and connection with the people; the technocrat, for his part, despises representation because it gets in the way of rule by experts. Both share hostility to party-political representation. Yet without it, there can be no means for the nation to imprint its demands on the state. The national interest remains to be served.

Britain, at least, should be in a better position to carve out its own position in this new world order. This is not only because, by Trump’s reckoning, the UK has a trade deficit with the US and is thus less likely to be subject to tariffs — for now. More important is the fact that Britain is in a stronger position because it was among the first to make a lasting break with globalism with the Brexit in 2016. It also has a long, if buried, history of non-alignment and independence as seen in the era of “splendid isolation” that ruled British foreign policy across most of the 19th century. These are deep resources to draw on in a new era of national interest politics.

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Belatedly, even some mainstream politicians are now realizing this. In a sharp denunciation of wars of intervention and neo-conservative regime change, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick concluded that Britain should adopt a Palmerstonian foreign policy, ruthlessly focused on self-interest. Jenrick was name-checking Henry John Temple (1784-1865), the Viscount Palmerston, the Victorian-era statesman most widely remembered for his famous dictum that Britain has no eternal allies or enemies, only eternal interests. In his study of dissent over British foreign policy, AJP Taylor recounts that the famous phrase was delivered “to a thin house” in 1848 and deployed to defend Palmerston’s record against one of his most determined and maniacal opponents, the cranky Tory aristocrat David Urquhart, who was convinced Palmerston was a Russian agent.

While the same smears of being in the pay of Moscow still meet any criticisms of intervention or British expression of national interest today, our circumstances are otherwise greatly changed. The policy of splendid isolation — itself a retrospective label — was improvised after Britain’s withdrawal in 1822 from the Congress system, the global policing regime established in 1815 by the victors of the Napoleonic Wars. Following this early Brexit from a precocious effort at global governance, Britain sought to avoid entangling alliances with continental powers while maintaining her international naval supremacy.

Today, however, Britain’s policy is almost exactly the reverse across every register. That’s clear from our obsession with strengthening global governance, to our hopeless preoccupation with the so-called Special Relationship. Both Tory and Labour governments have pursued the redoubling of commitments to the UN and NATO as a means to mitigate the risks to national independence that came with the Brexit vote.

We seem, in short, to have plenty of permanent friends — yet no permanent interests. Our naval power, it goes without saying, is not only reduced in material terms, but also built around our allies rather than British strength. We rename attack submarines to avoid offending our allies, while the nuclear warheads carried by our ballistic missile submarines are dependent on US technology and support to function.

What would a Palmerstonian foreign policy mean in such a context? In the first place, it would require a lucid reckoning with change. Rather than serving the national interest, the cost of protecting global sea lanes by maintaining British naval power on a world scale today would be an act of national self-sacrifice, or even self-annihilation. Whatever we might seek to achieve with naval power today would necessarily have to be in coalition. In light of even America’s inability to stamp out threats to global trade such as the Houthi chokehold on the Red Sea, the diminished utility of global naval power combined with the fact Britain is an island would have to be offset by greater economic self-sufficiency as opposed to free trade liberalism.

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Although Britain will always be a trading nation — not least by virtue of being an island — plenty could be done to enhance our self-sufficiency. Restoring control over Britain’s borders would be a vital step not only in strengthening security but also forcing business to cultivate a skilled national labor force. Rebuilding industry, reshoring critical supply chains, building new nuclear power stations and expanding fossil fuel production in the North Sea would all be good starts. With this groundwork in place, Britain could then start reestablishing permanent interests — rather than cultivating reliance on permanent friends. As these interests will be dictated in part both by geography and history, they will be significant continuities in British foreign policy. But maintaining friendly relations with our neighbors need not mean tying ourselves up in the entangling alliances that Palmerston sought to avoid.

None of this will be easy. Time and again, British leaders have shown themselves unable to think independently. Battered by catastrophic unpopularity so early in his premiership, many in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party clearly hope that crawling back to Brussels will make up for his domestic weakness. At the same time, Starmer is under fire from Trump, who has said the UK is “out of line” but can be managed without the need for punitive tariffs. At any rate, Starmer’s opponents should resist the urge to cheer Trump on: to do so would be to accept Trump’s humiliating designation of the UK as a vassal state that can be easily wrangled. There would be little point in ending a permanent friendship with Brussels, only to cling more tightly to another with Washington.

Britain’s post-war policy of seeking to be the trans-Atlantic bridge between Europe and the US has unsurprisingly resulted only in Europe and the US trampling all over British interests as they cross the bridge. Britain should be thinking more in terms of balancing between the two, carefully maintaining ties with both while seizing advantage wherever it presents itself, whether in trade or security – including pursuing connections with more distant powers such as China if need be.

It goes without saying, of course, that if there is to be a new age of Palmerstonian foreign policy, it will require more than simply repeating the cliches of a dead prime minister’s speeches, owning the libs and hoping foreign leaders will humiliate your domestic opponents. It will require brave and vigorous national leadership, willing to pursue the kind of disruption that Trump is enacting in US foreign policy. For 30 years, if not longer, our foreign policy has been dedicated to globalist ends — solving climate change, global poverty, human rights. It is time to make foreign policy serve national needs, and in the context of Britain today this would mean in service of the pursuit of national renewal.

For now, however, Britain’s permanent interests are buried beneath the rubble of our permanent friendships. If we are to excavate those interests, it will require a willingness to cast aside the debris of Cold War-era alliances and membership of crumbling 20^th-century organizations. If we are to have a new Palmerstonian foreign policy, we must be willing to endure the risks that will come with an exhilarating new era of splendid isolation.

Other adherents of his thought have not followed him. Writing recently for UnHerd, Thomas Fazi claimed that the arguments of realism actually fit the war in Gaza very well. He argues that just as any realist appraisal of the Russian invasion of Ukraine must acknowledge the role of Nato expansion, so too an explanation of this war needs to be as rooted in the regime imposed by Israel on the Gaza strip as in the horrors of the Hamas atrocities last year.

