S7E2: What Does a Return to Realpolitik Mean? With Professor John Bew

Hello and welcome once again to season 7 of Talking Strategy. My name is Paul O'Neill from the Royal United Services Institute in London. In this season my friend Professor Beatrice Husser and I will be talking to experts about some of the most important strategic issues affecting global security today. The history and implications of great power competition, deterrence in a multipolar world and the future of the international order. We are delighted that this podcast is once again made possible thanks to our long-term partnership with Corn Furry. As a leading global consulting firm specialising in strategy and in unlocking performance across defence and commercial sectors, their passion for enhancing organisational and individual potential makes them ideal partners. Now the views expressed in this interview are the speakers alone and do not represent those of Corn Furry, RUSI or indeed any other institution. And with that, allow me to hand over to my friend and colleague in Hamburg, Beatrice. Good to see you again and over to you. Thank you very much. In our series of podcasts dealing with strategic rivalry between great powers and the effects on lesser powers, we shall today try to disentangle the multiple meanings of realpolitik. John Bew will help us with this. He is Professor of History and Foreign Policy at the Department of War Studies, King's College, London. He was a Cambridge man through and through until in 2012. He was appointed to the Department of War Studies, King's College, London. He was appointed to the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC and then became a lecturer at the Department of War Studies at King's College, London. He became a specialist advisor to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. This might have happened to any other academic, but then his career took a turn that I'm sure has made all of us absolutely green with envy. In 2019, he joined Number 10 Downing Street as Foreign Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister. He held that position for over five years and through successive governments, making him one of the longest-serving and most senior advisors to Downing Street. Uniquely for a Number 10 appointee, he served through two general elections and for four Prime Ministers. He led the Number 10 team, which produced the Integrated Review of 2021, the Integrated Review Refresh of 2023, and in 2025, he was reappointed by the Labour Government again to lead work on the National Security Strategy 2025. He also served as a member of the National Security Strategy 2025. He also served as the UK's official representative preparing NATO's 2022 Strategic Concept. He was party to many key strategic decisions and negotiations leading up to them, about which we shall not be asking him today, as I'm sure they are still covered by the Official Secrets Act. But I equally do not doubt that his answers to our questions will be informed by the wisdom he derives from these enviable experiences. Bew is the author of five books, including Realpolitik: A History, Castle Ray: A Life, and Citizen Clem. He's back at King's now, and we're interviewing him here in his capacity as an historian and academic. So, John, the confusion about the meanings of realpolitik goes back to the early usage of the term, even by the Germans themselves in the 19th century. Okay, well, thank you, Beatrice Paul, for inviting me on the podcast. I'm delighted to be here. Realpolitik, you might say, you know it when you see it, and that's obviously associated with a unsentimental tradition in statecraft, which prioritizes interests, which understands power and is okay to wield power, that is less obviously focused on values and more obviously focused on state interests or raising data. And then there are obvious heroes or anti-heroes, depending on your perspective in that story. You could talk about, for example, you could talk about the medieval state, you could talk about Machiavelli, you could talk about Cardinal Richelieu, you could talk about Castle Ray and Metternich at the time of the Congress of Vienna, Bismarck, right through to the 20th century figures like Henry Kissinger or George Kennan. And by the way, interestingly, people like Henry Kissinger and George Kennan reflected on some of that history and thought back there. So there's an obvious tradition of statecraft that's sometimes set up as a counterbalance to a more universalist or values-led approach to statecraft, and that reflects in our national interest, et cetera. That story, I think, I suspect for your listeners is mostly understood. Round about the mid-2010s, there were these constant calls to return to realpolitik. And the idea was essentially that realpolitik had been left behind in the rush to spend too much in international development. Realpolitik had been left behind in terms of understanding that China and Russia couldn't be wished away as great powers, that there'd been too much focus on a kind of Fukuyama-style worldview when it comes to national security. And this wasn't working anymore. And you could see that too much idealism, not enough realpolitik had led to the disaster in Iraq that had led to the unwinnable counter-insurgency in Afghanistan. So everyone was talking about the need to return to realpolitik. So that moment as a historian engaged in some of these foreign policy debates, I said, I need to look at what the origin of this term is. And the term itself is actually a 19th century coinage. It's not. something that goes back to the origins of statecraft. It's not something actually that Machiavelli would necessarily have recognized. It's born out of mid-19th century liberal