Trump’s Foreign Policy May Be Crude, But It’s Realist

Opinion|What Is Trump’s Worldview? Call It Neanderthal Realism.

The destruction of U.S.A.I.D. Threats to make Canada the 51st state. The humiliation of Ukraine. What is going on with U.S. foreign policy? Some see it as driven by President Trump’s personal greed or fondness for dictators. Both might ring true, but neither tells the whole story. What matters most to Mr. Trump is not the wealth or ideology of a country but how powerful it is. He believes in dominating the weak and giving deference to the strong. It’s a strategy as old as time. It’s called realism.

Don’t get me wrong. So much of what Mr. Trump does abroad, like what he does at home, is ham-handed, shortsighted and cruel. But I also detect in his administration a recognition that the liberal international world order was possible only because of U.S. military might and that Americans don’t want to pay the bill anymore. That’s realism — a crude, unstrategic, “Neanderthal realism,” as the political scientist Stephen Walt once called it — but a form of realism nonetheless.

Realists see the world as a brutal, anarchic place. For them, security comes not from spreading the ideology of democracy and creating international laws that we then must enforce but from being the strongest bully on the block — and avoiding battles with other bullies. Mr. Trump wants to avoid a war with Russia. That means hardening our hearts to Ukraine’s plight.

The origin story of realism dates back to the Peloponnesian War, when Athens, a superpower of that era, laid siege to the island of Melos and announced that if its people didn’t pledge their loyalty, the men would be slaughtered, the women and children enslaved and the island colonized.

The Melians protested that Athens had no right to do that. Athens didn’t care. Noble ideas are only as durable as the army enforcing them. The Athenians uttered the still famous line in Thucydides’ history: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

If I’m honest, I probably would have bent my knee and lived to fight another day in secret resistance. But the leaders of Melos were braver than me. They chose to fight. The result? The men were slaughtered, the women and children were enslaved, and the island was colonized. Were they heroes or fools? If you think of them as heroes, you are a liberal internationalist, who believes that peace and security depend on just governments that abide by enlightened rules. If you think they were fools, you’re a realist.