How Emma Ashford’s realist manifesto — and 30 years of liberal hubris — rewrote the terms of the debate on America’s role in the world
The world did not end with a bang or a whimper. It frayed — slowly, then all at once. The post-Cold War order that American strategists once called “the end of history” has become, in 2026, something closer to a contested museum exhibit: admired by its architects, mocked by its critics, and entirely unintelligible to the generation of leaders now tasked with replacing it. From the Ukrainian steppes to the Taiwan Strait, from Tehran’s nuclear calculus to Berlin’s rearmament shock, the comfortable grammar of liberal internationalism — democracy promotion, humanitarian intervention, rules-based order — has collided violently with the oldest logic in world politics: power.
The Tragedy of Great-Power Foreign Policy is no longer merely the title of John Mearsheimer’s landmark 2001 treatise. It is, increasingly, the operating system of the world in which we live. And that uncomfortable truth is forcing a generation of policymakers, scholars, and citizens to ask a question they once thought settled: were the realists right all along?
When Foreign Affairs published Stacie E. Goddard’s review of Emma Ashford’s book How to Survive in a Hostile World in February 2026, the reaction inside Washington’s foreign-policy establishment was telling — not for the outrage it provoked, but for the unsettling silence. Goddard’s engagement with Ashford’s realist internationalism was rigorous and fair, but what lingered was the implicit weight of the question she raised: what happens when a framework built on liberal assumptions meets a world that has definitively stopped cooperating?
Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, has spent years arguing that realist foreign policy is not the morally bankrupt cousin of proper statecraft — it is, in fact, a more honest and ultimately more humane guide to navigating great power competition 2026 than the interventionist doctrines that produced the catastrophes of Iraq, Libya, and the disastrous optimism of post-Soviet NATO expansion. Her argument is careful, intellectually honest, and deliberately provocative. It deserves more than a polite academic review. It deserves a reckoning.
Let us be precise about the failures, because precision matters here. Liberal hegemony failure is not a talking point — it is a documented pattern.
In 1999, NATO expanded eastward over Russian objections, a decision that John Mearsheimer and other realists warned would eventually provoke a catastrophic backlash. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq on the premise that democracy, once planted by force, would bloom across the Middle East. In 2011, the West intervened in Libya, toppling Muammar Gaddafi and leaving behind a failed state that became a transit hub for migrants and a playground for competing militias. In 2021, a twenty-year nation-building project in Afghanistan collapsed in a single fortnight, exposing the hollow core of a strategy that had confused military presence with political transformation.
These were not isolated policy errors. They were symptoms of a deeper ideological overreach — the belief, as the political scientist Christopher Layne once put it, that American power could be deployed not merely to defend interests but to remake the international order in Washington’s image. The US foreign policy crisis we are living through today is, in large part, the compound interest on that hubris.
“Restraint is not isolationism. It is the recognition that American power, however formidable, is finite — and that its overextension is not a sign of strength but of strategic confusion.” — Emma Ashford, Stimson Center
The Trump administration’s 2026 National Security Strategy — a document that has been variously praised as a necessary corrective and condemned as a geopolitical abdication — marks the most explicit embrace of realist internationalism in American grand strategy in living memory. Its emphasis on spheres of influence, burden-sharing, and transactional alliances over ideological solidarity represents a decisive break from both the neoconservative adventurism of Bush-era grand strategy and the liberal multilateralism of Obama and Biden.
Whether this constitutes genuine realism or merely its populist imitation is a question worth asking. True realist foreign policy, in the tradition of Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, and now Ashford, is not simply America-first nationalism dressed in academic clothes. It is a disciplined, theoretically coherent framework that prioritizes:
The Trump NSS captures some of this logic — particularly its skepticism of open-ended commitments in Europe and its emphasis on the Indo-Pacific as the primary theater of competition. But it also contains the seeds of its own incoherence: a leader whose instincts are transactional rather than strategic, whose “deal-making” approach to Ukraine has already produced one near-ceasefire and two subsequent collapses, and whose tariff architecture risks alienating precisely the allies a genuine realist strategy would seek to retain.
The Ukraine stalemate is the central test case for realist prescriptions in 2026. Mearsheimer’s original argument — that NATO expansion provoked Russia into a war it could have been deterred from — has been both vindicated and complicated by the past four years of grinding conflict. Vindicated, because the structural logic he described proved accurate. Complicated, because realism offers a diagnosis without an obvious cure.
Ashford and others in the realist foreign policy school argue that a negotiated settlement — one that acknowledges Russian security concerns while preserving Ukrainian sovereignty over the bulk of its territory — is the only realistic endpoint. The alternative, they contend, is not Ukrainian victory but Western exhaustion, a prolonged war of attrition that bleeds European economies, fractures NATO cohesion, and ultimately produces a worse settlement under worse conditions.
