A Blinding ‘Realism’

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, May 23, 2025

 

Longtime readers know that I don’t have a lot of use for “realism” as widely practiced in foreign policy debates. The best working definition of a realist, I often say, is an ideologue who lost an argument. What I mean by that is so-called realists tend to claim that their political opponents—particularly those in power—are letting their ideological commitments blind them to what really needs to be done. “Those guys are ideologues, I’m just a realist” is to foreign policy what “Those guys are ideologues, I’m just a pragmatist” is to domestic policy.

 

One of my favorite illustrations of this comes from Pat Buchanan. Perhaps more than any other mainstream figure, Pat pushed the idea that America was too close to Israel. Some of his arguments were standard fair realpolitik and rehashed “beware entangling alliances” boilerplate. Israel is tiny, the Arab world is huge, why side with a hated minority in a region we relied on for oil?  But Pat would press the argument further, suggesting—or asserting—that Jews in America were responsible for our unwise alliance with Israel because they’re a “fifth column” in America with dual loyalties.  Here are a few of many, many examples, as pointed out by the Anti-Defamation League:

 

·        “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in The Middle East—the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” (The McLaughlin Group, Aug 26, 1990)

 

·        “Capitol Hill is Israeli occupied territory.” (The McLaughlin Group, June 15, 1990)

 

·        “I know the power of the Israeli lobby and the other lobbies, but we need a foreign policy that puts our own country first.” (Meet the Press, September 12, 1999)

 

·        “Whose War? The Loudest Clique Behind the President’s Policy” (The American Conservative, March 24, 2003)

 

Anyway, you get the point.

 

But in 1991, Buchanan urged the U.S. government to send the 6th Fleet to protect Croatia from Serbian aggression because, as David Frum wrote for National Review:

 

“Croatia is not some faraway desert emirate,” he noted. “It is a ‘piece of the continent, a part of the main,’ a Western republic that belonged to the Habsburg empire and was for centuries the first line of defense of Christian Europe. For their ceaseless resistance to the Ottoman Turks, Croatia was proclaimed by Pope Leo X to be the ‘Antemurale Christianitatis,’ the bulwark of Christianity.”

 

Now, I’m okay with a policy of protecting Croatia, but spare me the Jew scapegoating about letting religious and ethnic loyalties trump realism.

 

As John Lukacs once put it, describing Buchanan’s virulent hatred for Winston Churchill but tolerance for Hitler, “Buchanan is as much of an internationalist as he is an isolationist—dependent on his choice of who the enemy is.”

 

If you want a pithier and more timely illustration of the point, consider Donald Trump’s defense of white South Africans. Trump and his folks have invested a ton of time and energy into the idea that we should not be offering asylum to persecuted peoples, including Afghan translators who worked with American troops. Whatever you think of that idea, or how the administration has acted on it, it’s an intellectually defensible position. But it goes out the window when it comes to white farmers in South Africa. I’m fine with offering asylum to qualified white South Africans, but it’s telling that Afrikaners are the exception to the realist rule the way Croatians were for Buchanan.  There is no national security argument for coming to their rescue. It just feels right to Trump.

 

And that gets me to my point. Not to sound too much like German political theorist Carl Schmitt, but the friend-enemy distinction is unavoidable in foreign policy. The trick is to have a worldview, an ideological construct or frame of reference, about how you distinguish friend from enemy. A second order question is what you’re willing to do—or not do—in the name of friendship or, nemesis. Enmity? That is almost entirely a prudential question.  In other words, idealism is unavoidable about ends, but realism about means is essential.

 

Isolationism is a form of idealism—believing in a shining city on a hill unmuddied by the affairs of the world. Liberal internationalism is a form of idealism. Even classical realism is a kind of idealism, insofar as it posits a theory of how the world works and, as a result, how the state should operate within that reality. But every form of realism still conceives of friends and enemies. Realists want allies. They may be more cynical about how deep or enduring any given alliance will be in the unsupervised prison yard that is the global arena, but they still see alliances as useful tools of statecraft. As the 19th century British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston famously said, “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual.”

