Reading Today’s New Realisms: The Value of a Rhetorical Brand

In international politics today, the epithet ‘realism’ has become common currency. It carries with it a rhetorical confidence – a name which suggests prophecy of truth amongst alternatives which are deceptions. But as proclaiming a realist position has become something of a fashion nowadays, we must beware the fashion victims; those who don ill-fitting articles because they bear the right label, and wear its most ridiculous accessories without any sense of the motifs and substance that create its underlying style.

In 2024, for example, when David Lammy was electioneering, presumptive of becoming the UK’s Foreign Secretary, he wrote an article titled ‘The Case for Progressive Realism’. But in suggesting that “the logic of realism” has traditionally been applied “solely to accumulate power” and that his new progressive realism sought instead to use it “in service of just goals,” Lammy fatally misinterpreted a crucial relationship within realism.

Realism holds that on the international stage there is anarchy; a fatalistic absence of a higher authority that can enforce contracts and impose peaceful order over sovereign states, which are the most powerful political units on the globe. Every state’s perpetual chief interest is therefore to seek its security from dangers posed by other states, so another state using its power to forcefully champion its own values (however ‘just’) on the international stage can become indistinguishable from a potential threat. Everybody feels less secure this way, even if not by intention; hence realism also being known as the tradition of despair.

That Lammy suggested his ‘progressive realism’ transcended the need to make trade-offs “between values and interests,” shows he was engaged in wishful thinking about the essential tragedies at the heart of the realist perspective. Besides, this completely underestimates the tension and trade-offs encountered throughout the state’s bureaucratic machinery in pursuing just the myriad aspects of its interests, let alone balancing these against values-oriented programmes.

And while correctly recognising the UK’s capacity to act is contingent on its economic clout, Lammy ducked the difficult realities of this by simply referring to a coming economic miracle that incoming PM Starmer would bring: 

“To realize its ambitions, the next British government will have to revitalize its economy… which is why Starmer has pledged that the country will generate the highest sustained growth in the G-7 if he is elected prime minister.”

He added to this his own suggestion of effectively transforming the UK’s diplomatic service into a sort of travelling corporate salesforce in the name of “revitalizing economic diplomacy.” What ‘progressive realism’ amounted to for Lammy was therefore an especially thin kind of realism.

In January 2026 Finnish PM Alexander Stubb also published an article in which he outlined his new take on international politics, given the dubiously anodyne name ‘values-based realism.’ But this too was barely cohesive as a theoretical outline, and difficult to see as anything more than an attempt to adopt a popular brand for public consumption.

While inherently premised upon a critique of the “dominance” and “outright arrogance” of countries that “embraced the idea that the values of the global west would become the norm,” Stubb held that – similar to Lammy – an interest-oriented approach to international politics “need not eschew values,” while the “harder sense of realism” that Stubb recommended leaders must embrace came to little more than acknowledging “differences among countries.”

He defined ‘values-based realism’ as involving “committing to a set of universal values based on freedom, fundamental rights, and international rules,” which for the most part are “nonnegotiable” and “should underpin everything a state does.” Yet he goes on to argue that “in crafting foreign policy, governments of the global West can maintain their faith in democracy and markets without insisting they are universally applicable.” Well, which is it?

Then in Davos in January 2026 Canadian PM Mark Carney gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in which he introduced his ‘realism of the middle powers’. He saw the dominance of the West’s values and political intuitions across the globe as a product of “American hegemony in particular.”

This was a once-useful “fiction” in that it provided “public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.” But it was “partially false,” as it was “enforced asymmetrically” and “applied with varied rigour.” It constituted a “bargain” that especially “no longer works” in the face of increasingly capricious behaviour from great powers competing with one another.

Great powers “have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms” in their dealings across the globe, whereas “middle powers do not,” according to Carney. What was called for from middle powers was therefore not “naïve multilateralism, nor is it relying on their institutions. It’s building coalitions that work issue by issue with partners who share enough common ground to act together.”

Carney’s words have more of the ring of realism about them, though it is curious to note that he made reference to the ‘values-based realism’ of his contemporary, Stubb. Despite his somewhat clearer realist theoretical elucidations, then, Carney also appears to see the rhetorical and ‘brand’ value gained by attaching himself to a specious new theory of ‘realism’ forged in the crucible of the contemporary world.

The warning to those who indulge in today’s fad of inventing and adopting ‘realist’ theories for their rhetorical and brand appeal, is that this fashion surely has its victims –  as David Lammy and Alexander Stubb remind us.

Image: Flickr/Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (Ben Dance)

Licence.

No image changes made.