You don’t often find the philosopher Donald Trump of Queens and the historian Thucydides of Athens in the same article. Kudos, as Thucydides would say to Foreign Policy magazine.

A Foreign Policy contributor from the Rand Corp. argued last April that Trump is running a “grand experiment” in realist theory, the view of international relations that the wonks trace to Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War. In January, the president’s first-term National Security Council chief, Alexander Gray, told the Guardian that his former boss was a “foreign policy realist in the tradition of Nixon and Kissinger.” The New York Times agreed, so it must be true. Realism, the outlet said, gives Trump “a blank check for aggression.”

The realist tries to see the world as it is and pursue national interests without the encumbrance of ideals or emotion. No wonder realism is the minority report of American foreign policy. The American view of human nature, embedded in the Constitution and laws that allow children to drive hummers, is the inspiring, sentimental, and deranged notion that all of us are capable of exercising our faculty of reason. History has shown that most of us prefer to take no exercise at all, and that the faculty just lounge. There is no America without idealism.

George Kennan supplied the realist “containment” doctrine that guided America to victory in the Cold War, but he left no realist school........

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