... its young relative of two or three years. The unique organoleptic properties of a young and a mature cognac are virtually impossible to confuse.
Today’s textbooks, university lectures and academic journals on international relations treat political realism in greater detail and more extensively than liberalism. This is understandable. Neophytes explore its tenets easily and naturally, while liberalism requires a somewhat greater intellectual and emotional effort. Vodka is downed in a single gulp while holding one’s breath. Cognac is savoured, drunk ...
... international relations in the United States reject realist theory and, more importantly, see it as a problem of the current state in global politics. In addition, geopolitics and its methods are called obsolete. The consensus position believes that realism is refuted, as it fails to catch the zeitgeist of the much broader and more complex world. Consequently, the interpretations, practices, motives and arguments of the Russian side are not taken in at all. Their actions, in turn, are interpreted ...
... system of thought. It would be inadequate to rely solely on the Primakovian perspective, and the larger matrix of Russian Realism must be rediscovered and revived as the paradigm of world politics today.
Russian realists tend to blame a dilettantish liberalism for the deviation from the great tradition of Western Realism, from Kennan to Kissinger, which they are familiar with. Russian thinking, while understandably rejecting the liberal idealism of Fukuyama et al, has tightly embraced an American or Western Realism, that of Kissinger and Huntington, when a far ...
... world order” in danger. According to the experts, Trump’s victory dealt a heavy blow to the normative foundations of Western liberalism. The “manifesto” notes the importance of liberal values and institutes for Germany’s prosperity and insists on ... ... that NATO expansion, U.S. efforts to turn China into a liberal democracy, and the Bush Doctrine are all evidence of untethered realism that unipolarity made possible. This conclusion would be wrong, however. It is clear from the discourse in policymaking ...
... in terms of power. Henry Kissinger put it like this: “Once China becomes strong enough to stand alone, it might discard us. A little later it might even turn against us, if its perception of its interests requires it.”
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The ratio of liberalism to realism in international politics changes over time. Thus, since 1972, when President Nixon announced the end of the gold standard for the US dollar, ushering in an era of restructuring the global financial system, liberal trends gained momentum in global ...