This is a defensible argument. It is also, politically, nearly impossible to sell to a Ukrainian public that has buried tens of thousands of its sons. Realism, as its critics note, is excellent at describing the world as it is. It is less helpful in bridging the gap between strategic logic and democratic legitimacy.
The ongoing Iran-Israel confrontation — now in its most dangerous phase since the 2024 escalation cycle — illustrates a different limitation of realist prescriptions. Restraint in foreign policy works best when all major actors share a rough understanding of the rules of the game. In the Middle East of 2026, they emphatically do not.
Iran’s accelerated uranium enrichment program, conducted against the backdrop of a collapsed JCPOA and a Trump administration that has so far shown neither the appetite for military action nor the patience for sustained diplomacy, has produced a strategic vacuum. Israel, operating under its own existential calculus, has conducted multiple targeted strikes on Iranian nuclear infrastructure. Tehran has responded through proxies, missile barrages, and a sophisticated campaign of ambiguity designed to stay below the threshold of all-out war while steadily advancing its nuclear program.
A strict realist reading would counsel American non-intervention, spheres of influence logic, and offshore balancing — letting regional powers manage regional competition. The problem, as Ashford herself acknowledges, is that nuclear proliferation does not respect spheres of influence. A nuclear-armed Iran would transform the entire geometry of great power competition 2026 in ways that no amount of realist restraint can simply absorb.
The China-Taiwan tensions of 2026 represent the clearest vindication of the realist framework — and its most urgent test. Beijing’s military modernization, its increasingly assertive posture in the Taiwan Strait, and its frustration with what it perceives as deliberate American ambiguity have created precisely the conditions that realist theory predicts: a rising power challenging the existing order and a hegemon uncertain whether to accommodate, contain, or confront.
The realist prescription here is deterrence — clear, credible, and calibrated. Not the maximalist deterrence of full military confrontation, but the disciplined deterrence of red lines that Washington actually intends to enforce. The Biden administration’s “strategic clarity” pivot, maintained with modifications by the Trump NSS, represents an implicit acknowledgment of this logic.
What John Mearsheimer 2026 would call “the stopping power of water” — the formidable military challenge of amphibious invasion across the Taiwan Strait — provides a natural buffer. The realist case is that American strategy should exploit this geography rather than frittering away deterrence credibility on peripheral theaters where core interests are less clearly at stake.
The European rearmament debate is, in one sense, the most direct confirmation of realist predictions. For decades, European leaders refused to take seriously the realist argument that American security guarantees were a strategic subsidy that distorted European incentives and created dangerous dependency. Today, as Germany crosses the 2% NATO spending threshold for the first time, as France accelerates its nuclear modernization, and as Poland builds what may become the largest land army in NATO Europe, the continent is belatedly doing what realists always said it should: providing for its own defense.
The irony is that this rearmament is occurring not because Europe has embraced realist doctrine intellectually, but because the Trump administration’s ostentatious unreliability has removed the strategic crutch. Necessity, not theory, is driving the convergence.
Fairness requires acknowledging what realist internationalism cannot easily accommodate. Realism is, at its core, a theory of states and their interests. It is poorly equipped to address:
Emma Ashford’s version of realism — more nuanced than Mearsheimer’s, more attentive to domestic politics and institutional constraints — attempts to address some of these gaps. But the tension remains. A foreign policy that counsels disengagement from the Syrian civil war, accommodation of Russian spheres of influence, or managed competition with China on Taiwan is not costless. Those costs are paid in lives, in freedoms, and in the moral authority that ultimately underpins American soft power.
The question is not whether realism has a moral blind spot. It does. The question is whether liberal hegemony’s moral clarity — so often invoked, so rarely achieved — is worth the price of its failures.
The prescription, for policymakers and for readers of this essay, is not a binary choice between liberal idealism and cold-blooded realpolitik. It is a synthesis that neither camp currently champions with sufficient honesty.
Call it disciplined realist internationalism: an approach that accepts the structural realities of great-power competition, practices genuine restraint in foreign policy where vital interests are not at stake, invests in the rebuilding of degraded alliances and multilateral institutions not as ends in themselves but as force multipliers for American and Western interests — and reserves military power for moments when deterrence has genuinely failed.
This means:
The tragedy of great-power foreign policy, as Mearsheimer originally framed it, is that even states with benign intentions are condemned by the anarchic structure of the international system to compete, to accumulate power, and sometimes to fight. Ashford’s contribution is to argue that understanding this tragedy, rather than denying it, is the first step toward managing it.
In 2026, with the liberal order visibly fraying and its alternatives not yet formed, that understanding may be the most valuable intellectual resource the West possesses. The realists did not create this world. But they may be among the few who can help us navigate
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