Yet a realist appraisal of any war has to go further than an inductive analysis of its immediate causes to also consider the political character of its protagonists. One of the basic distinguishing features of realism is its focus on state power and the ruthless means by which states secure themselves, leading to the recurrence of violent conflict. And in this war, there is only one state to speak of — the Israeli one. Prior to October 7, the dependence of the Hamas authorities on the Israeli state was so extreme that the strip could be characterised as a de facto devolved province of Israel itself, with Hamas expanding to fill the vacuum left by the Israeli military and settler withdrawal in 2005. And as is now well-established and increasingly recognised, Israel has propped up Hamas ever since as a deliberate strategy for dividing the Palestinians of Gaza from those in the West Bank under the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.

A realist analysis should recognise this Israeli domination over Gaza, but the weight of its analysis should fall on the permissive cause of Israeli policy: the fact of Palestinian national defeat. For if realism is to carry any meaning whatsoever, it must surely include a lucid registration of historic defeats and victories, both political and military. There is one unavoidable fact in the history of this conflict that matters more than Israel’s crude strategies of divide-and-rule, and that is the fact that the Palestinians’ leaders effectively surrendered to Israel many years ago, at the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993.

Oslo was, in Edward Said’s ruthlessly incisive appraisal at the time, nothing short of a “Palestinian Versailles”. In accepting the two-state solution, Said argued, the Palestinian leadership renounced the entirety of Palestine’s national claims, accepting the substitution of municipal for national aspirations, with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) reduced to the role of policing Palestinians on behalf of Israel. The defeat of the secular Arab nationalism of the PLO would create the void that groups such as Hamas now occupy. But the rise of Islamist factions in Palestinian politics also traces a wider arc in Arab politics that began with Israel’s victory over all the leading Arab states of the era in the 1967 Six Day War. Since then, Islamic conservatism has come to substitute for Arab nationalism as the dominant force in Middle Eastern politics, whether backed by Iran on the one side (Hezbollah and Hamas) or Saudi Arabia on the other (the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and Isis).

For Hamas as for other Islamists, the ultimate referent object of politics is the overarching transnational community of believers, the ummah. For them, secular nation-states are provisional makeshifts at best, if not simply idolatrous substitutes for righteous rule. This is significant because as long as there is no agency that can legitimately claim to represent the Palestinian nation, their aspiration to independence remains a defunct and meaningless proposition. Over the years, regional experts have made much of the idea of a so-called “hudna”, a religious notion of ceasefire that some academics take as evidence for Hamas’s willingness to subordinate their religious ideals in favour of accepting secular rule and accommodation with Israel (at least in the short term). But given the fact that Hamas only exists in the ruins of Palestinian national independence, it makes little odds for the future of the Palestinian people, whatever term of Islamic jurisprudence one chooses to drape over Hamas’ thuggish theocracy or the iron fist of Israeli oppression.

Since the defeat of Palestinian nationalism in 1993, there has been no meaningful political agency in the conflict or the region except that of the Israeli state. Any political claim in this conflict that does not begin from this reality will inevitably find itself remoulded around the hard fact not only of Israeli military might but also the fact that the Jewish state is the only real political force in the Palestinian territories. And this is why analysts who otherwise draw from realism end up echoing so many of the liberal humanitarian claims around Gaza — whether describing the Israeli assault as a genocide, or boosting the claims of the International Court of Justice in its recent interim ruling.

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As the founding father of British realism E.H. Carr observed, world-history is the real world-court. Any realist who finds themselves resting the weight of their arguments on the feeble claims of international law has forgotten this prior. The reason that both popular and diplomatic opposition to Israel’s reprisals has taken the form of demanding ceasefires in the name of liberal humanitarianism is because there is no agency that can legitimately claim to act on behalf of the Palestinian nation and imprint its demands on the political process. Or, as Edward Said wrote (paraphrasing Karl Marx) in the opening to his 1978 book Orientalism: “they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented”. This is the case for the Palestinians today. The profusion of support for them around the world is in inverse proportion to their political inarticulation and powerlessness. The more hapless and weak they are, the more support they earn.

This is the bitter lesson realism has for this conflict. While a ceasefire may be desirable to relieve the suffering of Gaza’s civilians, it is no diplomatic solution to the conflict. This is not because it is not desirable or because one should never talk to terrorists — there is simply no party to treat with. Israel negotiating with whatever remains of Hamas after the end of the Israeli operations will produce no lasting solution simply because Hamas does not represent the Palestinian nation and does not even aim to. The idea that the two-state solution can be revived is the height of idealist utopianism, as decades of stalled peace talks and ever-worsening violence should have made clear.

But this logic applies to Israel too. As long as it refuses to take responsibility for its victory in 1993, and the Palestinian nation remains dead, any two-state solution will mean Israel devolving its authority to a quisling regime to rule over the prostrate Palestinians. It is hard to see how this is compatible with any definition of genuine Palestinian freedom. And if so, how can there be a lasting settlement to the conflict? Israel is thus in the wrong not for moral reasons but for political ones — it refuses to follow through on the implications of its own victory, opting instead for the dystopian prospect of waging forever war against those it has already defeated many times over.

A genuinely realistic analysis should make clear there is currently only one state across the whole of the historic mandate territory of Palestine, and it is Israel. But if Israel continues to evade the task of exercising sovereignty over its subjects in the Palestinian territories, then the only other option for Gaza is some kind of international protectorate. This will be accepted by Israel in preference to ruling Gaza directly and perhaps policed by international forces provided by Muslim states, likely involving Saudi Arabia, if only to preserve Saudi efforts to normalise relations with the Jewish state. Israel’s sovereignty will be compromised by the intrusion of the international community into its territory, and the Palestinians will certainly not be free in a little Saudi-sponsored colony.

It is doubtful that anyone would march for Palestine in this endgame: the Palestinians safely cosseted under a “permanent ceasefire” policed by foreign forces from the ummah. A protectorate for Gaza will return Palestine to its modern roots as a League of Nations mandate, its independence deferred to some remote feature. Doubtless some Quranic mot juste will be found that can be bandied about sagaciously by Western academics in order to give an authentic “decolonial” legitimacy to the new humanitarian colony. Anti-Israel protestors who have marched in cities around the world to condemn Israeli atrocities will find that they were a stage-army in the service of the global NGO-cracy, which will rapidly assimilate Gaza into another province of their own mini-empire of charitable sinecures.