Europe, but it's liberal Europe struggling to come to terms with great power reality. The guy who coined the phrase Ludwig von Rocco is a German liberal who's imprisoned in 1830, imprisoned again in 1848, flees. German, what he sees as Metternichian repression. Someone who believes in constitutionalism, the rule of law, the nation state, someone who is no sentimentalist for the old world, the El Chon regime. But when he fails in 1848, he says, well, why have we failed? He begins to say that liberals and this liberal thinking are not really what matters. It's actually your ability to understand the realities of power. And then secondly, your ability to adapt in the world of power. So he coins this phrase in 1853 in his book, Foundations of Realpolitik, about who holds power in any situation. And it's an explanation to fellow liberals and radicals as to why they failed, building castles in the sky. Lufthansa, you know, all their ideas turned to dust. But it's about how you understand why you have failed. Realpolitik is how to pursue liberal enlightened goals in a world that does not follow liberal enlightened rules. We talk about two different types of realpolitik. The Rocco one would say you're an idealist, but you have to take reality into consideration, the pursuit of your aims. So the art of the possible, which is one of the German formulations which tends to be used, whereas the other one is eclipsing the sentimentalism of the ideals and just says, just only face the hard facts. So the Rocco one that pursues ideals, while realising one is in a realistic world in which one has limits to what one can do. The other one is one which discounts ideals. That's exactly right. And I'm firmly in the first camp. People say we must return to realpolitik and everyone else is a stupid idealist. It's used in another way in some of the current debate, which is all realpolitik is bad. The previous Attorney General Lord Homer, he made a number of speeches in which he says realpolitik is bad, international law good. That's the sort of false dichotomy I think is really very important to avoid here. My head would explode if every time someone used the term realpolitik, I said, no, no, no, this is not what it's all about. You must go back and read the original text. That's what it's all about. You must be honest about some of the fundamentals of realpolitik. They do include military power. They do include economic heft. If you are to understand the international situation, you've got to understand where power resides, how power is deployed, but how power is also changing. And I would throw into that mix where you sit on the tech stack, levels of compute, where you get your energy from, those are kind of hard metrics of power. And in government and policy, there's no cosmic justice in the world. And if we simply pursue our values with no sense of those hard power realities, we're going to be unable to protect and secure our values. So I'm kind of with those who've argued that we need to get serious about the world around us. But then I go back to the original concept as well. And I say, there's some really useful stuff in there in the original concept that I don't think is fully appreciated. And I'd be very careful in the history of realpolitik to say the following caveat. You can recognize power. You have to understand how to wield power. But if you fall into the trap of a power politics logic on every single question, you're going to miss the fundamentals. And to go back to the original text, Louis Baraka says, this is not simply about materialism. It's not simply about who controls the military, who has the higher defense spending budget, who controls the application of the law. Axis says some of the most powerful things are values and ideas. He says the zeitgeist, for example, is the most important determining factor in any era and any age. So if this is dismissing hearts and minds, you've got a problem. The post-Von Rockhaus story of German realpolitik, to a great extent, actually begins to miss this. Parts of the German nationalist movement, that's unsentimental, that's highly materialist, rages against the Kantan hypocrisy of the Anglo-Saxons, to a certain extent, justifiably. So what I'm kind of simultaneously arguing for, and forgive the complexity, Yes, we've got to recognize the power realities, but we will make mistakes. if we forget values, if we forget ideas, if we forget narrative, if we forget the things that bring societies and allies together as well. So utter hard realism, unsentimentalism, cult of the national interest, to my mind, is anti-realpolitik. You mentioned that realpolitik originated within the domestic context. And yet, when officialdom tends to think of levers of national power, they often use the diplomatic, the information, the military and the economic most of which seems to be the levers that countries might have operating internationally, not domestically. Against your rockarian definition, how does realpolitik apply to how domestic policy needs to work in the future? Such a good question. Let me go back again to the original text. Realpolitik is sometimes used as a way of saying other people have delusions and they don't understand and they don't see what I see. And it's used as a sort of an attack on that, the removal of cataracts of the naive. What Rocco is saying is as follows. And remember, he is someone who's a liberal and someone who believes in German unification, because Germany and the German states feel uniquely vulnerable to the other European great powers. So they feel concerned they're going to be attacked. He believes in unification under liberal constitution to generate the tools and power of modernity, to industrialize Germany, to create a greater