Realpolitik
What is Realpolitik? In a nutshell, it is practical politics, divorced from ideological agendas. It is American realism in politics.
The January 2025 article Realpolitik, by Lafayette Lee & Voodoo, IM 1776, explains more about this approach to politics. Here are a few excerpts:
... Via anecdotes, storytelling, hyperbole, and other populist devices, Trump is able to bypass censors and connect to the political imagination of the people. And contrary to what the "experts" might believe, this talent, more so than principles, ideals, or moral values, is what sustains the American constitutional order...
Trump's forays into geopolitics demonstrate a sensibility that has resisted runaway idealism throughout American history. Forged on the frontier and rooted in pragmatism, the core of US statecraft is a simple, cold-blooded realism which mediates between two other powerful American impulses: idealism and isolationism. This sensibility may wax and wane over time...
Today, as another period of runaway idealism comes to a close, American realism, or Realpolitik, is returning. After the end of the Cold War, liberal idealism ran amok for more than thirty years, with the triumphalism of Fukuyama’s "End of History" displacing isolationism and Realpolitik. But this decades-long victory dance was premature. Globalization has stalled, the post-war international order is fraying, and isolationism is making a comeback. To the horror of liberals everywhere history and its ancient spirits have reemerged...
Realpolitik is the deepest tradition of American statecraft because it is the vision that most closely approximates American sensibilities. Fundamentally, it is not a grand theory of politics, but a method or approach. It is prescriptive rather than descriptive, emphasizing what could be over what should be...
Above all, Trump should repudiate the utopianism of idealists and isolationists, and restore a foreign policy based on realism...