Defensive realism is a theory of international relations that’s a useful lens to look through in order to analyze international politics today. The essence of defensive realism is that as a state ...

Why do people hate realism so much? It’s a thoughtful question asked by Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy. Walt is a card-carrying foreign policy realist, his work on alliances and his theory of balance ...

During Russia's terrible and ongoing total war on Ukrainian civilians, it has become clear that one strain of so-called "realist" thought in international relations theory is a source of confusion and ...

The author’s views are his own and do not represent those of the Air War College, the Air Force or the Department of Defense. For the record, I side with the critics when it comes to the advisability ...

Foreign policy realists, for all of their intellectual heft, have historically struggled to translate their academic theories into actual government policy. Not only have realists failed to prevent ...

In this ambitious work of political theory, Bagg argues that defenders of Western democracy tend to struggle because they fail to grapple with underlying material disparities of economic and social ...

The impact of industrialization on the development of realist theory and literature is the subject of The Fabric of American Realism, a new book by Babak Elahi, associate professor of English at ...