Realism is a theory of international relations (IR) that aims to elucidate the interactions between states and, to some extent, the human actors in government within the global system. It holds that the international system is anarchic in nature due to divergences of interests conceptualized as power and the lack of a sovereign who supercedes over states because states are the highest sovereign within the hierarchical structure of global politics. With states comes interests; thus, it emphasizes the importance of presenting facts about the international system and ensuring that these explanations adhere to a realistic, logical framework to reach theoretical conclusions. It is essential to emphasize that facts and reasoning are grounded in historical precedents and the deterministic, observable aspects of unchanging state nature. Conflict is paradoxically at the core of human existence despite states needing to survive. This means that we, as humans, have varying interests—political, economic, sociocultural, or psychological—that conflict.
Realists assert that the reality of the international system is universal and accessible, and this conflict at the global level is due to diverging interests among states, as states’ power is reflective of our human nature. Conflict is a tangible consequence arising from the discord of human interests (or power), particularly evident among the vast population of individuals whose varied aspirations frequently collide due to their egos striving to safeguard and fulfill their objectives. This often results in conflict, or more accurately, war at a higher level—an embodiment of human nature. Nevertheless, it is crucial to acknowledge that while realists observe the discord within the international system resulting in conflict, certain scholars, such as Hans Morgenthau, posit that the absence of morality in the pursuit of state interests, coupled with the recognition that other states similarly pursue interests devoid of moral imperatives, can foster a ‘respect’ for the interests of different states and assist states in formulating foreign policies that take into consideration those interests. This awareness may not vanquish conflicts from the international system, but I believe it could mitigate them. Whatever the case, it is important to appreciate that interests can be moral or, better still, encapsulate moral implications. This point will be explained later in this commentary using human rights, and the responsibility to protect as an international law.
Due to human beings’ unchanging, universalized nature, reflective in states’ interests as power, realist thinkers believe in the possibility of a theory that seeks to capture the nuanced expression of universalized human nature at the local, state, and international levels. Although it is essential to point out that classical realism tends to ascertain, make intelligible, or give meaning to facts in its process of explicating them, the tendency towards a hindsight bias is commonplace. This is very true of its approach to foreign policy analysis, where the realist thinkers and analysts absorbed into the analysis of the state’s actions in the international community through the assumptive analogy of putting on the statesman’s shoe to judge his rationality based on ‘similar’ precedence by selecting from the vast array of alternatives that speaks volume of foreign policy options.
This tells us that realism in IR is about gaining futuristic insights into reality by ascertaining historical facts through memory politics and historical precedents. Take, for example, the issue of US-China trade relations, which mirrors actors’ mutual distrust of one another based on the nature of global competition and the historical precedent of political ties in structuring future political relations. In another example, the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine or between Israel and the helpless people of Palestine, and how the formers exerted their influence (or, in this case, dominance) was oftentimes regarded as an aggressive interest-based foreign policy that culminated in an invasion of the territories of the latter. Such an approach within the foreign affairs ministries of these countries, coupled with the hard-right approach to nationalism, has been employed in understanding other conflicts, although unrelated and fraught, such as Taiwan or Somaliland. This does not mean such thinking must come from avowed right-wing politicians. The politics of realism in formulating foreign policy can be adopted by groups unfamiliar with hypernationalist ideals (for example, the US Democrats approach to other nations in jeopardy worldwide). What is crucial here, according to realists, is the notion of power and how it influences foreign policy direction and, in turn, how foreign policy objectives shape its narrative.
Domestic institutional structures, the weaponization of memory politics (even in the most subtle manner necessary as humans are historical creatures), and the tendency towards historical revisionism have been used by scholars as some of the factors that shape the way, manner, content, and implicative gesture of interests (or power) of states such as Russia, China, Somalia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, etc. Whether this is true depends on our subjective interpretation of historical facts employed in the state’s official narrative to justify aggression domestically or regionally within the international community. If realists ever hope for their theory to gain currency, exude meaning, and render factual events meaningful, then it is crucial to explain that the US, European states, and many other non-European western-styled states often shielded on the banality of democratic peace hyperbolics, exert tactics less benign to the moral speculations of human goodness to achieve its aims overseas and at home. The exertion of power politics derived from human beings’ rationality prides over truth and communitarian gestures in the international arena. The only credible community is an alliance not based on shared respect for progress as the denominator of international partnership, as the liberalists in IR would argue, but rather the pulling of weight to inflict pressure within the global system on the assumed other who share a mutual distrust in pursuit of power or interest. (Think about the alliances of international politics that started forming after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and those formed before the World Wars). Quite constructively, as the realists would argue, the extent to which these alliances pursued attaining their foreign policy objectives through a balance of power process is indicative of the dialectic conflict in human nature.
Another way to think about it economically is to imagine, assumingly, country A, whose interest is to protect businesses located in its territory through, say, the imposition of tariffs on cheaper products or services coming from country B, which threatens the market competitiveness and continued viability of production in country A. In response, country B has a range of alternatives to balance the actions of country A. It might choose to levy tariffs on products and services coming from country A, making imports illiberal, very expensive, and invariably hurting its population’s purchasing power while forcing importers to consider a cheaper market; or it might go into a trade alliance such as free trade agreements; or intensify extant free trade agreements into a customs union, or a further transformation into a common market (e.g., the European Union). Regardless of the response, proponents of realism would contend that the objective is to attain a state of power symmetry in a world rife with exigencies that can swiftly disrupt the balance of power, potentially sidelining country B’s economic interests from the delicate equilibrium of mutual strength and distrust with country A. Any action and reaction–commensurable in quantity or quality of effect or not–is a rational disposable alternative available to the states within the international system.