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Where does this leave realism in this war? In overlooking the reality of Palestinian defeat, its supposed adherents have allowed moralism to creep into their realism (in modern international relations, moralism means the “international community”). That is to say, they end up supporting the exercise of the exact kind of Western power that they so eloquently criticise elsewhere. That said, realism alone will not offer a solution to the conflict. As Aris Roussinos observed in his recent meditation on realism and E.H. Carr, taken to its logical extreme of endless cycles of competition for power, realism is ultimately barren, with no political meaning at its core.

By contrast, it was James Burnham who conjoined realism with freedom through the figure of Niccolò Machiavelli who, despite his reputation as an amoral powerbroker, understood that strife was a necessary condition for the preservation of liberty and independence. As Machiavelli maintained, anyone who is serious about freedom must be serious about political power — not only to understand how to hold it in check but also to understand how it is wielded and deployed. As long as there is no Palestinian nation, there is no political agency that can bear the weight of Palestinian freedom. All arguments that do not start from this premise inevitably devolve into liberal humanitarian arguments which prioritise the Palestinians’ human rights over their national rights. Conversely, as long as Israel refuses to recognise its own domination over the Palestinians, the longer it will be trapped in a forever war against a people who are already entirely in its power.

A Cambridge classicist turned diplomat, whose experience negotiating the 1919 Paris Peace Conferences disenchanted him with international politics, Carr laid out in The Twenty Years Crisis how the well-meaning illusions of liberal idealists had set Europe on the path to war. The “Utopians” had imported the precepts of Benthamite liberalism into the domain of International Relations, deluding themselves as to how the struggle between the world’s “haves” and have-nots” worked against a stable equilibrium. As Carr wrote, “The breakdown of the 1930s was too overwhelming to be explained merely in terms of individual action or inaction. Its downfall involved the bankruptcy of the postulates on which it was based” because “the principles themselves were false or inapplicable”. Then as now, “much comment on international affairs was rendered tedious and sterile by incessant girding at a reality which refused to conform to utopian prescriptions”. 

Both Britain in its moment of global hegemony and then its supplanter the United States had confused their own political and economic dominance with the good of all mankind, “clothing [their] own interest in the guise of a universal interest for the purpose of imposing it on the rest of the world”, yet “as soon as the attempt is made to apply these supposedly abstract principles to a concrete political situation, they are revealed as the transparent disguises of selfish vested interests”. Then, like the liberal dinosaurs who still dominate foreign policy discourse, “the utopian, faced by the collapse of standards whose interested character he has failed to penetrate, takes refuge in condemnation of a reality which refuses to conform to these standards”. 

There are two distinct, if overlapping, arguments here, both of which can rightly be made against our own Utopians. First, that the Idealists, for reasons inherent in Anglo-Saxon political culture, imposed the philosophically false precepts of 19th-century liberalism on the real world as it actually exists, and stood back in bewildered horror at the chaos that ensued. The second is that the idealist prescriptions of the Utopians masked naked self-interest, whether through cynicism or lack of self-awareness. In just the same way, there has always been a tension, in Realist critiques of US foreign policy, between criticising idealism for frittering away real-world power in pursuit of ideological delusions, and in deploying its stated values only cynically, shrouding its pursuit of naked power politics in a moral cloak.

As a result of his savage excoriation of liberal Utopianism, Carr has since been framed as one of the founding fathers of the Realist school of International Relations, which aims to deal with the world of foreign affairs as it is, and not as we may wish it to be. For as Carr lamented, “in contemporary British and American politics, the most powerful influence has been wielded by those more utopian statesmen who are sincerely convinced that policy is deduced from ethical principles, not ethical principles from policy. The Realist’s task, by contrast, “is to bring down the whole cardboard structure of utopian thought by exposing the hollowness of the material out of which it is built”. One of the first dedicated professors of the new discipline of International Relations, Carr, along with his American analogue Hans Morgenthau, has therefore since been framed as a central protagonist in the “first great debate” between Idealists and Realists, ever since the introductory fare of every IR undergraduate.

As American power surged following the Cold War, within the academy the intellectual pendulum swung away from the Realists towards Idealists who saw in the Pax Americana the opportunity to steer global politics towards an earthly paradise. Their ideas, in vulgarised form, have entranced our rulers ever since. As the great American Realist John J. Mearsheimer warned in his 2004 E.H. Carr memorial lecture: “Carr… would be appalled by the almost complete absence of realists and the near total dominance of Idealists in the contemporary British academy. In fact, it is difficult to imagine any British university hiring a young scholar today who makes arguments like those found in The Twenty Years’ Crisis.” 

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Similarly, in his excellent 2019 work The New Twenty Years Crisis, the British IR scholar Philip Cunliffe applies Carr’s merciless dissection of liberal idealism to the delusions of our own rulers. He observes that, in the United States “the hard task of clearing the liberal-utopian undergrowth has largely been undertaken by strong-armed American realists” like Mearsheimer “who have hacked away at the dense foliage of liberal idealism”, which inspired America’s Middle Eastern interventions . In Britain, however, the reason “the political science that Carr sought to establish — realism — has been allowed to wither”. Just as Britain’s political leaders now commit us to the last-ditch defence of an American global order in whose strategic thinking they have no say, so has the British IR academy, like the Utopian pundits of the Thirties, committed itself to providing intellectual cover for this doomed and delusional project.

Today, however, Carr’s work is undergoing a reassessment within the British IR academy in which he remained, for the duration of his life, a neglected prophet. There is something ironic in Carr’s centrality to IR theory: Carr himself had no great love for the discipline he helped found, declaring that the supposed “science of international relations” was merely an intellectual “rag-bag” and a “fiasco”, grumbling that: “Whatever my share in starting this business, I do not know that I am particularly proud of it.” Carr was, fundamentally, a historian whose understanding of international order came from the close, humane observation of human affairs that was, in earlier times, the natural product of a British Classical education. Yet his scepticism of IR’s intellectual value is, I would suggest, more than an amusing biographical quirk. For contained within The Thirty Years Crisis, largely neglected due to the blistering force of his intellectual demolition of liberal Idealism, is an underappreciated dissection of the failings of IR Realism, downplayed by those who claim his mantle for their own.

The failings of liberal idealism are, just as in the Thirties, clear to see: we inhabit the mess the Utopians have created, and are once again on the path to global war. Yet, at least in the vulgarised form IR Realism has adopted in policy discourse, the discipline has overcorrected away from the Utopians’ illusory dreams of global harmony towards a meek subjection to the claims of naked power, which often gives the sense of relishing its own amorality for pure shock value. Yet this is a tendency Carr himself both foresaw and warned against, the neglected half of his masterwork being what we could call a “Critique of Pure Realism”.

