You don’t often find the philosopher Donald Trump of Queens and the historian Thucydides of Athens in the same article. Kudos, as Thucydides would say to Foreign Policy magazine.
A Foreign Policy contributor from the Rand Corp. argued last April that Trump is running a “grand experiment” in realist theory, the view of international relations that the wonks trace to Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War. In January, the president’s first-term National Security Council chief, Alexander Gray, told the Guardian that his former boss was a “foreign policy realist in the tradition of Nixon and Kissinger.” The New York Times agreed, so it must be true. Realism, the outlet said, gives Trump “a blank check for aggression.”
The realist tries to see the world as it is and pursue national interests without the encumbrance of ideals or emotion. No wonder realism is the minority report of American foreign policy. The American view of human nature, embedded in the Constitution and laws that allow children to drive hummers, is the inspiring, sentimental, and deranged notion that all of us are capable of exercising our faculty of reason. History has shown that most of us prefer to take no exercise at all, and that the faculty just lounge. There is no America without idealism.
George Kennan supplied the realist “containment” doctrine that guided America to victory in the Cold War, but he left no realist school or think tank. The closest we have come since then, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, calls itself “realist” but was astroturfed with cash from Charles Koch’s and George Soros’s foundations and is staffed by frothy-lipped, pro-Iran isolationists. Quincy is against “foreign entanglements,” so it’s run by Trita Parsi, who was born in Iran, raised in Sweden, founded the National Iranian American Council when he was not an American citizen, and was the Obama administration’s human back channel to the mass-murdering regime in Tehran.
Every now and then, though, the idealists bungle it, and the realists get a chance. That was how Henry Kissinger became the master of disaster who wriggled the United States out of Vietnam. We are where we are now, and we are there with the Quincy clowns, because the idealists misread the tea leaves in the 1990s and overreached in Iraq and Afghanistan. When it’s time to get real, everyone who wants a job in Washington calls themselves a “realist.”
Trump may sound like living proof of the Realism 101 that the victorious Athenians teach the sad losers of Melos in the “Melian Dialogue” of The Peloponnesian War: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” But Trump is both more and less than a realist, and not just because no sane person would give him a blank check, and his dialogue is mostly a monologue.
Trump does not do theory. The “Donald Monologue” is all practice, and what he practices is blunt and aggressive machtpolitik, power politics. No one uses machtpolitik as a compliment. It’s realpolitik with the kind of itchy trigger that leads to the Trump administration’s abduction of an obstacle such as former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. The machtpolitik mentality differs from realism in its Machiavellian faith that conflict is at the core of human affairs than in its conviction that power is meaningless unless it is used. Physical force becomes just another option in the toolbox of coercion.
No surprise, machtpolitik was invented in Europe; in 19th-century Prussia, to be precise. After Bismarck’s German empire-state arose in the heart of Europe after 1871, the means of machtpolitik developed to serve the ends of weltpolitik, the “world politics” that attunes national policies to global ones. We know how that turned out. After 1945, western Europe harmonized with its American lead and shifted its weltpolitik into a liberal key that some Europeans called idealpolitik, “ideal politics.” In the 1990s, the European Union improvised on these themes in the register of international law and human rights. These extemporizations had no status in American law, but their idealist melodies enchanted American bureaucrats and many elected legislators, too.
CONTINENTAL DRIFT: AMERICA, EUROPE, AND THE NEW POWER POLITICS
A 2024 paper in the Journal of European Public Policy by Nicolai Gellwitzki and Anne-Marie Houde calls the current Euro-narrative gefühlspolitik, “the politics of feeling.” As Kissinger’s realpolitik hardens into Trump’s machtpolitik, so Europe’s idealpolitik deliquesces into gefühlspolitik. A similar decline, decadence, even has occurred to American idealism. Social media encourages people to huff their own hydrogen sulphide until they pass out or, in the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, are shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. Good and Pretti’s sanctimonious folly cannot, however, justify the use of machtpolitik at point-blank range. For that response also comes from the politics of feeling.
The president lives in his own fantasy of political feels, too. The scheme to mark the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution by throwing up a last-minute “Arc de Trump” on Memorial Circle in Washington suggests that, at least in our public life, the yeoman virtues of self-regulation and tax evasion are now eclipsed by imperial delusion, much as happened to Thucydides’s Athens. The cycle of history has turned on America. Perhaps that’s why Trump is building it on a rotary.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.