What Is International Relations? Realism, Liberalism, and Power

In 1979, a political scientist named Kenneth Waltz published a book that would reshape how scholars thought about world politics.^[1] He was writing in the shadow of Vietnam - a war the United States had fought for nearly two decades and lost, a conflict that seemed to expose the bankruptcy of American foreign policy reasoning.

But Waltz was not primarily interested in Vietnam as a policy failure. He was interested in a stranger puzzle: why do great powers, across centuries and continents, keep behaving in similar ways regardless of their different domestic systems, ideologies, and leaders?

His answer, in "Theory of International Politics," was that the anarchic structure of the international system itself - the absence of any world government - forces states into patterns of self-help, power-seeking, and balance-of-power competition.

It did not matter whether a state was a democracy or a dictatorship, capitalist or communist. The structure compelled similar behavior. This was structural realism, and it would anchor one of the dominant strands of IR theory for the next four decades.

Eleven years later, another intellectual claimed the opposite. Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992), elaborating an essay first published in 1989, argued that the Cold War's end represented not just a geopolitical shift but the final vindication of liberal democracy as the terminal point of human ideological evolution.^[8]

Liberal democracies, Fukuyama argued, did not fight each other; markets and institutions were weaving states together in mutually beneficial relationships; the age of great power conflict was over.

For a decade, this optimism seemed partially justified. NATO expanded. The European Union deepened. China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Democracies spread. IR theorists who had spent careers preparing for superpower conflict scrambled to theorize humanitarian intervention, global governance, and democratic consolidation.

Then came February 24, 2022. Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine in the largest land invasion in Europe since 1945.

In one stroke, every assumption of the post-Cold War liberal order was stress-tested: that economic interdependence deters war, that European security was settled, that a nuclear power would not commit outright territorial aggression against a neighbor.

The invasion forced a reckoning with the oldest questions of IR theory: Is world politics fundamentally about power and anarchy, as realists insist?

Or can institutions, norms, and democratic solidarity constrain and redirect state behavior, as liberals and constructivists argue? The answer, most IR scholars now agree, depends on which questions you are asking - and requires drawing on all three major traditions.

"The structure of a system changes with changes in the distribution of capabilities across the system's units. And changes in structure change the expected behavior of the units." - Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (1979)

Key Definitions

International relations (IR): The academic field studying interactions between states and other actors - international organizations, multinational corporations, NGOs - in the global system, with a focus on war, diplomacy, trade, and international order.

Anarchy: In IR theory, the absence of a sovereign authority above states; not chaos, but the structural condition of having no world government to enforce rules.

Realism: The theoretical tradition holding that states are primary actors in an anarchic system, pursuing survival and relative power as their dominant goals.

Liberalism: The theoretical tradition holding that international cooperation, institutions, democratic governance, and economic interdependence can moderate state conflict and produce durable peace.

Constructivism: The theoretical tradition holding that international structures are socially constructed through ideas, norms, and identities, not merely given by material conditions.

Security dilemma: The structural condition in which one state's efforts to increase its own security - building arms, acquiring territory - are perceived as threatening by others, triggering countermeasures that leave all states less secure.

Balance of power: The tendency in an anarchic system for states to form coalitions against dominant powers to prevent any single state from achieving hegemony.

Soft power: Joseph Nye's concept of the ability to attract and co-opt rather than coerce - the power of culture, values, and political legitimacy.

Hegemonic stability theory: The argument that a dominant power, a hegemon, is needed to provide the public goods - open trade, security guarantees, reserve currency - that sustain international order.

The Realist Tradition: Anarchy, Power, and the Tragedy of Great Power Politics

Thucydides and the Origins of Realist Thinking

Realism's intellectual genealogy begins not in the twentieth century but in ancient Athens. Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War, written in the fifth century BCE, contains the clearest early statement of realist logic.

In the Melian Dialogue, representatives of Athens present the Melians with a stark choice: submit to Athenian power or be destroyed.

Their argument is famous for its brutal clarity: "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." This was not cynicism for its own sake but an analysis of how the logic of power operates when there is no authority above competing states.