As Carr warned: “Where utopianism has become a hollow and intolerable sham… the realist performs an indispensable service in unmasking it. But pure realism can offer nothing but a naked struggle for power which makes any kind of international society impossible.” Indeed, Carr observed “it is an unreal kind of realism which ignores the element of morality in any world order”, as “an international order cannot be based on power alone, for the simple reason that mankind will in the long run always revolt against naked power”. For Carr, the cold power-politics of the Realists is morally unsatisfying, and thus will ultimately fail to provide order, as the human spirit will naturally rebel against it. His value therefore lies in showing that pure Realism, by ignoring the moral considerations underpinning IR, was in a literal sense unrealistic, and no less illusory than the follies of the Idealists.

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Yet popular understandings of IR veer between an amoral caricature of Realism indistinguishable from a fawning worship of brute power, and a hysterical, expeditionary Idealism increasingly unmoored from realpolitik — which in the current context means the hard reality of the West’s dwindling power. Just as the struggle for supremacy within the academy between Realists and Idealists obscures these tensions within Carr’s work, many prominent IR Realists today find themselves making moral judgments of their own as they cast their cold eye on world affairs. Realists who view Ukraine’s struggle against Russian domination as a delusional folly of an Idealist West cannot resist making moral claims where their own consciences intrude. For Cunliffe, Nato intervention in Yugoslavia and Libya, like the invasion of Iraq, was not just folly but morally wrong in itself, through violating the rights of small nations of which Carr himself was largely dismissive. Similarly, Mearsheimer observes that Israel’s war on Gaza is a “crime against humanity that serves no meaningful military purpose”, yet claims that even if it were effective, it would be hard to view it as anything other than an outrage. As Mearsheimer states, he wishes “to be on record so that when historians look back on this moral calamity, they will see that some Americans were on the right side of history.” 

Another prominent American Realist, the strategist Elbridge Colby, who has long warned against Washington’s bogging itself down in Ukraine and the Middle East as a distraction from the looming contest with China, takes the opposite position. Colby argues that the Gaza war requires US backing, and that America should be willing to “defer more to Israel’s judgment about how best to manage its security challenges”. This is a position he is most unwilling to take regarding Ukraine. Right or wrong as any of these particular stances may be, they are all moral value judgments, rather than the cold-eyed weighing of power balances which Carr’s Realist heirs profess to expound. Just as Idealists couch naked power politics in dubious moral claims, so do Realists, when it comes to it, find themselves taking moral stances informed by Idealist principles. 

This observation is not an attempted “gotcha”, or accusation of hypocrisy: both Mearsheimer and Cunliffe are alive, within their analysis of Carr’s work, to the moral factors that will always undercut pure Realism, even if they understate their importance. Instead, the observation is that in its circular transatlantic journey, Carr’s Realist tradition has over-emphasised the cold logic of power while underemphasising the natural sense of right and justice that still, despite it all, plays upon the affairs of man. The dispute within the academy has in a few short years been firmly won: the Idealists have led us to catastrophe, and we are soon to find ourselves humbled by the iron laws of power governing international affairs. Yet even still, now that the Realists have won the battle, we would do well not to throw out the ethical baby with the liberal-imperialist bathwater. 

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There is a danger, as theory transmutes into policy, that IR realism becomes a more sophisticated version of the vulgar anti-Western self-hatred of the younger Left. Multipolarity, by itself, is no more likely to bring global harmony than European decolonisation brought what we now call the Global South peace and prosperity. One can believe that the invasions of Iraq and of Ukraine are both wrong for precisely the same reasons, just as one can condemn the grossly disproportionate conduct of the Gaza War while also condemning Hamas’s war crimes against Israeli civilians. Carr himself noted that British and American claims that their rule was more humane and driven by local consent than that of their German and Japanese rivals — though cynical and self-serving — were also true in an objective sense. Writing in 2019, Cunliffe was entirely correct to lambast the expeditionary liberalism that destabilised the world order, yet it is a marker of how swiftly the global order has changed that the focus of his polemic is a system that already seems of only historical interest. The US is no longer searching the world for new monsters to slay, but desperately trying to preserve the remnants of its order for those desirous to live under it. The de-escalatory meekness of its responsive use of military force is startling. Realists are in danger of tilting at windmills that have already fallen into ruin. 

The issue at hand is no longer to impose liberalism on other societies by force, but to preserve what was humane about it, in some form, for ourselves. It is fanciful that the Europe that will emerge from the trials ahead will be the world of oppressive liberal hegemony we rail against: critics of runaway liberalism, including myself, may have cause to dread the hard world whose dawning we have so long proclaimed. Is this liberal idealism sneaking in through the back door? In so far as Carr’s conception of the basis of international morality seems to echo liberalism, it is through liberalism’s own self-obscured Christian inheritance. In essence, our task is to rescue what liberalism best preserved of this — as Carr put it, to “ascertain what can be saved from the ruins”. Perhaps here again morality cloaks self-interest — now the West is weak, we throw ourselves back onto the better angels of human nature. 

Through his rejection of IR as a science, Carr is liberated from its sterile determinism. Things, he believes, can yet be better than they are. Whether or not this is true — and the failure of Carr’s chosen projects justly provokes scepticism here — his understanding that we believe this should be so, and that it is morally unsatisfactory to believe otherwise, is worth holding onto. For if the Idealist fallacy is that things are other than they are, the Realist fallacy is that things cannot be so. By not replicating their errors in turn, the Realists may still navigate a path out of the jungle. As Carr observes: “Political science is the science not only of what is, but of what ought to be.” 

Other critics argue that Putin was non-rational because he violated a fundamental international norm. In this view, the only morally acceptable reason for going to war is self-defence, whereas the invasion of Ukraine was a war of conquest. Russia expert Nina Khrushcheva asserted that “with his unprovoked assault, Mr Putin joins a long line of irrational tyrants”, and appears “to have succumbed to his ego-driven obsession with restoring Russia’s status as a great power with its own clearly defined sphere of influence”. Bess Levin of Vanity Fair described Russia’s president as “a power-hungry megalomaniac”; former British ambassador to Moscow Tony Brenton suggested his invasion was proof that he is an “unbalanced autocrat” rather than the “rational actor” he once was.

