Vol. 11 No. 1 | 2024 Edition
I liked realism from the start because I thought it did a much better job of explaining how states behave than other theories. It is not perfect, and it’s not that other perspectives don’t make their own contributions to our understanding, but I felt that realism had a much better track record in explaining how countries behaved. It also had extraordinary range across time and space: realist ideas could explain a lot about how empires acted, how city-states acted, how nation-states acted. It had explanations for why wars occur, why alliances form, why some states rise and fall. So it had a very wide applicability. And I thought that the main modern rivals to realist theory just weren’t as persuasive. Liberal theories didn’t predict that well. A good liberal would think that democracies would act fundamentally differently than autocracies, but the evidence that they do is limited. And as we talked about before, realism tells you that international law or norms will be of only limited value in controlling what the most powerful states will do.
This piece is offered in PDF format for easier reading. Download the PDF to read more.
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs and Faculty Chair of the Belfer Center’s International Security Program. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as Master of the Social Science Collegiate Division and Deputy Dean of Social Sciences. He writes a regular column at Foreign Policy magazine and is co-chair of the editorial board of the journal International Security. He was elected as a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in May 2005 and received a Distinguished Senior Scholar Award from the International Studies Association in 2015.
Professor Walt is the author of The Origins of Alliances (1987), which received the 1988 Edgar S. Furniss National Security Book Award. He is also the author of Revolution and War (1996), Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (2005), and with co-author J.J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007). His most recent book is The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of US Primacy (2018).