Thucydides himself attributed the war's ultimate cause not to the specific disputes between Athens and Sparta but to "the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta" - a formulation that anticipates modern structural realism by two and a half millennia.

Morgenthau and Classical Realism

Hans Morgenthau's "Politics Among Nations," first published in 1948, is the founding text of modern realism.^[2]

Writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Morgenthau was reacting against what he saw as the dangerous idealism of interwar liberal internationalism - the belief that the League of Nations, arms control agreements, and international law could prevent war.

His argument was that states are driven by an irreducible human drive for power; that the national interest, defined in terms of power, is the proper guide for statesmen; and that moralistic foreign policy untethered from power realities produces catastrophe.

Morgenthau was not simply celebrating power - he saw its tragic dimensions and argued for prudence and restraint in its exercise. But he insisted that ignoring power was more dangerous than engaging with it honestly.

Waltz and Structural Realism

Waltz's 1979 innovation was to shift the explanation for state behavior from human nature (Morgenthau) to system structure. For Waltz, it did not matter whether leaders were aggressive or peaceful, whether states were democracies or autocracies.

The anarchic structure of the international system - the fact that there is no authority above states to protect them - forces all states into self-help competition. Under anarchy, a state cannot fully trust any other state, because there is no guarantee of enforcement.

States therefore prioritize relative power and guard their security jealously. This produces the security dilemma: each state's defensive preparations are perceived as offensive threats by neighbors, triggering countermeasures that leave everyone less secure than before.

Waltz's bipolar Cold War world, with two superpowers balancing each other, was in his analysis more stable than the multipolar world that preceded it, precisely because each superpower could focus its deterrent calculations on one clear rival.

Mearsheimer and Offensive Realism

John Mearsheimer pushed realism further in "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" (2001).^[3] Where Waltz argued that states seek to survive - a defensive posture - Mearsheimer argued that states are never satisfied and always seek to maximize their relative power, ultimately aiming for regional hegemony.

Great powers are engaged in an unending competition for dominance, and the "tragedy" of the title is that this competition is not driven by malice but by the structural logic of the system itself.

Mearsheimer applied this framework to predict that China's rise would not be peaceful - that a rapidly growing China would seek to dominate Asia as the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere, and that the United States would resist this.

He also argued, controversially, that NATO expansion would provoke Russia - a prediction that appeared prescient to some observers in 2022 and dangerously apologetic to others.

The Liberal Tradition: Institutions, Democracy, and Economic Peace

Kant's Perpetual Peace

Liberalism's foundational text for international relations is Immanuel Kant's 1795 essay "Perpetual Peace." Kant argued that a federation of republican states - states with representative government, rule of law, and separation of powers - would have structural incentives for peace.

Republican citizens who bore the costs of war would be reluctant to authorize it; republics governed by law would apply those norms internationally; and a pacific federation, once started, would expand as more states adopted republican governance.

Kant was not naive - he did not argue that republics would never fight wars, only that they would be less likely to fight each other and that an expanding republican federation could gradually institutionalize peace.

The Democratic Peace Theory

Michael Doyle's 1983 articles in Philosophy and Public Affairs made the empirical case for what became known as the democratic peace theory: liberal democracies do not go to war with each other.^[6] The statistical evidence is striking.

Among the hundreds of interstate wars recorded since 1815, there are very few clear cases of two liberal democracies fighting each other.

The theory became one of the most debated empirical findings in IR - not because its core regularity is contested, but because scholars disagree about what explains it.

Is it shared democratic norms of peaceful conflict resolution? Is it institutional accountability, which makes war costly for elected leaders? Is it the economic interdependence and institutional embeddedness that tends to accompany democracy?

The democratic peace theory became the intellectual foundation for the liberal foreign policy project of the 1990s and 2000s: that spreading democracy would produce a more peaceful world.

International Institutions and Economic Interdependence

Liberal IR theory emphasizes two additional mechanisms for peace beyond democracy. International institutions - the United Nations, the WTO, NATO, the EU, the International Monetary Fund - provide forums for negotiation, bind states to rules, raise the costs of defection, and create transparency that reduces uncertainty.