These claims all rest on common understandings of rationality that are intuitively plausible but ultimately flawed. Contrary to what many people think, we cannot equate rationality with success and non-rationality with failure. Rationality is not about outcomes. Rational actors often fail to achieve their goals, not because of foolish thinking but because of factors they can neither anticipate nor control. There is also a powerful tendency to equate rationality with morality since both qualities are thought to be features of enlightened thinking. But this too is a mistake. Rational policies can violate widely accepted standards of conduct and may even be murderously unjust.

So what is “rationality” in international politics? Surprisingly, the scholarly literature does not provide a good definition. For us, rationality is all about making sense of the world — that is, figuring out how it works and why — in order to decide how to achieve certain goals. It has both an individual and a collective dimension. Rational policymakers are theory-driven; they are homo theoreticus. They have credible theories — logical explanations based on realistic assumptions and supported by substantial evidence — about the workings of the international system, and they employ these to understand their situation and determine how best to navigate it. Rational states aggregate the views of key policymakers through a deliberative process, one marked by robust and uninhibited debate.

All of this means that Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine was rational. Consider that Russian leaders relied on a credible theory. Most commentators dispute this claim, arguing that Putin was bent on conquering Ukraine and other countries in Eastern Europe to create a greater Russian empire, something that would satisfy a nostalgic yearning among Russians but that makes no strategic sense in the modern world. President Joe Biden maintains that Putin aspires “to be the leader of Russia that united all of Russian speakers. I mean… I just think it’s irrational.” Former national security adviser H. R. McMaster argues: “I don’t think he’s a rational actor because he’s fearful, right? What he wants to do more than anything is restore Russia to national greatness. He’s driven by that.”

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But there is solid evidence that Putin and his advisers thought in terms of straightforward balance-of-power theory, viewing the West’s efforts to make Ukraine a bulwark on Russia’s border as an existential threat that could not be allowed to stand. Russia’s president laid out this logic in a speech explaining his decision for war: “With Nato’s eastward expansion the situation for Russia has been becoming worse and more dangerous by the year… We cannot stay idle and passively observe these developments. This would be an absolutely irresponsible thing to do for us.” He went on to say: “It is not only a very real threat to our interests but to the very existence of our state and to its sovereignty. It is the redline which we have spoken about on numerous occasions. They have crossed it.”

In other words, for Putin, this was a war of self-defence aimed at preventing an adverse shift in the balance of power. He had no intention of conquering all of Ukraine and annexing it into a greater Russia. Indeed, even as he claimed in his well-known historical account of Russia-Ukraine relations that “Russians and Ukrainians were one people — a single whole”, he also declared: “We respect Ukrainians’ desire to see their country free, safe, and prosperous… And what Ukraine will be — it is up to its citizens to decide.” None of this is to deny that his aims have clearly expanded since the war began, but that is hardly unusual as wars unfold and circumstances change.

It is worth noting that Moscow sought to deal with the growing threat on its borders through aggressive diplomacy, but the United States and its allies were unwilling to accommodate Russia’s security concerns. On 17 December 2021, Russia put forward a proposal to solve the growing crisis that envisaged a neutral Ukraine and the withdrawal of Nato forces from Eastern Europe to their positions in 1997. But the United States rejected it out of hand.

This being the case, Putin opted for war, which analysts expected to result in the Russian military’s overrunning Ukraine. Describing the view of US officials just before the invasion, David Ignatius of The Washington Post wrote that Russia would “quickly win the initial, tactical phase of this war, if it comes. The vast army that Russia has arrayed along Ukraine’s borders could probably seize the capital of Kyiv in several days and control the country in little more than a week.” Indeed, the intelligence community “told the White House that Russia would win in a matter of days by quickly overwhelming the Ukrainian army”. Of course, these assessments proved wrong, but even rational policymakers sometimes miscalculate, because they operate in an uncertain world.

The Russian decision to invade was also the product of a deliberative process, not a knee-jerk reaction by a lone wolf. Again, many observers dispute this point, arguing that Putin operated without serious input from civilian and military advisers, who would have counselled against his reckless bid for empire. As Senator Mark Warner, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, put it: “He’s not had that many people having direct inputs to him. So we’re concerned that this kind of isolated individual [has] become a megalomaniac in terms of his notion of himself being the only historic figure that can rebuild old Russia or recreate the notion of the Soviet sphere.” Elsewhere, former ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul suggested that one element of Russia’s non-rationality is that Putin is “profoundly isolated, surrounded only by yes men who have cut him off from accurate knowledge”.

But what we know about Putin’s coterie and its thinking about Ukraine reveals a different story: Putin’s subordinates shared his views about the nature of the threat confronting Russia, and he consulted with them before deciding on war. The consensus among Russian leaders regarding the dangers inherent in Ukraine’s relationship with the West is clearly reflected in a 2008 memorandum by then ambassador to Russia William Burns; it warned that “Ukrainian entry into Nato is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in Nato as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests… I can conceive of no grand package that would allow the Russians to swallow this pill quietly.”

Nor does Putin appear to have made the decision for war alone, as stories of him plotting in Covid-induced confinement implied. When asked whether the Russian president consulted with his key advisers, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov replied: “Every country has a decision-making mechanism. In that case, the mechanism existing in the Russian Federation was fully employed.” To be sure, it seems clear that Putin relied on only a handful of like-minded confidants to make the final decision to invade, but that is not unusual when policymakers are faced with a crisis. All of this is to say that the Russian decision to invade most likely emerged from a deliberative process — one with political allies who shared his core beliefs and concerns about Ukraine.

Moreover, not only was Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine rational, but it was also not anomalous. Many great powers are said to have acted non-rationally when in fact they acted rationally. The list includes Germany in the years before the First World War and during the July Crisis, as well as Japan in the Thirties and during the run-up to Pearl Harbor. In both cases, the key policymakers relied on credible theories of international politics and deliberated among themselves to formulate strategies for dealing with the various issues facing them.

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This is not to say that states are always rational. The British decision not to balance against Nazi Germany in 1938 was driven by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s emotional aversion to another European land war coupled with his success at shutting down meaningful deliberation. Meanwhile, the American decision to invade Iraq in 2003 relied on non-credible theories and emerged from a non-deliberative decision-making process. But these cases are the exceptions. Against the increasingly common view among students of international politics that states are often non-rational, we argue that most states are rational most of the time.

