This article is taken from the December-January 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Primacy. Deep engagement. Offshore balancing. Restraint. Realism. Neoconservatism. Selective engagement. Multilateralism. Liberal internationalism. Conservative internationalism. Jacksonian. Jeffersonian. Hamiltonian. Peace through strength. Come home, America. Global leadership. Soft power. Hard power. Smart power. America First (Woodrow Wilson). America First (Donald Trump).
These terms and phrases swirl around any would-be student of American foreign policy. The word salad quickly becomes confusing. But they have wider consequences, for the United States remains a large and consequential power, enjoying greater discretion and latitude in its choices than most others. What it decides in the coming years — not least about its relations with Europe — affects us all.
So, some taxonomy is due, not least to help clarify Washington’s options and what different Americans propose. American statecraft is a vast beast. But one useful incision in the beast’s hide is to understand that “realism” and “restraint” in its foreign policy, whilst at times pragmatically overlapping, are fundamentally not the same impulse. Those who insist they can be both realist and restrainer are sincere. But they are also conflicted.
Regarding restrainers, there are many notable ones from across the national security penumbra. Their institutional, think-tank “home” is the Quincy Institute. Regarding realists, there is the Marathon Initiative founded by A. Wess Mitchell and Elbridge Colby, now Donald Trump’s under secretary of Defence, as well as the Center for the National Interest.
To begin with what they have in common, the “realist” and “restraint” outlooks both (mostly) share a view that America’s power and commitments are out of balance, that overreach has depleted and helped polarise the republic, and that the US must do less abroad and refocus its power to some degree.
Even realists who are more optimistic about America’s capacity to remain top dog in Europe, Asia and the Middle East would also want that primacy to be more self-disciplined, agreeing that a prudent diplomacy should resist the messianic or crusading urge to remake the world on America’s terms. Beyond the baseline that America should work harder to keep its powder dry, important differences kick in.
“Restraint” at its core isn’t merely a preference for doing less abroad. Rather, it is grounded in a suspicion of engaging in competitive power politics in foreign policy. “Restraint” is a broad, at times excessively loose, term for those who presume against projecting power overseas, especially violent power.
Realism is not the same, even though often used in the same breath as “restraint”. Realism at its core accepts and embraces competitive power politics. It is more a general, pessimistic paradigm for thinking about international politics than a pre-packaged set of policies. To be clear and fair, American realists often (though not always) also prefer that their country’s foreign policy be more restrained than in past decades.
After all, it was such realists who wrote an advertisement in the New York Times in October 2002, forewarning that invading Iraq was “not in the national interest”. At the same time, realism at a minimum accepts that there comes a time when the country should take the gloves off and apply force ruthlessly and unapologetically, or alternatively arm other countries to the teeth.
American realists and restrainers might agree that the US should retrench from one or more theatres abroad. Yet whilst a realist might think that other countries can do the hard work of balancing against China, which needs some containing, the restrainer would question the whole notion that China must be contained in the first place.
Consider the contrast between realist Christopher Layne and restrainer Van Jackson. Jackson argues that the US should dismantle the military-industrial basis for great power competition, and devote its activities abroad to emancipatory tasks like the redistribution of wealth via an international minimum wage and cracking down on tax havens, a clean-energy transition, the dismantling of an oppressive, extractive capitalism, the dismantling of patriarchy and reparations to the victims of empire.
Christopher Layne would also retract US forces from Europe, the Middle East and Asia, but would have Washington assist Japan to acquire nuclear weapons, to help buck-pass the burden of risk-taking containment to others. The urge to pull back is shared, but precisely why and how is significantly different.
Realists argue for many different versions of foreign policy. In general, their threshold for militarised action is lower. Realists accept that even a country like America with large moats, the bounty of a continent and relatively friendly neighbours ought occasionally to strike out and suppress potential threats abroad.
Realism assumes that whilst restraint may be prudent much of the time, and that even a superpower should not misspend its scarce resources on extravagant projects to democratise regions and topple regimes, sometimes a state must go in hard, to combat threats directly or to prevent them from forming. Realists are more likely to be, effectively, neither “primacists” committed to overseas general dominance, nor to support general withdrawal, but rather “prioritisers”, favouring pullback in some theatres, sustained commitment in others. The political scientist, John Mearsheimer, for instance, supports ending US patronage of Israel and turning over European security to Europeans, yet also argues that Washington should draw a line in the ocean and resist China’s bid for regional hegemony.
Realists are more sceptical about the effectiveness of international institutions or projects that aim for grand collective bargains, whether over arms control or the environment. Constructive diplomacy is possible and indeed imperative much of the time, but it depends on the alignment of narrower and selfish interests. Restrainers, by contrast, believe not that the US should withdraw from the globe, but that it should reorient its whole basis for interacting with it, to be organised not around competition for security but rather on the basis of ambitious, altruistic internationalism. That approach may be sound or unsound, but it is emphatically not realism.
There is another important divide between the two schools. More than realism, restraintism is predisposed to regard active power-projection as the problem, or root of the problem, and the misbehaviour or mischief of other states primarily as a reaction to American overreach. In that sense, in the Copernican restrainer mind, American foreign policy is close to all-important, the sun around which other planets orbit.
Russia invaded Ukraine as a consequence of Western Alliance enlargement. Less enlargement would have meant greater stability. The way to address the problem now is to reach a settlement that (in part) placates Moscow’s security fears.
Compare that with realism, which accords more agency to adversaries and “others” abroad. Western enlargement may well have made Moscow feel insecure and threatened, but counterfactually a post-Soviet Russia would probably have bid to restore its power and prerogatives in its region regardless. Having invaded Ukraine, it needs to be bled down before meaningful talks can even happen, to reduce its capacity for further aggression and restore deterrence, and prevent it getting greedy. Russia, like most consequential powers, is imperial as well as insecure.
All of this is contentious, because there are people who regard themselves as both realist and restraint-minded. Foreign policy is made by people and groups responding to incentives and pressures, rather than neat and tidy concepts. In real life, especially in government, people are not straightforwardly one thing. There is still value, though, in identifying different impulses, even if they run through the same person. Coalitions that proceed by ignoring or wishing away their internal differences will run into trouble when events causing those differences assert themselves. The MAGA coalition suffers from a revealed disagreement about embroilment in the Middle East and the wisdom of bombing Iran.
The journal International Security found that within the “big tent” of self-identified restrainers, a polarising divide is opening up over China: its rise and what to do about it, and even how to think about it. As Miranda Priebe, John Schuessler, Bryan Rooney and Jasen Castillo argue, “deep and growing differences on China will complicate the restraint camp’s ability to provide a clear alternative to prevailing US strategy in East Asia”.
If people within a foreign policy tent divide over the most significant tectonic shift in world politics in a generation, which involves the most profound redistribution of wealth and power since the fall of the Soviet Union, that cannot be just a discrete policy disagreement. It flows from a substantive disagreement on the fundamentals. In this author’s experience, views within the tent on China expose a stark disagreement about whether to accept and practise competition for power abroad: for realists, this is axiomatic to survival in a state of anarchy. For some restrainers at least, it amounts to a form of racism.
From that, basic policy disagreements flow. What should Washington have done, say, with the wealth that it consumed in the War on Terror, a project that both realists and restrainers regard as wasteful. Restrainers would prefer by and large that the wealth be invested in healthcare or a tax cut, depending on where they lie domestically. Realists would want a chunk of that wealth invested in recapitalising the US navy. These are not minor doctrinal quibbles. They are disagreements that will erupt, either in advance or under conditions altogether more stressful.