class harmony, to have greater economic growth, scientific advancement as well. So it's kind of an enlightenment idea. He says the strongest states are those that harness the social forces within them. And in harnessing the social forces are able to manage division effectively. That's the art of politics is to manage those divisions, to stop them turning to violence, to stop one group imposing their will in an unchecked way over another. He is seeking an internal balance because internal balance and harnessing these strengths of what gives you security and external strength. So if you were anxious, say, take the UK as a study point about social attitudes to migration, about nationalist movements pulling away from the state or undermining a state, you were to take polling that suggested 18 to 25 year olds don't want to fight for the country, should they ever be asked. Those are the things that would give you concern. Rocco would say these are concerns because your lack of internal cohesion, the lack of mobilizing these internal forces in a way that makes the country stronger is a problem. If Rocco looked, for example, at the city of London, I think he'd see two things. He'd see the one hand, a relative strong UK national attribute, one of the few areas where it's generally world leading and London has this core financial center, which still competes with New York and has survived all the challenges around Brexit, et cetera. But he'd also look at it and say, actually, a lot of their capital flow, not a lot of it gets spent back in the UK. not all of that's accessible for things like military spending as well or addressing debt so he'd regard that as a potential area of strength that is underutilized as well that's the idea harness balance find an equilibrium doesn't have to be perfect where you achieve a certain level of harmony that keeps you safe and secure and allows you to be stronger and more industrially and economically advanced can i pick you up on that economic side that you've just been talking about the concepts of geopolitics were discovered in the early 20th century are we now finding ourselves in an era of geoeconomics where in fact largely unprecedented way economics are being used as tools of strategy against adversaries yes absolutely so the postscript to the original history of realpolitik is it begins to get confused and melded with the concept of weltpolitik world politics which is tied up into some of the tributaries that lead into the first world war then the science of geopolitics is debated in english and german language in different types of ways with help of mckinger the uk etc german emigre intellectuals bring a lot of these ideas to the united states as well if you were living in the 1930s and possibly for a good period after the breton woods agreement geoeconomic realities that was sort of part and parcel of the reality of international politics and we've kind of had a holiday from that to a certain extent because a settlement was created a sort of economic system builder on the us dollar primarily and build around certain fundamental assumptions certainly in the non-soviet pac countries about the value of free trade that form of international political economy has just been dismantled and it's broken down significantly now people point to the original sin of letting china into wto that's almost a completely bipartisan view in the united states and it leaves countries like the uk japan south korea singapore etc countries that depend on an open trading international market system unchallenged free supply chains and rates quite significantly exposed and let me just give you a sort of vignette of this from my time in government you could throw in all the crisis factors we saw war in ukraine the politics around brexit covid as well but at the period preceding covid the uk had something like the second or third highest growth projections in the g7 setting aside the brexit issue wasn't settled tca wasn't agreed etc covid hits right to the bottom same thing actually has happened at the start of the iran war as well where the uk had some pretty good projections under the labor government in terms of overall growth again the iran war disrupts global supply chains as well so we feel that in the uk when there's geoeconomic crisis that's one of the things we're not particularly well trained for because for a country like the uk that has historically sold off a lot of its assets has foreign ownership of critical national infrastructure in those areas that i think is the hardest thing for us to move from a recognition we're in a geoeconomic era to finding the tools of economic statecraft that keep us in the game a significant part of the uk government thinks this is just too hard to do we cannot generate the levels of defense industrial base to be sovereign in xyz area we can have baby niche capabilities and the ai stack as well it's such a shift in our political economy that was almost revolutionary as to what it required in terms of tax code spending relative portion of national resource spent in welfare defense etc the uk sometimes appears like the last man at the bar at davos and there's a reason why it's concerned about the route and the journey home but it's because the roads are very slippery and it's drunk pretty heavily at the bar over the course of the night john conscious that real policy has got these multiple different meanings what have been the consequences for a world that's been living through an era that one might have labeled with that term real politic and therefore what do we think we might face as countries today it's more naked than previous eras i always go back to a speech i discovered when i was the kissinger chair in the library of