Why Realists Rejected Trump Long Ago

There was an unholy alliance of sorts between some Trumpists and Trump’s most vocal liberal internationalist critics to paint him as a realist.

Ted Galen Carpenter makes a solid case for realists to repudiate Trump, if they have not already done so:

Even if he were a proponent of a foreign policy that embodied realism and restraint, such comments could not be justified or excused. However, Donald Trump is not and never has been a champion of a more benign and sensible role for the United States in the world.

Therefore, genuine, principled advocates of such a policy should not find it difficult to repudiate him.

When Trump was president, there was an unholy alliance of sorts between some Trumpists and Trump’s most vocal liberal internationalist critics to paint him as a realist. The former did this to try to spin Trump’s militarism and unilateralism into something more coherent and respectable than it was, and the latter did this as a way to attack realists and restrainers over their alleged similarities with Trump. For every credulous Trumpist trying (and failing) to find evidence of realism in Trump’s obsessive hostility to Iran and Venezuela, there were usually two or three liberal internationalists eager to lump Trump together with realists in the hopes of discrediting them. One notable example of this guilt-by-false-association argument was the tedious Ikenberry/Deudney polemic from 2021. These arguments always relied heavily on assertion and required ignoring the fact that restrainers frequently criticized and opposed Trump’s policies in public for years.