Realism and geopolitics

Though the idea of Realism is derived from Greek philosophy, one should understand that philosophy is not a standstill faculty; and with every new thinker some things are lost and some gained in every school of thought.

The basic idea around which this school of thought revolves is the idea the real world exists around us regardless of our thought or experience of it. This very idea led its believers to the belief on the solidity of reality and that though our senses provide us with direct awareness of the external world, the senses can sometimes be wrong, but in any case, the corporeal objective world is always real.

This same school of thought has also deliberated on human nature; how it constructs society; and how states behave in the community of states.

Thucydides, who had witnessed the Peloponnesian Wars, was perhaps the first realist political scientist. Introducing ideas like the security dilemma, which may be created if one state allies with the enemy of a friendly state; and the Thucydides Trap, meaning that a ruling power is threatened by a rising power and will inevitably attack it, even if the other is meaning no harm.

The enlightenment writer Machiavelli advised the rulers of Italy in his book, The Prince, to regard virtu over virtue and to use the tools of deception, treachery and brute force to strengthen their power inside the state and to weaken enemy states. Thomas Hobbes, who introduced the idea of a social contract by virtue of which the people surrender their power to a sovereign, did not talk of the sovereign as one concerned with the welfare of his people, rather he talked of a sovereign with absolute power and impunity.

In the 20th Century, American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr gave a realist approach to religion by pronouncing that the individual's attempt to fulfil the commandments of religion in a moral sense is impossible. Because of man's pride and selfish self-love, is displayed the human tendency to corrupt the good, throughout history.

Political theorists like Carr and Morgenthau grounded their idea of realism on an innate human nature of animus dominandi, or drive to dominate. They defined morality as relative and that policies of states are made upon interests not moral values. Kenneth Waltz added to realism the scientific foundations of structuralism and proclaimed the international system to be anarchic. All states are constrained by existing in an international anarchic system, and their course of action is undermined by their relative power within the larger structure.

Morgenthau in his political ontology terms the animus dominandi a potentially insatiable will. Therefore, a state's 'national interest' is defined in terms of 'rank-maximisation' by relentlessly maintaining, expanding or demonstrating 'power'. Power (the Lion) and deception (the Fox) have been regarded crucial tools for the conduct of foreign policy. So, from the onset realist have proclaimed that humans are at the core evil and therefore societies and states are inherently anarchic.

Contemporary political theorist John Mearsheimer also endorses animus dominandi in his Offensive Realism. He says that the international system is an anarchic one, where each state is for itself and cannot rely on any over-arching power that will protect it. So, between fear and the lust for glory, states behave as power maximisers. He also tends to defend the idea of US supremacy by upholding the Hegemonic Stability Theory that poses that the international system is stable when a single state is the dominant world power, or hegemon. And US's superior military, its insularity and its large growing economy makes it a natural hegemon, which can enforce rules of system upon others provided the system is considered mutually beneficial by other big powers and important states.

Going further, Mearsheimer explains how the US, considering itself the sole superpower of the world in the previous decades, pursued the policy of spreading its liberal ideals around the world, and how it went all wrong. Instead of using its hegemony to maintain a global status quo that would serve its economic and political purposes, the US, considering itself the greatest civilisation, went on to export its liberal ideals and attempted a global-scale social engineering – an attempt that has often backfired.

The US attempt for liberal hegemony, a mix of its realism and liberalism, goodness and evil packed in a same pretty package, has awakened in many states their sense of nationalism, and forced them to raise their guards against ideas that oppose their cultural and religious norms. Rather, nations have reacted to such onslaughts with their own realist versions.

Realism, then, is a stringent, apathetic, materialistic realpolitik that has little to do with compassion and empathy for humanity. Power and only power is its goal – in whose pursuit all goodness can be redefined as evil and all evils can be redefined as good!

It is a shame that such a ruthless idea prevails in Western political thinking. And it pains to think what kind of a world order is expected under such a school of thought. Many contemporary realist thinkers who had great influence in the matters of their states, like Kissinger, George Kennan, Brzezinski, Charles de Gaulle, Deng Xiaoping and Lee Kuan Yew, have followed the coercive, amoral, Machiavellianism that may have boosted their respective state's powers. But how have this type of thinking left the world as a whole? Is humanity better off with this school of thought?

Sadly, this school of thought does not believe in cooperation and mutual progress. It believes in zero-sum games, meaning that in order to be successful one must ensure that all others are unsuccessful and subdued. The animus dominandi of its believers does not accept anyone getting ahead of them – and they are prepared to kill and destroy their enemy or even the whole system to achieve the dominant status.

German politician, Ludwig Rochau, wrote, "The law of power governs the world of states just as the law of gravity governs the physical world." With power being at such a primal position, there is no place for truth, friendship, fidelity or honour; there is only thing, according to Kissinger, a flexible "ability to exploit every available option without constrain of ideology".