Realist thinkers from Thucydides through Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz have counseled ruthless focus on national interest and warned against costly overextension. Trump's Iran war violates both principles, two scholars steeped in that tradition have argued.
As "Hvylya" reports, Rebecca Lissner of the Council on Foreign Relations and Mira Rapp-Hooper of the Brookings Institution argued in Foreign Affairs that the Trump administration's "reckless use of American power" has made it "realism's latest cautionary tale."
The scholars traced how commentators anointed Trump a realist at different moments for different reasons. In his first term, the label stuck because of his perceived restraint and pivot toward great-power competition with China. In his second term, the White House rebranded the approach as "flexible realism" - anchored, adviser Stephen Miller told CNN, in the principle that "we live in a world governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power."
But Miller's formulation illustrates the problem, the authors argued. Real realism demands more than a preference for domination. It requires strategy, a clear hierarchy of interests, and leaders who anticipate unintended consequences. The Iran war lacks all three: it embroils the United States deeper in a region Trump himself downgraded, it drains resources needed for the Indo-Pacific, and it has triggered an energy crisis the administration did not anticipate.
The prominent realist scholar John Mearsheimer and his peers have spent decades debating whether states seek security or maximum power. But all stripes of realism, the authors noted, counsel a basic national security pragmatism: secure a favorable balance of power and avoid peripheral conflicts that drain blood and treasure.
Trump may believe that raw power settles all questions. But dominance without a strategic framework, the scholars concluded, is not realism - it is recklessness.
Also read: why McChrystal dismantled the case for air power supremacy in Iran.