The Poverty of Realism
No political theory in the world is less real than the so called “realism”.
Why?
Because it ignores the domestic politics.
“Realism” explains literally every big political decision with the foreign policy concerns. Powers compete for hegemony, and their rivalry triggers international conflicts. Why did Russia, or China, or the United States did this or that? Because of their relation to another state. Obsessed with the foreign policy, “realism” looks at this world exclusively through the lenses of the interstate competition.
The realist vision of politics
Now what would be the blindspot of this approach? The intrastate competition, of course. That is the domestic politics. Seeing the state as a basic unit of politics, “realists” effectively treat is a monolith with no internal structure or dynamics. This is what makes realism so shockingly delusional.
The thing with the powers is that they are run by the powerful. That is, by the powerful people and interest groups. So, to understand the behaviour of a power, you must first investigate concerns of the powerful.
What you should know of the powerful?
Nobody becomes powerful by accident
To become powerful, you must first win the power
And then you must defend it from all kinds of the pretenders
Defending the power takes at the very, very least 99% of your attention
If you cannot fulfil this bare minimum, you will be ousted out by a more single-focused pretender
Our basic assumption about the powerful must be that they are focused solely and exclusively on defending their power. Otherwise, they would have been ousted out long ago. If they are not, this indicates they are absolutely power-obsessed.
As the powerful are preoccupied with guarding their power, their attention is necessarily focused on defending their position at home. That means that the goal of their policy must lie in the domain of domestic politics. Foreign policy, on the other hand, constitutes merely an instrument for securing one’s position at home.
Domestic politics is the goal
Foreign policy is an instrument
This must be a starting point for any truly realistic conversation on the foreign policy and the international relations.
The “realists” get it wrong
I knew there was a EU4 player in there!
Great post, and “it’s not a map painting game” is exactly the right lens.
This makes me wonder if "realism" as a theory originated in studying periods like Middle Ages Germany, when "home" was a flyspeck country the size of a small city -- really, the work necessary to keep the burghers of Bremen happy was not a lot of work -- and gaining political power meant gaining *additional territory*.
If you're the Prince of Lippe, sure, domestic politics in Lippe are *important*, but your relations with other cities, states, and countries are going to dominate your time and energy (even from a domestic economics point of view -- your domestic economy is *dominated* by foreign trade).
The larger your country is, the less relevance foreign policy has to your power and the more relevance domestic policy has. So you'd expect foreign policy to matter very much in Andorra and hardly at all in China.