There’s a running debate in international relations theory about whether the realist school of thought is anathema to the American people. Realists tend to think they’re outgunned and outnumbered, ...

If we needed any further confirmation, the crisis in Ukraine and the breakdown of Syria and Iraq have underlined, once again, the limits of Western power. In truth, the notion that there are many ...

John Bew, Realpolitik: A History (Oxford University Press, 2015). “It is never a waste of time to study the history of words.” In a strategic community that seems to be dominated by political science, ...

You may be all too familiar with those exhausting political-tagging debates involving this politician or that intellectual—and whether he or she is “really” a conservative (or a “real conservative”), ...

Trump is right: We should not break with Saudi Arabia. But we should demand a higher price for our support. As a card-carrying neoconservative, I am usually a critic of realpolitik. But in judging the ...

The term “Realpolitik” is endlessly bandied around in foreign policy debates, usually as an insult or synonym for Machiavellianism, but John Bew’s scholarly new book, Realpolitik: A History, reminds ...

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In 1973, Walter Laqueur wrote in Commentary that the influence of Henry Kissinger's writings had led to a situation where no article on foreign policy seemed complete "without a quotation or two about ...

This article will be published in the May 9 edition of the Weekly Standard. A good historian is inevitably a revisionist. Why write if you have nothing new to offer? But of course, not all ...