Realism Remains A Terrible Position

One of the things which is most frustrating about the Donald Trump Administration is consistently seeing his supporters across the media attempt to form a coherent intellectual basis for his actions, when in reality no such thing exists. An article published today by Michael Lind in UnHerd with the headline “The roots of Trump’s realpolitik” sees one such example of what I am talking about.

The piece is not full of factual errors — although that is not to say none exist. (I specifically took note of Lind calling the late New York Times columnist William Safire a neoconservative, he wasn’t.) However, what primarily makes this article so noteworthy is how it exposes what the “realist” philosophy would look like in practice. Lind discusses how many former Presidents of the United States took “realist” positions on foreign policy, with a healthy amount of Woodrow Wilson bashing for good measure.

The article discusses how FDR originally planned for the post-World War Two world to be ruled by four nations — the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China. This, to those of us who actually value democracy and liberty, sounds downright dystopian. Lind notes how the only nation which could be considered democratic at the time was the United States — although his exclusion of the United Kingdom comes from the undemocratic nature of their empire…