This argument has profound implications for both the study and the practice of international politics. Neither can be coherent in a world where non-rationality prevails. Inside the academy, our argument affirms the rational actor assumption, which has long been a fundamental building block for understanding world politics even if it has recently come under assault. If non-rationality is the norm, state behaviour can be neither understood nor predicted, and studying international politics is a futile endeavour. Only if other states are rational actors can practitioners anticipate how friends and enemies are likely to behave in a given situation and thus formulate policies that will advance their own state’s interests.

All of this is to say that Western policymakers would be well-advised not to automatically assume that Russia or any other adversary is non-rational, as they often do. That only serves to undermine their ability to understand how other states think and craft smart policies to deal with them. Given the enormous stakes in the Ukraine war, this cannot be emphasised enough.

***

This is an edited extract from How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato

But with the Ukrainian “Maidan revolution” in 2014 and then the Russian invasion this February, he became a figurehead for the millions of people worldwide who have misgivings about the wisdom of Western actions in Ukraine. A single lecture delivered in 2015 entitled “Why is Ukraine the West’s fault” has been viewed a staggering 28 million times on YouTube.

His central argument, that by expanding Nato eastwards and inviting Ukraine to join the bloc, the West (and in particular the United States) created an intolerable situation for Vladimir Putin which would inevitably result in Russia taking action to “wreck” Ukraine, is politically unsayable today. His critics denounce him as a Putin apologist; his supporters, however, believe the invasion was proof that he was right all along.

When I meet Mearsheimer, I am keen to focus on what we have learned since the February invasion began. I want to know how can he still maintain that there is “no evidence” that Russia had ambitions to conquer Ukraine? How else are we to interpret that shocking moment when it became clear that the Russians were launching a full-scale invasion — from the North, the South and the East of the country?

“The Russians invaded Ukraine with 190,000 troops at the very most,” he replies. “They made no effort to conquer all of Ukraine. They didn’t even come close. There is no way they could have conquered Ukraine with 190,000 troops. And they didn’t have the troops in reserve to do that. When the Germans invaded Poland, in 1939, they invaded with 1.5 million troops. That’s the size army you need to conquer a country like Ukraine, occupy it and then incorporate it into a greater Russia. You need a massive army. This was a limited aim strategy.”

In which case, what was that limited aim?

“What the Russians have said they have wanted from the beginning is a neutral Ukraine. And if they can’t get a neutral Ukraine, what they’re going to do is create a dysfunctional rump state… They’ve taken a huge swath of territory in the East, they’ve annexed those oblasts that are now part of Russia. And at the same time, they’re destroying Ukrainian infrastructure. They’re wrecking the Ukrainian economy. It’s sickening to see what’s happening to Ukraine.”

This assessment of the situation on the ground is very different from the reports we hear every day of Ukrainian successes and Russian retreats. The underdog nation, by most accounts, is performing astonishingly well against the aggressor.

Mearsheimer concedes that he was surprised by how poorly the Russians have performed, but that doesn’t seem to have affected his assessment of the realpolitik. I put it to him that the progress of the Ukraine war thus far can be seen as a repudiation of his “realist” theory of international affairs. The smaller power is outperforming the greater, in part through the sheer moral conviction of its people defending their homeland — evidence, surely, of the intangible moral element that is missing from his coldly “realist” world view?

“The key word here is nationalism,” he responds. “There’s no doubt that when the Russians invaded Ukraine, nationalism came racing to the fore, and that Ukrainian nationalism is a force multiplier. There’s also no doubt that nationalism is not part of the realist theory of international politics that I have, but nationalism is consistent with realism. Nationalism and Realism fit together rather neatly. But the point you want to remember is that Nationalism is also at play on the Russian side. And the more time goes by, and the more the Russians feel that the West has its gun sights on Russia, and is trying to not only defeat Russia, but knock Russia out of the ranks of the great powers, the more Russian nationalism will kick in. You want to be very careful not to judge the outcome of this war at this particular juncture. This war has got a long time to go and it’s going to play itself out in ways that are hard to predict. But I think there is a good chance that in the end, the Russians will prevail.”

Bleakly, Mearsheimer now believes that the opportunity for peace has been lost, and that there is no realistic deal that could be reached in Ukraine. Russia will not surrender the gains made in Eastern Ukraine, while the West cannot tolerate their continued occupation; meanwhile, a neutral Ukraine is also impossible, as the only power capable of guaranteeing that neutrality is the US, which would of course be intolerable to Russia. As he puts it, succinctly: “There are no realistic options. We’re screwed.”

He believes that escalation is likely, and the chance of a nuclear event is “non-trivial”. He lays out his rationale for why the Russians might well go there, step by step:

“If the Russians were to use nuclear weapons, the most likely scenario is that they would use them in Ukraine. And Ukraine does not have nuclear weapons of its own. So the Ukrainians would not be able to retaliate against the Russians with their own nuclear weapons. So that weakens deterrence. Furthermore, if the Russians use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the West, and here we’re talking mainly about the United States, is not going to retaliate with nuclear weapons against Russia, because that would lead to a general thermonuclear war.”

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Western restraint cannot be relied upon in this scenario, he concedes, and the chances of catastrophic escalation remain strong, which is why he considers the current rhetoric among Western leaders about defeating Russia “foolish”.

The British are “major cheerleaders” for the policy, by his assessment, pushing the United States into stronger action. “I think the British are being remarkably foolish, just like I think, the Poles, the Baltic states, and the Americans.”

Sweden and Finland meanwhile, with their Nato membership bids, are only making the situation more dangerous. The idea that Russia is poised to invade either Finland or Sweden is a “figment of the West’s imagination” and their membership of the security pact will only heighten Russia’s sense that it is being deliberately encircled. He believes their applications should be rejected, and that nobody should have the “right” to join a security pact like Nato.

Mearsheimer’s logic all points in the same direction: if there is no peace deal now possible in Ukraine, the only logical outcome is ongoing fighting; ongoing fighting will logically lead to escalation, particularly if Russia appears to be losing; and escalation may very well eventually take a nuclear form, at which point a great power nuclear conflict becomes a real possibility.