Robert Keohane's work on international regimes showed that institutions can sustain cooperation even among self-interested states by lowering transaction costs and making defection more costly.^[9]

Economic interdependence raises the costs of war by disrupting trade, investment, and supply chains. The liberal expectation was that Germany's deep energy dependence on Russia would moderate Russian behavior - an expectation that was decisively refuted in 2022.

Constructivism: Anarchy Is What States Make of It

Alexander Wendt's 1992 article "Anarchy is What States Make of It" challenged the foundational premise of realism.^[4] Waltz had argued that anarchy - the structural condition of having no world government - automatically produces self-help competition.

Wendt argued this was wrong: the same structural condition can produce radically different outcomes depending on the identities states have formed and how they understand their relationships with each other.

Three hundred British nuclear warheads do not threaten the United States the way five North Korean warheads do. The material capability is different, but so is the identity relationship - Britain is an ally, North Korea is perceived as a potential adversary.

The threat comes not from the material fact of nuclear weapons alone but from the social meaning attached to who holds them.

Wendt extended this argument in "Social Theory of International Politics" (1999), distinguishing three "cultures of anarchy." A Hobbesian culture, in which states see each other as enemies, produces constant violent competition.^[5]

A Lockean culture, in which states recognize each other's sovereignty and compete according to rules, produces something like the Westphalian system. A Kantian culture, in which states see each other as friends, produces collective security and shared sovereignty.

These cultures are not permanent - they are constructed and can change. The gradual spread of the norm against chemical weapons use, the delegitimation of slavery, the development of human rights law: all represent constructed normative changes that altered state behavior in ways that material analysis alone cannot explain.

Constructivism also provides better tools for understanding the end of the Cold War. The peaceful Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union's self-dissolution were not driven by a shift in material power - the USSR remained a nuclear superpower until the end.

What changed was the ideational environment: Gorbachev's embrace of "new thinking," the delegitimation of communist ideology, the changing Soviet identity. These are constructivist variables that realists had no framework to predict.

The English School and International Society

Hedley Bull's "The Anarchical Society" (1977) offered a different synthesis. Bull argued that the international system was not merely an anarchic collection of self-interested states, as realists maintained, but an international society - a group of states that share common interests, rules, and institutions.^[7]

States recognize each other's sovereignty, respect the norm of non-intervention (however imperfectly), and sustain a diplomatic culture.

This international society is fragile and its rules are often violated, but it is real and consequential.

Bull's framework - associated with the "English School" of IR - is particularly useful for understanding how international legitimacy functions, why some violations of international norms provoke strong responses while others are tolerated, and how the fabric of international order is maintained by shared understandings as well as power.

Key Concepts in IR Theory

Sovereignty and Its Limits

Sovereignty - the principle that states have supreme authority within their territory and no external authority has the right to intervene - is the foundational organizing principle of the Westphalian international order, dated conventionally to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

But sovereignty has always been contested. The "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine, adopted by the UN in 2005, argued that sovereignty entailed obligations to protect citizens and could be forfeited if states committed mass atrocities.

The tension between sovereignty and human rights norms is one of the defining fault lines of contemporary international order.

Nuclear Deterrence and Mutual Assured Destruction

The development of nuclear weapons transformed IR theory. The doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) held that if two nuclear powers each had the capacity to survive a first strike and retaliate with devastating effect, neither would rationally initiate nuclear war.

This created a paradox of stability through terror: the more certain the mutual destruction, the more stable the deterrent relationship. Nuclear deterrence theory became a major sub-field of IR, producing sophisticated game-theoretic analyses of second-strike capability, crisis stability, and escalation ladders.

The Russia-Ukraine war raised new questions about the limits of nuclear deterrence - Russia's implicit nuclear threats influenced the scale and speed of Western military assistance to Ukraine.

