How to Survive a Hostile World: Power, Politics and the Case for Realism
by Patrick Porter
Stanford University Press, 202 pages, $24
Foreign policy realism is having a moment. A talk by the University of Chicago professor and dean of realism John G. Mearsheimer entitled “Why Is Ukraine the West’s fault?”—recorded in 2015 following the pro-Western putsch in that country the previous year—went viral in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ironically for a doctrine founded on the primacy of the nation-state, realism has benefitted from the viral dynamics of global communications. It has gained a reach and heft that it never previously enjoyed, even during the era of its supposed intellectual supremacy across the latter half of the twentieth century, when its reach was restricted to elite universities, scholarly journals, and specialist periodicals.
Given that we are going through an era of renewed geopolitical rivalry and conventional wars involving the great powers, it may seem obvious why realism is enjoying renewed interest. It is, after all, the doctrine of political science built on the proposition that ruthless competition for power and jockeying for advantage is endemic in international affairs. But realism does not base its claim on the fact of war alone. Realist tenets can also be observed in the repeat rounds of trade wars since at least 2016, in the balance of terror that underpins nuclear deterrence, in government efforts to reshore key supply chains within their borders, or in the unseemly international scrabble for ventilator machines and vaccines during the pandemic. In other words, what realists claim we are seeing goes beyond any specific war or the foreign policy of any particular country; rather, it speaks to the condition of international politics as such.