HONOLULU -- One of the advantages of living in Hawaii is that you get to spend weekends at the beach. I spend mine with the Grizzled Old Vet, a longtime observer of East Asia who has spent a lifetime straddling academia and the minefields that litter the Beltway. Between waves, the Gov (as I will call him) and I speculate about the world beyond the surf.
Recently, we have spent a lot of time talking about "realism." Our focus makes sense, given the Bush administration's seeming fixation on military strength as the most important determinant of national power, the growing number of military crises that dot the planet, and a new book, "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics," by John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago professor of political science and a leading international-relations theorist.
"Realism" has a specific meaning in the foreign-policy world. As the name suggests, it is a bare-bones conception of international relations. There are three principle assumptions: