HOLMES CHAPTER 2:
POLITICAL REALISM
Is realism an accurate depictions of what
occurs within international relations and
foreign policy? Does it tell us how to think
about foreign policy?
Realism’s Image
• Realpolitik (power politics): “the only creed appropriate to
foreign relations…”
• US must play the game of power politics efficiently or lose
the game to someone else.
• Men who “won the West…made America
great…unburdened by sentimentality…” (p. 51)
• What is the image here? Is it accurate? What role does it
play/what use might it be to policymakers?
The role of morality
• On one realist view, morality is “unobtrusive, almost
feminine, function of the gentle civilizer of national selfinterest…” (p. 51)
• Political realists of the 20th Century: Reinhold Nieburh,
George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, Robert Osgood,
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Henry Kissinger.
• According to Holmes, much of American foreign policy
since WWII has conformed to realist prescriptions: There
is no room for morality.
The philosophical problem
• There are various aspects of the international
circumstances that lend themselves to a realist
perspective
• (1) It seems permitted for states to do everything
individuals are not permitted to do—(e.g., lie, kill, steal…)
• Woodrow Wilson (1917) “we are at the beginning of an
age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of
conduct and responsibility for wrong done shall be
observed among nations…as among individuals.”
• Is such a thing possible?
Thucydides in the Peloponnesian War
• Athenians say that the weak have always been subject to
the strong. Claims of injustice are not plausible. Athenians
claim that you [the Lacedaemonians] thought our power
was fine until there was a threat to you. The claim of
justice “no one ever yet brought forward to hinder his
ambition when he had a chance of gaining anything by
might…” (52)
Relationship Between Morality and SelfInterest
• [A realist need not be a conventionalist or relativist about
morality] However, two positions like this:
• (1) Hobbes: Sovereign states have no authority over them
and morality requires such authority. [The sovereign
determines right and wrong.] So nations are in a state of
nature and there is no justice in the state of nature.
Morality/Self-Interest
• Callicles: The weak are subject to the strong. There is a
‘natural justice’ in which the strong rule over the weak.’
• (Callicles assumes the strong should rule.)
• Laws and conventions hamper the strong and keep the
strong from ruling appropriately.
The (false) ideal of equality ties the hands of the strong.
Two moralities result: The natural dominance of the strong
and the conventional morality which protects the weak.
Machpolitik
• Thrasymachus (in Book 2 of the Republic –Callicles is in
Book 1) also thinks the strong should prevail.
• Social Darwinism asserts that view as well.
So another distinction is between public and private
morality.
Private: Governs the conduct of individuals in their personal
relations.
Public: Governs the conduct of individuals in their role in
government, business or public life.
Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’
• According to Machiavelli, the prince “cannot possibly
exercise all those virtues for which men are called ‘good’”
because he must do what is necessary for the
preservation of the state.
The prince must jettison private morality for the greater
good.
Collective Morality
• Is collective morality fundamentally different than private
morality?
• Von Treitschke: the State is to be judged by standards
“which are set for it by its own nature and ultimate aims…”
This is a “higher morality…”
• The collective morality of the state has priority. Private
morality can be permissibly violated.
Fundamental of realism
• Most realists view the collective morality of the state as
inferior (morally speaking) to person/individual morality.
But they don’t think personal morality can govern foreign
affairs.
• Political realism is also used to imply something that
rejects emotions and idealism.
Positivistic realism
• Positivists argued that, for something to be a statement, it
has to be capable of being verified (shown true or false).
[Religion was thought not to be made up of such
statements and emotivists thought moral claims were
more like saying ‘boo’ or ‘hooray’ rather than true or false.
• Holmes calls positivistic realism the claim that morality
has not application whatever to international relations.
• Right and wrong only apply to the actions of individuals.
Normative realism
• A normative claim is a claim about what should be the
case.
• Normative realism “allows that one can make moral
judgments about international affairs but …one ought not
to do so in conducting foreign policy…” (p. 57)
One can make sense of the idea that Nation X did
something wrong but we should referain from making
such judgments.
• Machiavelli: The prince should exhibit virtue when he
can…The soft realist: The state should be moral when it
can…
A higher order justification for realism
• The state promotes and maintains values. [Plato, Augustine,
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Treitschke, Hegel, John Jay, Mussolini]
GE Moore: Society is necessary for the highest goods.
The modern version of raison d’ etat is the idea of national
interest.
Other claims
(1) Nations always act from self interest
(2) System of international relations requires acting from self
interest [Hobbes/Clauswitz]
(3) The nature of the human condition precludes reliance on
morality in international affairs [Niebuhr/Augustine]
(4) Acting on moral considerations has worse consequences
(Kennan, Schlesshinger)
Recent justifications of realism:
Isolationism v. Idealism
• Historical events
US seized the Philippines from Spain but realized this was
a mistake and backed off and became isolationist.
Lincoln: All the armies of Europe…”could not by force take
a drink from the Ohio…” US geographically isolated.
Wilson: America’s moral superiority should keep it out of
war. (But we were drawn into WWI)
Osgood: “If…Wilson erred…” it was not by leading the US
into war but by failing “to prepare the people to see their
entrance into a foreign war as an act consistent with
national ideals…” (p. 60)
National security
• Wilson’s idealist mistake was to fail to realize that he
couldn’t use ‘moral suasion’ and had to be prepared to
use power.
• Kennan: The failure to maintain the balance of power
sowed the seeds for WWII.
• Thus idealism led to WWII.
Niebuhrian realism
• (Obama has said that Niebuhr has an influence on his
foreign policy.)
• Niebuhr argues that “group relations express collective
egoism and “can never be as ethical as those which
characterize individual relations’.”
• We cannot respond morally in collective situations. (So it
is not normative realism.)
• People subordinate their personal interests and moral
compass to the service of the state.
Nieburh: Why can’t we be moral in
collectives
• It’s a psychological claim.
• (1) There is a ‘stubbornness of sin’ in all humans. This is part of
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the human condition and can’t be corrected.
[Is there a secular version of this claim?]
We should not be romantic and overestimate our ability to be
good.
It’s part of our ‘tragic nature’.
(2) We lose ourselves in collectively egoistic projects (like
nationalism?)
P. 66 “Loyalty to the nation is a high form of altruism when
compared with lesser loyalties…unselfishness of individuals
makes for the selfishness of nations…”
Holmes: These two accounts conflict with each other but there
is a psychological truth within it.
Neorealism
• The balance of power approach.
• Churchill: Balance of power “is a law of public policy…”
• Holmes: A major problem is knowing when the power is
balanced. In Vietnam, the morale of the Vietnamese was
stronger than the Americans and so the estimates of the
balance of power were mistaken.
• The balance of power cannot maintain peace because it
assumes leaders are rational in a way they often arne’t.
What has been the motivation of
American leaders since WWII?