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statesmen saw their interests clearly. The very word
states-men
told you a lot: these were men who thought, moved, and acted on the scale of nations. Diplomacy was work for wood-paneled
     rooms, ideally insulated from the pull of domestic tension, an idea known as
das Primat de Aussenpolitik,
or the primacy of foreign affairs. And national power could be tracked with the clarity of that thrown hat: Metternich’s
     refusal to stoop for the emperor told you all you needed to know about the history unfolding there. Sure there were unpredictable
     moments in battle or in diplomacy, but generally the system should be predictable, since its actors were all rational. Was
     Napoleon’s tantrum irrational? No, it was simply the calculated act of a leader looking for an edge and a man who believed
     he could achieve face-to-face what his armies might not be able to achieve on the field of battle. Realism, Morgenthau wrote,
     “shares with all social theory the need, for the sake of theoretical understanding, to stress the rational elements of political
     reality.” He saw his statesmen as working out balances in a system of power that reflected the physics of Newton: capable
     of equilibrium, predictability, linearity. Using realist precepts, great men like Metternich and Castlereagh could see and
     measure the threats they faced, could balance them one against the other.
    This view of the global stage as a kind of workshop was revolutionary. It was an attack on ancient, persistent schools of
     thought that saw the progress of history as a result of divine forces, for instance, or saw in history an inevitable working
     out of some ideological magic, whether it be the natural right of Nazi fascism to rule the planet or the economic inevitability
     of Marxism. It was an answer as well to the ideas of men like Woodrow Wilson, who had thought that with the right institutions,
     such as a League of Nations, it would be possible to fashion a stable, peaceful global order that appealed to the higher instincts
     of men. Morgenthau dismissed such views as fantasy. He ran his world order on that old refugee calculus that power equals
     survival, and violence is inevitable. In the end, he said, for men and nations alike, only one instinct mattered: the twitch
     toward mastery of others.
    With his “workshop” view of the world, Morgenthau established, more or less, the whole discipline of international relations
     as a science of sorts. Seventy years after he published
Politics Among Nations,
realist theory still dominates international-relations thinking in most universities. It shapes everything from how we make
     alliances to how we build institutions that are supposed to control everything from disease to financial panic. And its fundamental
     premises and language inform even competing schools of thought such as liberalism, internationalism, or bureaucratic-politics
     theory; they serve as the basis for a Scrabble board of similarly named ideas like
defensive realism
and
neoclassical realism.
Frankly, you can’t even begin a serious discussion of international relations without reference to Morgenthau, which is part
     of the reason I’ve introduced him here.
    Politics Among Nations
is one of those rare books of politics that is as beautiful and inspiring as it is sharp. You can see in every sentence why
     Morgenthau bewitched presidents, diplomats, and theorists. But there is also, on nearly every page, something else: a gnawing
     sense that he knows he is proposing a way of looking at the world that, like those elegantly naive models of Dean Babst, simplifies
     the international order to the point of near-irrelevance. Sometimes you only glimpse this wistfulness in passing, buried in
     footnotes. Moving your eyes from page to footnote and back again in
Politics Among Nations,
you sometimes feel you are reading a pharmaceutical ad, in which a miracle treatment is offset by a host of potentially lethal
     complications, listed in fine