A more positive eventual outcome than this, of course, will falsify his theory and prove him wrong. I ask him, if the Ukraine conflict ends less badly — perhaps with Russia withdrawing or accepting a fudge, Ukraine strengthened and no nuclear event — will he admit he was wrong?

“Of course,” he says. “International Politics operates in a world of what I would call radical uncertainty, it’s very hard to figure out what the future looks like, it’s very hard to make predictions… Is there a possibility that the Russians will cave at some point? I think there’s a small possibility. I also think there’s a non-trivial chance that this will lead to nuclear war. And when you marry the consequences of nuclear war with the possibility, in my mind, that means you should be remarkably cautious. Let me illustrate this by this analogy. If I have a gun, and the barrel has 100 chambers, and I put five bullets in that barrel. And I say to you, Freddie, I’m gonna pull the trigger and put the gun up to your head. But don’t worry, there’s only a 5% chance that I will kill you… The question you have to ask yourself is, are you going to be nervous? Are you going to be scared stiff? …The consequences here involve nuclear war. So there only has to be a small probability that John is right.”

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The common critique of this line of argument is that it becomes hard to see how the behaviour of a nuclear power could ever be curtailed. The bully could always wield the threat of nuclear disaster to get away with a new atrocity. And that logic also leads to disaster. So where would Mearsheimer draw the line? His answers are unambiguous.

First, he believes without hesitation that the existing Nato countries must be defended, notwithstanding the risks. “The Baltic states are in Nato. Poland and Romania are in Nato. They have an article 5 guarantee. If the Russians were to attack those countries, we would have to come to the defence of those countries, there’s no question about that. I would support that.”

More surprisingly, on the subject of China and Taiwain, which you might think bears a resemblance to Russia and Ukraine as a smaller Western-backed entity in the orbit of a rival regional hegemon, he takes the opposite view.

“I have a fundamentally different view on China than I do on Russia. And therefore, my thinking about Taiwan is different from my thinking about Ukraine. I believe that China is a peer competitor of the United States, and that it threatens to dominate Asia the way the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere. … From an American point of view, that’s unacceptable. And I think that’s correct. I think the United States should not want China to dominate Asia, the way we dominate the western hemisphere. So we’re going to go to great lengths to contain China. And for purposes of containing China, it is important for us to defend Taiwan.”

Mearsheimerism, then, is not quite what either his followers or his detractors might think it is. It is not an anti-war doctrine (his branch of “Offensive Realism” specifically sees aggression as a necessary part of great powers’ survival); nor is it fundamentally sceptical of American power. He supports American power being projected in its interests, but believes that the war in Ukraine is a distraction from the real threat, which is China, and worse, will drive Russia into the arms of China when it is in America’s interests to drive them apart.

A week before we met, Isaac Chotiner published a transcript of a telephone interview with Mearsheimer in the New Yorker. It was ostensibly about Ukraine, but Chotiner pushed Mearsheimer to talk about his recent meeting with Viktor Orbán. Which he refused to do. The effect was to imply that he was covering up murky friendships in the illiberal (and Russia-sympathetic) fringes of Europe.

Mearsheimer tells me, which he refused to do on the phone to Chontiner, that he was in Hungary to promote the translation of his latest book The Great Delusion, and that the prime minister and president requested a meeting via the publisher. He says he jumped at the chance, and ended up having a three-hour conversation with Orbán.

“I was very interested in talking to him for two reasons. One, I was interested in hearing his views on Ukraine, and how his views compare to the views of other European leaders and where he thought this was all headed. But I was also very interested in talking to him about nationalism and liberalism, the relationship between those two isms, this is one of the central themes in my book. What I have in common with Orbán is he thinks nationalism is a very important force, obviously, and I agree with him. But where I disagree with him is I think that liberalism is a very powerful force, and it’s all for the good. He, on the other hand, detests liberalism, so what he sees is liberalism and nationalism as polar opposites, and he favours nationalism, and wants to crush liberalism. I, on the other hand, see nationalism and liberalism as two ideologies that differ in important ways, but nevertheless, can coexist.”

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Is he not worried that, whatever the content, by having those kinds of meetings, he will start to be seen as an activist with a political agenda more than an observer and an analyst?

“I’m not an activist, I’m an academic, I’m a scholar. And this is part of my research. My goal is to understand what’s going on in Europe… I’m not condoning Victor Orbán’s policies, or condemning them, I’m simply talking to him to understand what is going on in his mind and what is going on in Hungary and what is going on in Europe more generally… The fact that people are trying to smear me because I talked to Viktor Orbán is hardly surprising in the context that we now operate, because people are really not that interested these days in talking about facts and logic. What they prefer to do is to smear people who they disagree with.”

It is perhaps not surprising that Mearsheimer’s brand of cold realism has become popular in our increasingly multipolar, competitive world. But there is an impassive, observational quality to it which sounds negative and even cynical to the progressive ear. I ask him whether this uncertain, multipolar world is here to stay and if so, is that a good thing?

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“I think it’s definitely here to stay. And I think it’s more dangerous than the Cold War was. I was born and raised during the Cold War, and the world was bipolar at that point in time… During the Cold War, we had the United States and the Soviet Union. During the Unipolar Moment, you just had the sole pole, the United States. And today, you have three great powers, the United States, China, and Russia. Now, you could not have great power politics in the unipolar world, because there was only one great power. What we have today, with the US-China competition in East Asia, and the US-Russia competition, mainly over Ukraine, is two conflict dyads. They’re separate conflict dyads — US-China, US-Russia. I would argue that not only do you have two instead of one, each one of those dyads is more dangerous than the conflict dyad in the Cold War.

“The United States and Russia are almost at war in Ukraine, and we can hypothesise plausible scenarios where the United States ends up fighting against Russia in Ukraine. And then we talked about the US China competition and the problems associated with Taiwan. And Taiwan is not the only flashpoint in East Asia, there’s also the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and the Korean peninsula. So you can imagine a war breaking out between the United States and China in East Asia, and a war breaking out in Ukraine involving the United States and Russia, I think more easily than you could imagine a war breaking out during the Cold War in Europe, or in East Asia involving the United States and the Soviet Union.

So I think we live in more dangerous times today than we did during the Cold War, and certainly than we did during the Unipolar Moment. And I think if anything, this situation is only going to get worse.”