congress one that he gave in london in 1982. what it says is the anglo-americans don't talk so nakedly in terms of realpolitik and kissinger always said that realpolitik was a german word used to impugn him because it sounded exotic and slightly dangerous it's sort of doctor strange love element to it but actually it's a more subtle and liberal means of realpolitik whereby the story that was told through the cold war is all we want is other nations to be free and trading and have self-determination quite a powerful myth and kissinger has this great line in that speech that the british bequeath to the americans a convenient form of ethical egotism that holds that what worked for them should work for everybody else that actually did hide quite a lot of the power dynamics the realities of a dollar-led financial system the fact that if you were working on net assessment in the department of defense in the 1970s and 1980s it was all about the military balance with the soviet union ultimately the soviet union collapses because it can't out-compete the united states it's economically and partly bankrupts itself by trying to do so so there's really strong power dynamics in an era when it was less fashionable to talk about power dynamics i think some of that understanding of those realities gets slightly pushed to the margins during the post-cold war era into the war on terror as well and some of that anchoring in those power realities those hard metrics get sort of slightly washed away with our conception of historical development as well which brings us to today's era so the first thing we've got to accept is that power is wielded is not only wielded between ourselves and adversaries it's also wielded between allies and other partners so you're a period now where the realities of political economy mean that you've got to answer to your domestic audience and they may not agree with said international agreement that means you must have such approach on refugees a lot of these international agreements which are the series of agreements intelligence and nuclear agreements that set up the international sector and then post-cold war you have an explosion of new charters treaties commitments on development spend etc so we have to recognize that this is a really quite ugly era and it's quite a transactional era you could talk about u.s economic sanctions on iran right now as an example of that you could even talk about g7 sanctions on russia as well so it's the nakedness of it the tonality of it is actually quite a shock to a diplomatic service that likes to speak in more civilized terms a bit of a shock to our that takes some getting used to the idea the conduct of this politics is far less civilized far more brutalist but to your point as to how you get ready for it when you've got to be able to defend yourself from being coerced you have to pull some of your resources and potentially even some of your sovereignty among other allies and partners to give yourself heft so this is why you have this sort of variable geometry at the moment i'm not so convinced that the alexander stewed model of global south west and new world actually works anymore i'm not convinced by the mark harney model i'm probably a bit more small c conservative about our approach to this as well but people are searching for an operating model they're searching for a way in which they understand the machine operates and they have not landed upon one and it's quite disorienting and that's why it's quite tough for foreign ministries etc to adapt to that our established organs of getting stuff done like the un security council are currently bust wto is actually less dead than people say but the united states is not playing ball and china's not playing ball we're really searching for how we operate even if we understand increasing this is a brutal zero-sum logic world jones conscious there isn't a definitive operating model what would be the key principles within which a framework might be found okay let me speak as someone who's in my jobs at number 10 was primarily involved on the national security abroad the foreign and the external you've got to recognize first of all there's far more contest about what the fundamental assumptions of our foreign policy are i'm going to speak to you as someone who believes we should spend more on the international and we should spend more national security as well but i'm also saying unless you win those arguments domestically you're on a hiding to nothing it is unsustainable and you get all these arguments over welfare and warfare and guns and butter and you cannot ignore those look at recent german local elections in saxony and elsewhere there may be a uk general election who knows in the following year these issues will surface and quite significantly so you've got to pay attention to domestic audits but what's your operating model be from that point as well the first thing is what gives you international power what gives you a right to be in the room or a say in these absolutely consequential issues these issues do affect the uk they will affect the uk uk is that to a certain extent more exposed than other nations 70 80 percent of our gdp is a run trade 15 when it comes to the united states so it matters to us more to a certain extent but our ability to affect it is less the first thing you've really got to do and this is absolutely vital is recognize what gets you at the top of the list and what gets you at the top of the list at the table for the renegotiation and the two core criteria for that right now is number one the strength of your economy measured in whichever way you want to do but it's basically your fiscal and other power and the uk is not going so well in that uk france