Introduction for How to Survive a Hostile World
Introduction
LET US BEGIN IN the dark. For in that is where we existentially are in a time of war, atrocity, plague, economic dislocation and climate crisis, and political rancor. The darkness has several layers. It is partly the darkness of what we humans are capable of doing to one another. It is partly the darkness of facts we can’t avoid—of impermanence and mortality. Everything ends. Life is fragile, and time is scarce. And there is the darkness of uncertainty. Our knowledge about life remains limited. In particular, we can’t for certain know what others are thinking. Even if we could, we can’t know whether, when, and how their minds will change. Understanding the political environment we live in matters. In order to build a richer and fuller existence, what President John F. Kennedy called “a more vital life,” we must first see the world for what it is.1 We must survive.
Morbid? A little. Granted, this author has a melancholy streak and is predisposed to look for the darkness. Still, thousands of years of history are pretty dark. There are moments when the darkness lifts. Moments. And even the peace of those interludes is uneasy and uneven. Nostalgists nowadays look back on the Cold War or the 1990s periods of stable “order.” But the Cold War era turned continental Europe—the core of such nostalgia—into rival armed camps. And it featured brutal conflicts, coups, and purges through Indonesia, Korea, Tibet, Vietnam, Egypt, Hungary, Angola, Cuba, Chile, Cyprus, Greece, and beyond. And when, in the 1990s, the United States enjoyed a large and decisive power advantage and was unchecked by peer adversaries and expected its preponderance to last, the supposed holiday from history also featured the Second Congo War, Africa’s Great War, and bloodletting in the Balkans. It is idle, therefore, to tell people studying International Relations (IR) that times have changed and to switch focus to other matters. To do so is to wish away the recent history of concentration camps and gulags, minefields and bomb craters, and the signs of their return.
That being so, the study of IR matters. Those who make foreign policy, after all, work from assumptions about how the world works—what we call “theory”—whether or not they admit it. Within IR, which is the best, or least bad, “first cut”? Which is the soundest starting point for understanding that part of politics that we call “international”? It is the tradition of realism despite the many and extensive attacks on it.
In a nutshell, realism is a pessimistic intellectual tradition about how the world of human politics is and how it is bound to be. It views international life as intrinsically dangerous given both our species’ capacity for violence and the absence of a reliable protector to keep us safe. However remote it seems, the shadow of war conditions international life. All efforts at cooperation, prosperity, and peace are constrained by that reality—a reality that can’t be changed. Likewise, human groups ought to make all foreign and defense policy with that shadow in mind. Most polities tend to act in self-serving ways and revert to competition under pressure. They do so not primarily because they are bad but because the imperatives of the international system shove them in that direction. Those that flout these imperatives court punishment. Realism takes as its analytical priority the external environment, its structure, or the “international system,” and the pressures it generates. Realism need not be blind to other factors, like domestic politics or the type of regime or ruler, but these have lesser causal weight. Importantly, realists assume that international forces are the main source of domestic politics, rather than vice versa. It is hard to understand political strife from China to America, for instance, without factoring in global competition for muscle labor and how this drives up China’s growth, drives down American wages, and moves industry offshore and creates a more discontent working class.
This book is a short defense of the realist worldview. It is written mainly for those who are new to the subject. It has in mind those who are curious and come at this with fresh minds. My goal isn’t to convert you to realism. Or, at least, that’s not the main goal. Rather, I want to show you that realism is a serious tradition worthy of consideration. It is not a typical academic book, as it isn’t primarily a work of innovation. Rather, it is an attempt at rejuvenation. Realists spend much of their/our time arguing with each other about how best to formulate, refine, and apply the intellectual tradition. That’s not a bad thing. A paradigm without internal dispute is a dead paradigm. But it has come at a price. By talking so much to one another and other scholars, not enough realists defend the church to a broader audience, though there are honorable exceptions, like the scholar Stephen Walt, and these deserve supporting fire.
This book makes three arguments. Against claims to the contrary, I argue realism has a moral basis. Against claims to the contrary, I argue realism is realistic, at least to the extent that it works like a decent map, simplifying enough to clarify without fundamentally distorting things. And against claims to the contrary, I argue realism is for everyone.
