The Russia-Ukraine War and the Renaissance of Ir Realism

Realism is one of the leading theories in the study of international relations, originating from thinkers like Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes, and later articulated by 20th-century scholars like Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, John Mearsheimer, and Stephen Walt. It posits that international politics is characterized by anarchy and a struggle for power between sovereign nation-states pursuing their national interests driven by human nature and the structure of power. However, after 1991, many scholars wanted to discredit it as an obsolete, dysfunctional, old way of doing things. The same critical voices pushed countries like Ukraine to surrender the nuclear arsenal that they inherited after the collapse of the Soviet Union in exchange for some empty security assurances in Budapest in 1994. Today, the same voices are strangely silent when it comes to finding effective security policies. However, realists are ready to provide policymakers with effective systemic solutions not only to the war in Ukraine but others.