Trump's foreign policy may be crude, but it's realist

World view

- By FARAH STOCKMAN

The destruction of the US Agency for International Development. Threats to make Canada the 51st state. The humiliation of Ukraine. What is going on with US foreign policy? Some see it as driven by President Donald Trump's personal greed or fondness for dictators. Both might ring true, but neither tells the whole story.

What matters most to 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 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 US military might and that Americans don't want to pay the bill anymore. That's realism—a crude, unstrategic, "Neanderthal realism," as 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 also from being the strongest bully on the block—and avoiding battles with other bullies. 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."