This is not the first bite-size defense of realism. I commend readers to two short articles by Robert Gilpin—one of the most penetrating realist minds—from 1984 and 1996, where he recapitulated and defended realism from new waves of criticism.2 Gilpin’s articles, though, appeared in the era of the late Cold War of 1984 and then at the climax of US global preeminence in 1996. Three decades later, advocacy on realism’s behalf is again needed—this time, for a new context.
This book brings the discussion to a generation facing different circumstances: a more multipolar world where hierarchies and power balances are more unsettled and where Western youth are generally more skeptical about realism’s core claims, more averse to the idea of militarized competition for security under anarchy, and more sensitive to the issue of whether any IR theory developed by Western minds can be truly universal. This discussion approaches realism through several problem areas that have taken on added salience in the present—namely, the climate crisis, the question of cultural difference and Eurocentrism, mounting crises in East Asia and the Middle East, and the largest war in Europe in generations. These issues are likely to intensify further in our time and beyond.
A few points of clarification are needed before we begin. First, in defending “realism,” I am defending the common baseline of assumptions that realists share. Realists, like any “-ists,” are not monolithic. Realism is more a paradigm or family of theories than a single one. Here, the focus is on the realist “minimum.”
Throughout this book, I refer to “states.” To be clear, I use this as shorthand not just for the kind of nation-states we have today but also for what Gilpin calls “conflict groups” more broadly, applicable from city-states to empires. At their core, they are organized and governed to rule a territory and population from a fixed abode. When I discuss nonstate actors, like insurgent movements or terrorist networks, I’ll say so.
Last, skeptics will likely say that realists, like this author, don’t have much to say about novel, cutting-edge, or resurgent problems away from realism’s main focus, like artificial intelligence, robotics technology, food insecurity, social media disinformation, or preventable diseases. In truth, we don’t. A general paradigm does not rise or fall on its capacity to pronounce on and incorporate every worthy topic or to be relevant across the board. The subjects above are important and deserve intensive study. They bear on realism, however, only to the extent that they challenge realism’s fundamental claims about international politics. Aspects of today’s existence may be more complex than earlier generations endured, though they often aren’t more intense. We shouldn’t be too impressed with how much more sophisticated we, or our circumstances, are than our forbears. Most people today would not swap their problems for what their ancestors endured. In those areas where things are more complex, other ideas and theories may help understand those issues that fall outside realism’s main focus.3 If you are after a Great Big Theory of Everything in IR, you’ve come to the wrong shop.
Studying international politics requires us to look carefully, to distinguish what is new from what only seems to be new. For sure, the internet is centrally important in our lives, but that doesn’t mean online activity alters the offline balance between the weak and the strong. Other problems sometimes look more urgent, but that doesn’t mean they will remain so. Terrorism and insurgency, for a time, persuaded some that realism, with its emphasis upon states and great power politics, was losing its salience. That dismissal, it turns out, presupposed the continuation of a stable international hierarchy, overseen by one superpower—conditions luxurious enough that strong states could focus so much on lesser threats. Those conditions ended. Indeed, the assumption that other things mattered more—in particular, the overinvestment in counterterrorism, nation building, and the extravagant global war on terror—diverted capital (intellectual and financial) from a more important development: the return of interstate competition. Realism’s main focus is on conflict, power, and survival against the most intense and direct threats. Not a trendy topic, perhaps. But alas, once again, on trend.
Notes
1. John F. Kennedy, “Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy Announcing His Candidacy for the Presidency of the United States—Senate Caucus Room, Washington, DC,” January 2, 1960, The American Presidency Project, accessed March 13, 2025, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/274074.
2. Robert G. Gilpin, “The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism,” International Organization 38, no. 2 (1984): 287–304, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2706441; Gilpin, “No One Loves a Political Realist,” Security Studies 5, no. 3 (1996): 3–26, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636419608429275.
3. For Charles L. Glaser’s prescient argument, see Glaser, “Structural Realism in a More Complex World,” Review of International Studies 29, no. 3 (2003): 403–14, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20097862.