Rationality in realism is interest-guided. There is no such thing as morality or moral principles or preferences, except morality is defined as a mutual reaction exhibited by counteracting statesmen or actors representing a state within the international system. Morality is, basically, any logical response to an action to give weight and balance to another state’s prior actions, which are disruptive and consequential for one’s state or the global system. The recognition of realist interpretations of foreign policy—whether for its pragmatic approach or its rejection of the behavioralist paradigm in the third debate, as asserted by Kal Holsti—indicates that any endeavor to analyze a leader’s behavior or persona is akin to a fruitless assault on barren soil, incapable of yielding crops. The issue lies not within the character of individuals such as Trump, Biden, Tinubu, Kim, or Putin but instead in the inherent structure of the international system, which mirrors a state tendency to prioritize national power (think of it as interest at the state level) and needs, often at the expense of others within the international system. To put it differently, all leaders aim to rationalize their foreign policy regardless of the often-than-not recalcitrant alteration of those policies with personal whims or ideological preferences. The significance lies in the rationality of foreign policy, which is commendable; however, this commendation is not derived from a divine mandate or celestial decree but rather from the unyielding pursuit of national interests. It appears to me that such an approach to the analysis of foreign policy, while real, is the holy grail attempt to explicate the reasons behind slavery and colonialism. The theory also tries to foster the narratives that mercantilism, the growth of capitalism, and the beast it is transforming into are easily traceable from historical and logical precedents.
However, it is important to highlight the thinking of Hans Morgenthau that political realism is not just a grim picture of the reality of conflict of interests at the state level due to its varying degrees and contents of different nations’ foreign policy multiplicity. Cooperation that is envisaged at state levels is also possible at the international level only if there is the transformation of the system through a “…workmanlike manipulation of the perennial forces that have shaped the past as they will the future” (Morgenthau, n.d., p.12).
The problem with most realists’ thinking in IR is that its amoral approach to global political relations of seeing everything about states’ actions as an interest-based process or about the dynamic nature of power can lead to a nihilistic vision of today’s present international system. While it may be true that a state pursues its interests at the expense of the other and that realism finds plausible evidence that the state system in the first half of the twentieth century and preceding centuries portrayed a colossal disappearance or lack of international sovereign, recent developments in IR has realistically seen some form of joint sovereignty by states themselves and a host of new actors through the pulling together of their respective powers. With the establishment of new intergovernmental institutions such as the United Nations and its agencies, various international and local non-governmental organizations, and the proliferation of global media and means of communication brought about by technological innovations, standard rules meant to guide political behavior such as the Geneva Conventions or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, serves as international laws with moral implication which forces states to refrain from actions deemed overly unnecessary, immorally defined (e.g., the holocaust/Jewish cleansing policy of Nazi Germany), and aversive. This has helped us, although not always perfect, to avoid wars or to recall warring states to the table to negotiate peace (e.g., Hamas and Israel, Rwanda and Congo, and many others). In recent contextual discourse, the recent Israeli actions in Gaza sanctioned by Western states’ ineptitude have called into question both Israel’s disregard for international law and the Western states’ commitment to global institutions (whether in abstract or concrete terms) to which they stood in front to establish some decades ago. Analysts and scholars are now beginning to ask the critical question of whether international law applies to some states and not others within the international system when things fail to compliantly move in the expected direction of some states within the international environment.
Another issue to appreciate in defining what is wrong with realist thinking in IR and runs counterintuitive to a global framework trying to explain international politics can be found within the politics and security crisis of the developing countries of the world, particularly the Rwandan and Srebrenica genocides of the 1990s. In the context of the United Nations (AU), the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) refers to the principle that each member state has a primary responsibility to protect its population from mass atrocities like genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, and if a state is demonstrably failing to do so, the UN has the right to intervene to protect citizens. Based on the AU’s Constitutive Act, while Article 4 (g) prevents imploring member states to non-interferences on the internal affairs of other states in deference to the principle of sovereignty in Article 4 (a), Article 4 (h) categorically grants the community a moral obligation through the “…Union to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.” It upholds the concept of ‘non-indifference’ to such crimes, allowing the AU to intervene in a member state’s affairs if serious human rights violations occur. Such a transnational approach to interventions carries the weight to suggest that collective AU interests might emanate from a conceptually moral process and not an amoral self-interested gesture to portray interest as power because the state chooses to do so as the realists would claim.
Interestingly, as the realists’ ideas of IR may be, I perceive that global relations are embedded with many moral suppositions. Even the natural laws are, or else chaos would disrupt the balance of the universe. The sun can only shine during the day and the moon at night. If not, an eclipse that disrupts celestial balance would jeopardize their various opportunities to shine at their temporal limits around the clock. While this may be characterized as interests between the sun and moon at various times, each interest must be positioned in such a way that it does not overstep its bounds into the other’s interests defined as power. Similarly, is the issue of human rights embedded with so much morally distinctive power where individuals and states manage rights to life in such a way that one does not negatively affect other people’s expression of that right- no wonder the incarceration system is available for those who err despite an opportunity to defend themselves within a court of competent jurisdiction.
Thus, the ultimate interest of a state is to safeguard and protect its territorial integrity and citizens therein, even when that interest is in the development of nuclear capabilities (e.g., Tehren’s effort, the US, France, the UK, etc.). The ability and right to life and survival carry implicative moral appeals that cannot be ignored easily by even state officials in the construction of their foreign policy, no matter how selfish those policies are. It might impute some considerable respect for others or not, and the same goes for all states within the international system. This kind of thinking puts the assumptions of the realists regarding an anarchic state system with amoral gestures of state power into questions that demand more answers than those extant.
Christopher Amrobo Enemuwe is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at Idaho State University. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
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