in particular are most of europe is a bit of a mess exceptions of poland a few others even more acute in britain and france because you can't borrow that's challenge number one so get growth get the economy on the line and level footing if you want to pursue this strategically the second is around how much you get out of your input and output on defense and i use those words very carefully yes it matters what overall portion of gdp you spend against your native target but pretty quickly you get into what you can put at sea how many drones you can put in the sky how deployable your assets are and again the uk historically has been quite good at that with the height and significant risk appetite to do some of this but it's been tricky and it's been at sort of limits if you take the straight of her moods or the concerns over sending frigates out to protect cyprus etc so inputs outputs what you can actually do with your military there's plenty of people you know in the us you pat britain on the head for being a long-standing ally that think we just don't simply have enough mass in certain critical areas to do things as well so economic strength fiscal power secondly military spend and that means some other uncomfortable realities it means that things like development spend is a metric of national power and influence it's just simply much reduced cultural power i think is probably a little bit less important in this era i wouldn't dismiss it another one that's really important though is your capacity in science and technology and advanced manufacturing and that means how much ai research you generate where you sit in the stack your energy prices again blinking red for the uk some of the highest in the world so the things you bring to the table fiscal power defense technological power i think that's the core set and paying as much attention to that as possible is really important now that's not easy because there's trade-offs across each so the treasury will tell you spend more money in defense you can't address economic growth so there's no easy road to fixing any of this so those sort of three core pillars i think are kind of the clues to your operating model thank you and what do we need to do to help those people who are the decision makers or directly informing the decision makers to allow this understanding of how to thrive so i think it's probably more understood than people fully appreciate there are problematic blind spots i would add to that china expertise david lammy's former advisor ben judah highlighted that concern and foreign ministries and others have to be pockets and receptacles of expertise universities should do something else universities sometimes follow government bureaucracies and they chase the currently fashionable ideas and they're not going to be able to do that so i think it's important to look at those ideas and subject matter universities have got to be receptacles of ideas and types of expertise that may come in use at a later point so in my own king's war studies department we had unbelievable scholars on the caucuses on non-state activism at least etc who had this period of lull and china experts etc were brought back in so society's got to maintain and create different types of expertise and knowledge my experience having worked in parliament as well as they're often quite fast on the uptake on some of the strategic challenges i work for the foreign affairs committee when tom tugendhat was chair for much of the mid-2010s and he and the committee in iran were very good at highlighting stuff often in a way that makes life difficult for government some of them come from non-civil servant roles some of them come from industry finance a lot of military figures former international development practitioners as well so we actually have a quite internationally conscious parliamentary system and in that sort of way we're able to bring in a lot of of butts up against officialdom when the operating model is assumed and understood in government then officialdom is more inclined to shut out external voices if you really deeply believe in international development as an ameliorative thing that creates the world in more in your image and allows you to protect and promote your interests we have deep expertise on that and the department that before it was merged in the foreign office had unique specialisms and expertise it didn't actually need external tender or expertise as well or experts on counterinsurgency or the sharper ends of intelligence operations were less inclined to listen to others in my last decade or so that's changed and the bureaucracy is very quick to realize when it doesn't know stuff as well and there's openness to external engagement and knowledge has actually increased bureaucracies adapt slowly but they can do it and they are doing it in certain key critical areas i think that's really hard on technology and it's very hard for a foreign office generalist when i was in rishi sunak's number 10 he understood intuitively and deeply because he had an interest in this and for the world of finance and through his broader network the importance of technology ai ai security importance for our prosperity and its international consequence and he was ahead of the curve in terms of international leaders so what did he do well in addition to pointing a lot of external people from the tech industry and changing the payment model creating the ai security institute bringing people like henry duzut or matt clifford into government who are investors tech letter he also went and engaged with the top figures in this new world of technology he had it in conversation with elon musk long before elon musk declared himself for donald trump he engaged extensively with