I really hope you’re wrong, I say. “I hope I’m wrong too,” he replies.

Cheney was referring to Saddam Hussein, but it is not difficult to imagine the current President saying something similar about his Russian counterpart. Just last week, Joe Biden stated that Vladimir Putin was “not joking” about the use of nuclear weapons, warning that “we have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis”. Cheney’s hawkish worldview has been reinvigorated by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. This time, however, those advocating restraint — the “realists” — are no longer just opponents, they are now enemies too.

In the past fortnight, the realists have been described as “intellectually bankrupt”, “pro-fascist” and “Putin apologists” — and that’s just in one article. It is a continuation of a trend that became prominent during the Covid era, in which it was no longer enough to question the argument, but to question the morality and the motives of the person making them too. Rather than being just wrong, proponents of realism — like the lockdown sceptics before them — are viewed as dangerous and morally flawed.

A diffuse network of intellectuals, think tanks, commentators, and politicians (on both the Left and Right), realists do not form any kind of cohesive bloc. All hew to a vague notion that America should act with restraint abroad, but have little else in common. There is neither a value system they wish to impart, nor a broad, all-encompassing ideology that holds them all together. This makes realism a modest doctrine; it doesn’t lend itself to extremism and Manichaean world-views.

Unlike idealists, who emphasise the importance of spreading democracy and human rights abroad, realists believe that countries are guided by self-interest, not abstract values. They eschew the Disneyfied view of the world of the kind recently expressed by President Biden, in which he characterised the escalating Ukrainian conflict as “a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force”.

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Such enthusiastic support for Ukraine is a natural symptom of the moral absolutism he displayed during the pandemic. It forgoes rational debate in favour of a moral impulse to be seen to be doing something, even if the costs of those actions are not fully considered. However noble the intention may be, the results are often tragic, as Afghanistan (cost: $2.313 trillion), Iraq ($2.4 trillion), Syria ($1.2 trillion) and Libya ($567 billion) attest. Likewise, the cost of pandemic mitigation is still being calculated, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the economic and social consequences were seriously underestimated.

Yet for all their policy failures, America’s idealist wing appears to have suffered few professional setbacks. Joe Biden’s foreign policy team isn’t all that different from Obama’s; Thomas Friedman, who once boasted in 2003 that “we could have hit Saudi Arabia…We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq, because we could”, still lunches with the President.

Compare this to the almost immediate backlash realists faced after the Ukraine invasion. Until 24 February 2022, John Mearsheimer was a relatively anonymous IR professor at the University of Chicago who gave scholarly lectures on the clash between liberalism and nationalism in America. As one of the country’s foremost realists, he had been interested in the Ukraine question for some time, arguing that Nato enlargement was to blame for Russia’s antagonistic relations with the West. In 2015, he gave a lecture on the subject, which subsequently went viral after the invasion.

Mearsheimer turned into an overnight pariah. Weeks after the lecture was dredged up, students at his university signed an open letter explaining that they were “deeply pained” to learn that Mearsheimer was “propagating Putinism” and asserting that his actions were “extremely detrimental for our country”. They even demanded to know if he was on the Russian payroll. Meanwhile, other prominent realists such as Henry Kissinger and Noam Chomsky were roundly condemned for suggesting that Ukraine may have to cede territory to Russia in order to prevent further bloodshed. In Chomsky’s framing, Ukraine had to make concessions because Russia was like an incoming hurricane. “You may not like it, you may not like the fact that there’s a hurricane coming tomorrow, but you can’t stop it by saying, ‘I don’t like hurricanes’ or ‘I don’t recognise hurricanes’,” he said.

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In response, Chomsky and “other like-minded intellectuals” were subjected to an open letter which accused them of “adding further fuel to the Russian war machine by spreading views very much akin to Russian propaganda”. Kissinger, who proposed the handover of Luhansk and Donetsk to Russia, was even admonished by Suella Braverman, who argued that the former diplomat was “appeasing” Russia. “People like Henry Kissinger believe that if we give the Russian dictator some of what he wants,” she wrote in June. “He’ll stop the war and we can return to normal.”

Such efforts to discredit the opinions of these academics bear a striking resemblance to the freighted criticisms thrown around during the Covid era. Following the publication of the Great Barrington Declaration, questions about the group’s funding were swiftly raised. In the same way that students believed that Mearsheimer was funded by Russia, the implication was that these scientists, Sunetra Gupta, Martin Kulldorff and Jay Battacharya, did not hold their views sincerely — they were merely a trojan horse for a wealthy libertarian think tank (Gupta even felt the need to profess her Left-wing credentials afterwards).

Implicit in all these charges was a conviction that these people were not just wrong, but on the wrong side of history too. Just as Conservative politicians who entertained lockdown scepticism were denounced for their “dangerous” beliefs, those who now outline a plan for peace in Ukraine — be it Elon Musk, the Pope, or Roger Waters — face a similar reaction. The lockdown sceptics were willing to sacrifice at-risk humans to save the economy; the realists were willing to let a country perish in service of great-power politics.

None of this is to suggest that realists have always been right. Predicting that Kyiv would fall in 72 hours, for instance, many underestimated the strength of the Ukrainian army and the incompetence of Russia’s. More recently, the claim by some realists that the US was behind the Nord Stream pipeline attack seems to have been disproved. And for every lockdown sceptic that slips into Covid denialism, there are realists who start off by asking legitimate questions about American military aid to Ukraine, and end by having to delete tweets that teeter on Holocaust revisionism.

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On the bigger questions, however, each passing day adds succour to the realist argument. The fear of an escalation continues to grow, with politicians such as John Bolton calling for Putin to go and Tobias Ellwood MP claiming that strategic ambiguity is “no longer a deterrent”. Add to that former US National Security Council official Fiona Hill’s assertion that we are already living through a Third World War, and it’s easy to see why realists are urging caution.

Putin and Covid are both malevolent forces, but how we respond to them is — and should be — a contested subject. In the same way that our response to Covid benefitted from having lockdown sceptics in the tent rather than out, the same must apply to realists. They are, after all, raising important questions about Ukraine’s interests versus our own, and the degree to which it is escalating beyond our control. Absent that, America is almost certain to repeat the same foreign-policy errors as before. And when a nuclear power is in play, that adds an entirely new — and potentially catastrophic — dimension.