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Realpolitik: a History Alexander B Naval War College Review Volume 69 Article 17 Number 4 Autumn 2016 Realpolitik: A History Alexander B. Gray John Bew Follow this and additional works at: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review Recommended Citation Gray, Alexander B. and Bew, John (2016) "Realpolitik: A History," Naval War College Review: Vol. 69 : No. 4 , Article 17. Available at: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol69/iss4/17 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Naval War College Review by an authorized editor of U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Gray and Bew: Realpolitik: A History BOOK REVIEWS 163 the American deficit, national debt, and entitlements, and the occasional departures into partisan rhetoric do not really serve the overall thrust of the Realpolitik: A History, by John Bew. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015. 408 pages. $27.95. book. Some of the arguments it contains are inconsistent or undeveloped. An ex- John Bew, a historian at King’s ample is the suggestion to build smaller, College London, provides the first single-mission hulls, which is followed comprehensive intellectual history of the later by a diametrically opposite often-misunderstood term Realpolitik. recommendation to build multimission Drawing on the experience gained frigates with antiair, antisubmarine, from his acclaimed biography of Lord and antisurface warfare capabilities. Castlereagh, the Napoleonic-era British Additionally, his proposal to relegate foreign secretary, Bew traces Realpolitik much of the Army to National Guard from its obscure, nineteenth-century or Reserve status is probably politically origins in revolutionary Germany to the infeasible because of the dire effects this term’s use and misuse in contemporary would have on the communities around Anglo-American foreign policy debates. major Army bases. All that aside, it is Scholars and practitioners seeking to difficult to disagree with the fundamen- gain a more nuanced understanding of tal tenets of Mayday—that a sufficiently the evolution of Western foreign policy sized and equipped Navy is crucial thinking over the last century, particu- for our continued national security larly before 1945, would be well advised and the maintenance of international to consider Bew’s compelling narrative. order—and on these bases his arguments In the often-glib foreign policy for a naval expansion are sound. discussions that characterize public Mayday provides an excellent case for understanding of the discipline’s key reversing the piecemeal downsizing of terms and points of contention, realism the Navy, a return to pragmatic platform is often supposed to be interchange- design, and consistent funding of a able with Realpolitik. Bew’s greatest shipbuilding program to deliver and contribution is his voluminous research maintain a fleet sized to secure our into the term’s early history, beginning interests and achieve our international with the 1853 book Foundations of objectives. Although the quote is not Realpolitik by the little-known German mentioned specifically, this book recalls philosopher Ludwig von Rochau. This President George Washington’s observa- original formulation, distinct from tion in his letter of 15 November 1781 later uses in both Germany and the to the Marquis de Lafayette: “[W]ithout Anglosphere, was a creature of its time a decisive naval force we can do nothing and place: a disunited Germany torn definitive, and with it, everything between the liberal impulses of the honorable and glorious.” Mr. Cropsey’s 1848 revolutions and the conservatism recommendations are pragmatic and of its traditional ruling class, as worth consideration by senior Navy personified by Otto von Bismarck. leadership and policy makers alike. Rochau’s Realpolitik was not an ideol- JOSH HEIVLY ogy at all; it was a lens for viewing the political circumstances of Germany’s Published by U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons, 2016 1 NWC_Autumn2016Review.indb 163 9/15/16 12:47 PM 164 NAVAL WAR COLLEGENaval REVIEW War College Review, Vol. 69 [2016], No. 4, Art. 17 bourgeois liberals at a time of conserva- very different from Rochau’s cold-eyed tive reaction. Rather than continue to analysis of the facts on the ground. build “castles in the sky,” as Rochau Realpolitik’s introduction to British and believed the failed revolutionaries of American audiences at the beginning 1848 had done, he argued for a specific of the twentieth century was in a far focus on the essential truth that ideas different form. Namely, after Germany’s have little currency without some nationalist academics transformed the acquaintance with power. To have any term into an amoral ideology of “might hope of success, Germany’s liberals had makes right,” Anglo-American opinion to understand the underlying social, came to regard it as a synonym for economic, and political context of how German militarism and ultranational- power was wielded and the limita- ism. Bew is particularly elegant in his