Soft Power and Hard Power

Joseph Nye coined the term "soft power" to describe the ability to attract and co-opt rather than coerce - to shape the preferences of others through the appeal of culture, political values, and foreign policy legitimacy.^[10] Hard power is the military and economic capacity to compel.

Smart power, Nye argued, combines both. The concept proved remarkably useful for analyzing American foreign policy after the Cold War, when U.S. military superiority was unchallengeable but American legitimacy - damaged by the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo - was contested.

Contemporary Challenges: China, Climate, and the Limits of Institutions

The Rise of China and U.S.-China Rivalry

The defining structural shift in twenty-first-century world politics is the rise of China. China's GDP, measured in purchasing power parity terms, surpassed the United States in 2014. Its military spending has grown dramatically.

It has asserted territorial claims in the South China Sea, invested in Belt and Road infrastructure across the developing world, and positioned itself as an alternative governance model.

Mearsheimer's offensive realist prediction that China would seek regional hegemony and the United States would resist appears increasingly confirmed.

The question for IR theory is whether the transition can be managed peacefully - whether institutions, economic interdependence, and nuclear deterrence can prevent the "Thucydides trap" of a rising power challenging an established one.

Climate Change as a Security Threat

Climate change has forced IR theorists to grapple with a threat that respects no state borders and cannot be addressed through the traditional tools of military power or bilateral diplomacy.

The concept of "environmental security" - the idea that resource scarcity, sea level rise, and extreme weather events can trigger conflict, mass migration, and state fragility - has become central to security studies.

The collective action problem is severe: each state has an incentive to free-ride on others' emissions reductions while reaping the benefits of global action. International institutions like the Paris Agreement are voluntary and enforcement-free.

The UN Security Council and Institutional Limits

The United Nations Security Council's veto structure - permanent membership for the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China - was designed for a post-World War II world and has become a significant constraint on collective security.

Russia's veto has blocked Security Council action on Ukraine; China's veto blocks action on issues where it has interests. The UN's record on preventing great power conflict is weak precisely because the Security Council's design prioritizes great power consensus over universal enforcement.

Why IR Theory Matters Beyond the Academy

International relations theory is not merely academic. It shapes the assumptions of foreign policy makers, the framing of security threats, and the design of international institutions.

The liberal order built after 1945 - with its emphasis on multilateral institutions, trade openness, and democratic norms - was a direct expression of liberal IR theory applied as policy.

The realist critique of NATO expansion was a direct expression of structural realist theory applied to strategy.^[11]

The question of whether norms against torture, chemical weapons, or territorial aggression can be maintained is fundamentally a question about constructivist claims concerning the robustness of international norms under pressure.

For anyone trying to understand news headlines - the war in Ukraine, the competition between the United States and China, the crisis of international institutions, the debate about humanitarian intervention - the competing frameworks of IR theory provide essential conceptual tools.

They do not provide simple answers. The Russia-Ukraine war cannot be fully explained by realism alone, liberalism alone, or constructivism alone.

But each framework illuminates something real: the structural logic of great power competition, the fragility of institutional constraints, and the centrality of identity and ideology to understanding why leaders make the choices they do.

Sources & Further Reading

1. Waltz, K. (1979). Theory of International Politics. Addison-Wesley.
2. Morgenthau, H. (1948). Politics Among Nations. Alfred A. Knopf.
3. Mearsheimer, J. (2001). The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Norton. DOI: 10.1017/S0020818302441081
4. Wendt, A. (1992). Anarchy is what states make of it. International Organization, 46(2), 391-425. DOI: 10.1017/S0020818300027764
5. Wendt, A. (1999). Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511612183
6. Doyle, M. (1983). Kant, liberal legacies, and foreign affairs. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12(3), 205-235. View source
7. Bull, H. (1977). The Anarchical Society. Columbia University Press.
8. Fukuyama, F. (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press.
9. Keohane, R. (1984). After Hegemony. Princeton University Press.
10. Nye, J. (2004). Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. PublicAffairs.
11. Mearsheimer, J. (2014). Why the West is principally responsible for the Ukrainian crisis. Foreign Affairs, 93(5). DOI: 10.2307/24483306

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