Throughout U.S. President Donald Trump’s most recent campaign and second term in office, he and his team have attempted to spin his foreign policy as pragmatic, disciplined, and strategic. They counter accusations that his global approach is impetuous and reckless with professions of “flexible realism”––a nod to an intellectual tradition often traced back to Greek historian Thucydides, who famously observed that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Though a diverse school of thought, realism generally holds that power is the currency of international politics. It eschews idealism and counsels a ruthless focus on defending national interest. The seeming resonance of this worldview with Trump's early-second-term foreign policy has led prominent analysts to embrace realism as the unifying framework for the president’s heterodox approach. The New York Times even proclaimed it “the theory that gives Trump a blank check for aggression.”

But the United States’ new war with Iran makes clear that Trump is not a realist. In fact, realism, when properly understood, reveals the profound dangers of the Trump administration’s careening approach to foreign policy. Unleashing regional war in the Middle East with neither a compelling justification nor a theory of how best to advance U.S. interests is profoundly at odds with the core tenets of realism. Indeed, with his war with Iran, Trump has permanently ceded his claim to represent a clear-eyed and pragmatic approach to U.S. foreign policy, opening new space for other political leaders to take up that mantle.

In search of an intellectual framework to explain Trump’s worldview, the administration and commentators alike have turned to realism. The realist tradition has roots that run through U.S. presidents as diverse as John Quincy Adams, Dwight Eisenhower, and George H. W. Bush, as well as prominent thinkers including Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, and John Mearsheimer. Academic realists have spent decades questioning whether states seek security or maximum power, under what conditions alliances are beneficial or entangling, and whether the post–World War II liberal international order was anything more than window dressing for American hegemony. They also readily acknowledge that intellectual realism doesn’t easily translate into clear prescriptions for U.S. foreign policy.

Realists of all stripes also counsel a certain national security pragmatism: secure a favorable balance of power and avoid peripheral conflicts that drain blood and treasure. Tied in is the importance of prioritizing national interest, and a wariness of unintended consequences, particularly in times of war. Across his two terms as president, analysts have labeled Trump a realist for different reasons at different times. One wave of commentary, prevalent in his first term, anointed Trump a realist precisely because of his perceived restraint. Trump claimed to reject prolonged and costly conflicts in the Middle East, and this anti-interventionism helped propel him to the White House in 2016. Under the tagline of “principled realism,” the first Trump administration was unapologetic in its pivot away from the Middle East and toward competition with China—a focus on great-power dynamics that most realists would expect to see from the United States facing a peer competitor. Anticipating a second Trump presidency, the prominent realist scholar Randall Schweller (writing with Andrew Byers) predicted in Foreign Affairs that Trump’s realist impulses would result in “the most restrained U.S. foreign policy in modern........

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