tions that existed on their freedom of parsing of Rochau’s original work and action. A fervent believer in German the contrast with much of the ultra- unification for liberal ends, Rochau nationalist proselytizing that came to supported much of Bismarck’s foreign define Anglo-American understanding policy under the guise of Realpolitik. of Realpolitik before the First World War. A sober appraisal of the domestic Bew’s narrative shines particularly political situation meant that German brightly during his analysis of the unification, even under the leadership interwar period, notably the use of of a reactionary conservative such as “Realpolitik” by British prime minister Bismarck, provided the best long-term Neville Chamberlain to justify his prospects for German liberalism. appeasement of Nazi Germany. The It was Rochau’s unsentimental ac- counterreaction to the perceived failures ceptance of the facts of the situation, of Woodrow Wilson’s liberal internation- as he interpreted them, that defined alism precipitated a reappraisal of the the original Realpolitik. Bew’s essential term in London during the 1920s and mission is to chart the course from 1930s, with it coming to be seen more Rochau’s relatively benign concept to the positively as a steady adjustment to facts, fraught foreign policy debates of today, as opposed to Wilson’s starry-eyed ideal- with intermediate stops in Wilhelmine ism. Bew, seeing the appeasement debate and interwar Germany. In his zeal to as a critical node in the term’s evolution demonstrate the laudable breadth of to its ultimate place in the twentieth- his research on the term’s multicentury century realist paradigm, is convincingly evolution, Bew occasionally overwhelms dismissive of Chamberlain’s co-option the reader with quotes and anecdotes of the term. Quoting at length from from relatively obscure academics whose contemporary sources, Bew notes that opinions of Realpolitik and its various Chamberlain’s Realpolitik lacked many permutations have only tangential of the essential elements of commonly relevance. His point, seemingly inargu- accepted foreign policy realism and able given the clarity of Rochau’s writing, instead relied on a world-weary pes- is that the term quickly lost its essential simism that left Britain unprepared for benignity and was co-opted by German the Nazi challenge. Winston Churchill’s intellectuals advocating something blend of tactical realism, in the form https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol69/iss4/17 2 NWC_Autumn2016Review.indb 164 9/15/16 12:47 PM Gray and Bew: Realpolitik: A History BOOK REVIEWS 165 of advocacy for a British rearmament broadly, the term has been twisted to policy, and ideological opposition to mean any policy that is believed to lack a Nazism serves as a powerful contrast to moral foundation or, from the contrary Chamberlain’s flawed use of Realpolitik. viewpoint, is seen as grounded in realis- Bew breaks less original ground in tic levelheadedness. As Bew’s narrative the post-1945 period, as Realpolitik in ends and the term is gradually subsumed the postwar United States is decidedly into the broader tradition of American intertwined with the much-discussed realism, the reader is reminded of the “realist” school of foreign policy inherent flimsiness of the structure of exemplified by academics such as Hans so many of the terms endemic to the Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz. The debate over American foreign policy. term’s Germanic origins and use by Professor Bew’s new book is a helpful discredited proponents of the Second antidote to such rhetorical laziness. and Third Reichs undoubtedly contrib- ALEXANDER B. GRAY uted to a period of limited use, even by self-proclaimed realists. Bew’s narrative, post-1945, begins to merge into the broader discussion of the different schools of American foreign policy that Grand Strategy in Theory and Practice, by Wil- emerged during the Cold War—an area liam C. Martel. New York: Cambridge Univ. of much previous research without room Press, 2015. 548 pages. $115. for the compelling scholarship offered “The main goal of this book,” Martel in this book’s early chapters. Like all writes, “is to provide contemporary who study “realism,” Bew is drawn to an policy makers and scholars with a extended meditation on Henry Kissinger rigorous historic and analytic framework and his influence on U.S. foreign policy. for evaluating and conducting grand Refreshingly, Bew is cognizant of the strategy” (p. ix). Acknowledging that subtlety and nuance of Kissinger’s world- the term itself is “relatively new,” view and refuses to paint that enigmatic although its concepts certainly can figure with an overly broad brush. be found throughout history, Martel Realpolitik: A History is an important credits academics during World contribution to international relations War II (particularly “the founder of scholarship, not least for resurrecting modern grand strategy, Edward Mead Ludwig von Rochau and the origins of Earle”) with being the first to focus Realpolitik.
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