people like eric schmidt the former google ceo our diplomatic corps they're not quite well equipped to deal with that you know if you look at the table around president trump and you see some of them look happy to be there some of them look like they're a cat been taken to the vet but you know this is a power game right so these are multi-billion dollar companies at the seat of the president of the united states who can change export controls who can buy stakes in these companies and again the uk is way beyond that we do not buy stakes we don't do state capitalism we've allowed a lot of our national assets to come out of the country because we believe in this free market model and that's not going to stand the test of time so i go back to the economic statecraft the technological literacy but beyond that the professionalism the uk national security state is actually extremely high top two or three in the world but there's a number of areas where you just need to beef up pretty fast and pretty quick even if you understood all this the question is what's the lever so we had all constant stream of mps coming to number 10 tech companies to vent companies and the question is what can i do to change this or fix this and often the lever isn't there international law means you can't do that regulation means you can't do that this act department which we don't have the authority to go back and re-examine means you can't do that so this is all not weed you've got to get through anyway and that's really the business of statecraft from identifying the problem which i think is actually quite understood to finding the ability to act upon it and then to act upon it coherently across the piece to trade off as well and that really requires deep rigor it requires an understanding of history and an understanding of just how radical the present moment is as well we're trundling downwards the uk let's be frank about that so we continue to do that in a contented fashion until we end up in the trolley park somewhere or we can try and correct course the correcting course is going to be painful we kind of conceptually understand the age of realpolitik we have sort of chocolate levers when it comes to things we need to pull shade and shift as well that's the current british predicament john thank you our structures often operate within silos of deep competence but not necessarily as effectively horizontally and i wonder to what extent do you think there's anything structural in this as well as the talents of individuals so i'm in the camp of believing very firmly in individual and group leadership because all the things the three sort of fundamental pillars i outlined the economic growth level of input and output on defense and then technological proficiency are national problems unless you address those things you can reorganize the cabinet office a hundred times over but unless you're making the big bull moves over here which requires political leadership and gumption and risk and potentially failure then you're in a holding pattern it's fundamentally about two things the first is having a coherent plan manifesto commitments are not a plan for doing things differently manifesto commitments are like an albatross around their necks they're stakeholder documents they're reaffirming old traditions religions they're making sure xyz person is happy they're very rarely a real plan for the country across the piece i think we need to almost rediscover that spirit of planning i remember britain in 1930s has all the same problems in co-ed it's not brought together john leonard canes is walking around and can't find a political letterbox to put his ideas into so we need the coherent plan over here and the second thing we need is effective political leadership i think a lot of things fall into place after that but we rush to tinker into the delivery mechanisms the structures and shifts unless you've got the plan and the political leadership it's very hard and when you do have the political leadership and i would take you to the uk approach over ukraine as well the system really bends itself very wrong quickly it's inspired by that it's when the politics isn't working or the plan is absent that the devil makes work for idle hands we need to do some really radical things in this country it's got to happen in the political space let me recap rochelle talked about realpolitik being the politics of the possible pursuing noble aims in a world where many forces are against you others define it as an attitude that dismisses values of sentimental naivety i do hope for everything you've said that we can stick with you as an advisor to follow the rochelle course rather than the second course thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today thank you both thank you for the therapy session it's always good to talk thank you for joining us for this russi podcast brought to you in partnership with corn furry if you would like to catch up on any of our earlier episodes or any of the other topics we've covered please visit your usual streaming platform or try our web page at russi.org and to hear about future episodes you can always follow russi on social media having examined realpolitik in this episode next we will be turning our attention to geopolitics and geoeconomics professor scott smitson from denison university in granville ohio will be talking us through these ideas their historical use and what they might mean today for international security stability and prosperity he is the director of the grand strategy program at denison having previously served for 21 years in the united states army including as a strategist at u.s central and southern commands and on the joint staffs please join us then thank you