 

But back to that prudential question. I have few major objections to the realist’s description of how the world works. Countries act on their interests, they say, and I nod along. Where I think realists go wrong is in their quasi-Marxist definition of national interests as narrow economic, geo-strategic, essentially materialist, considerations. Political leaders—democratic and authoritarian alike—make decisions based on things other than economic or pure national security considerations all the time. Notions of national honor, cultural ties, shared values, religious imperatives, and national “glory” move countries to action all the time.

 

Starting in earnest in the 19^th century, Russia convinced itself that it was the “Protector of the Slavs” everywhere. I think this is a stupid belief. But it is, and has been, sincerely held by Russians for a long time. I don’t think it’s been in their interest, if we define interest in realist terms, but that’s the point. The Russians don’t define their interest in purely realist terms. If they did, they might not be slaughtering so many Ukrainians right now.

 

Iran is run by a bunch of theocratic nutters. Their definition of national interest stems from their messianic mess of an ideology. If the regime were toppled tomorrow—fingers crossed!—the new regime would have a different definition of national interest. 

 

I could do the same thing with China, North Korea, Cuba, et al. The assumption that rulers act only on fundamental national interest is question-begging on stilts. And the idea that the conception of national interest doesn’t change with a new regime is as ideological and unrealistic as any other school of foreign policy.

 

Which gets us back to the friend-enemy distinction. The question isn’t whether America should have friends, but what kind of friends we should have.

 

President Trump doesn’t have a lot of use for our traditional friends or our traditional criteria for deciding who our friends are. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want friends. He obviously wants to be Vladimir Putin’s friend, which is why he treats him with such deference while treating Volodymyr Zelensky with such contempt. He clearly likes being friends with the president of El Salvador. He loves to show people the love letters he got from Kim Jong Un. And, of course, he really digs his new besties in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

 

I think some of this can be explained by the fact that he likes to be friends with tough guys because that’s how he likes to be seen. But some of it can also be explained by the fact he loves to make deals with the sorts of people who don’t have to go to voters or legislatures for approval. He likes dealing with “deciders” who can close a deal with a handshake. That’s harder to do with democratic leaders. In other words, he likes strong men aesthetically but he also likes the way strong men can get things done.

 

This is partly why he’s so hellbent on convincing people he should be granted war powers, because in our system it’s only through the invocation of war or some other crisis that an American president can behave like a strong man. 

 

Until recently, Americans in both parties broadly defined our national interest as being bound-up with being the “leader of the free world.” There’s a lot of room within that consensus for profound disagreements, but they were disagreements within that broad framework.

 

I think that framework is correct. Full stop. I can give you another 500 or 5,000 words for why I think this is so—on realist terms. As an economic matter, it’s better to be friends with rich countries than poor ones. It’s better to have allies that share our values, because that makes collective action in our interest easier. But I don’t want to make the realist case, because I think the moral case is more compelling. We should be on the side of freedom, because we believe freedom is morally superior. Even the isolationist hero John Quincy Adams agreed with that. Isolationists love to quote his line about how America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” They’re less fond of sentences that came before and after it:

 

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.

 

In other words, JQA would be, at least rhetorically, on the side of Ukraine, Tibet, and Taiwan.

 

Not to live down to Pat’s expectations, but I think the Trump administration’s view is bad news for Israel. I’ll spare you all of the punditry about Steve Witkoff’s toadying to Qatar (and Putin), the administration’s leaks undermining Israel, or the fact Trump skipped visiting Israel on his recent trip to the Middle East. The bigger point is that if the new definition of the national interest is one that accepts a policy of blindness or contempt for democracies that share our values, that’s bad news for Israel (and Taiwan) in the long run.

 

A world in which America values friends who can make handshake deals, regardless of how much blood they have on their hands; a world in which trade between free economies is deemed to be theft; a world in which mutual defense over shared values is for suckers; a world in which nations can buy good will with fawning lightshows and free luxury jets: This is not a good world for Israel.

 

But more importantly, it’s not a good world for America.