"For Walt and other realist thinkers, Trump’s aggressive and chaotic actions on the world stage — his antagonism of U.S. allies, his threats of territorial conquest and assertions that the U.S. is not afraid of putting “boots on the ground” — undermine any claim he could make to practicing a realist foreign policy. Realists largely opposed the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, preferring policies of restraint. The failures of those episodes vindicated the realist worldview.

“Flexible realism is a beautiful neologism because it doesn’t point you in any particular direction, and it doesn’t steer you away from any direction,” Walt said. The incoherence of Trump’s foreign policy is explicitly memorialized in the National Security Strategy. On one page, the document states that Trump’s foreign policy is “realistic without being ‘realist.’” On another, it lays out a distinct strain of realism that purportedly governs its actions.

For Porter, it is not realism that defines the Trump era but rather its “corrupt cousin,” machtpolitik, which pursues power for its own sake and is defined by a “sort of violent exhilaration of destruction, nihilism and vengeance.”

Trump’s penchant for theatrics and bombast, his obsession with status, and his use of power to enrich himself and his family — all these are characteristic elements of this darker ideology. Machtpolitik is realism gone wrong, the kind of phenomenon that it was ostensibly invented to prevent.

“By losing all restraints, you destroy yourself,” Porter said. The perpetual threat of machtpolitik is why, he says, “realists can never relax, never just sit back when people invoke the philosophy for the sake of imperial hubris.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/magazine/trump-venezuela-foreign-policy-realism-greenland.html

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