The Limits of Realism after Liberal Hegemony

This review essay conducts and works to contribute an assessment of recent realist critiques of liberal hegemony. It finds that realists identify important problems with liberal hegemony, but also finds that under scrutiny the alternative foreign policies that realist critics offer suffer from their own serious limitations. It makes the case that realist proposals of “restraint” and “offshore balancing” avoid the problems realists associate with liberal interventionism, but would also be generative of proxy wars, while offering insufficient additional institutions, practices, and norms for mitigating and managing proxy wars and great power conflict, among other global and international challenges. From closer examination and consideration, that is, the argument is made that these limitations of alternative realist foreign policies question their ability to contribute to international order in the twenty-first century and suggest, quite the opposite, that if pursued they would instead become new sources of international disorder, albeit while avoiding some of the problems associated with liberal internationalism.