Realpolitik / Real Life

• Otto von Bismarck, a 19th century Prussian statesman who served as the First Chancellor to King Wilhelm I, advocated realpolitik as a means of uniting Germany. Specifically, this was in opposition to the democratic nationalist movements which attempted to unite Germany as a confederation in the 1830s and 1840s, whereas Bismarck's plan was to unite the German states under Prussian hegemony by uniting them against various external threats. Bismarck would utilize realpolitik again during the Franco-Prussian War, where Prussia's victory as the lead of the coalition of several German states at the French emperor Napoleon III's expense propped up Prussia's standing among the other German states enough for Wilhelm I to proclaim a unified German state in the French palace of Versailles in 1871.
• Lord Castlereagh, a 19th century Anglo-Irish statesman and diplomat who served as Foreign Secretary under Lord Liverpool is widely recognised as one of the first practitioners of realpolitik. He is credited with creating the union between Ireland and Great Britain, despite his dislike of the Irish government and distrust of absolute monarchy. He was also implemented a "hands off" style of British diplomacy when it came to European affairs, but was regardless one of the major players at the Congress of Vienna.
• Richard Nixon made his political career being a stalwart anticommunist, yet he and Henry Kissinger (his Secretary of State) were the ones who started the push for greater diplomatic ties with the People's Republic of China starting with "ping-pong diplomacy" in 1971 and kicked off on a government level with Nixon's visit to China in 1972 — both held mutual distrust and suspicion of the Soviet Union at the time. Formal diplomatic relations were established in 1979, when the US ended official diplomatic recognition of the Republic of China (i.e., Taiwan).
  • This was also to help leverage better relations with the Soviet Union, intending to goad the USSR into becoming an ally out of jealousy of China's situation. (i.e. "Hey, China is Communist like us, and they're being friendly with the US while getting some benefits from doing so. Why can't that be us?"). It would also lift them the load of being allied with a country targeted for openly breaching human rights, which was impairing the American discourse of promoting democracy abroad.
  • Not coincidentally, Nixon's strong anticommunist reputation was a big reason his administration was able to initiate the move to establish ties with China in the first place — said record helped to shield him from accusations that he was coddling to Dirty Communists (something a more moderate president wouldn't have had). This legitimacy-by-previous-enmity is what is meant when it is said that "only Nixon could go to China" (regardless of how much the Vulcans may claim is theirs).
• Charles de Gaulle summed this attitude up nicely: "Nations don't have friends, they only have interests."
• Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston spoke of this in the nineteenth century: "Therefore I say that it is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."
• Alexander III of Russia once said: "Russia has two allies: the Army and the Navy". However, he did initiate the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894 (which would play a crucial part in the run-up to World War I).
• The Melian dialogue in Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War is an example of how this trope can turn into Might Makes Right. The Athenians asserted their dominance over the Melians due to the fact that they had far stronger military force, and could blackmail the Melians into accepting either submitting peacefully or being killed. The idea was that "the strong will do what they will and the weak will accept what they must".
• During the Cold War, Finland was in the awkward situation of being a liberal democracy with a mixed economy but also very vulnerable to direct attack by the Soviet Union. Or should we say, renewed direct attack by the Soviet Union, since the Soviets had actually tried to conquer Finland before (to the point where Helsinki was desperate enough to turn to Nazi Germany for help). As a result, Finland had every reason to want to join the West...but also every reason to not piss off the East. The result was a policy of doing everything in their power to avoid unnecessarily offending Moscow while trying to maintain good relations with the West; President Urho Kekkonen defined this policy as art of bowing to East without mooning to West, and stated Find your friends near and your enemies far. Nevertheless, the policy was criticized in some anti-Communist circles, to the point where Willy Brandt's Neue Ostpolitik ("New Eastern Policy", i.e. detente with the Soviet bloc in general and East Germany in particular) was derogatorily called "Finlandization" by many members of the CDU/CSU.
  • A staggering example of this occured during The '70s, when the Soviet Union asked Finland to help them find a way to invade Norway (one of only two NATO allies of the day^note The other being Turkey with a land border with the USSR). Finland obliged, but decided to work so slowly that the whole thing was stalled, and the Soviets eventually abandoned the idea.
• One example of this was the Western Allies allying with the Soviet Union during World War II. On one side, you had a group of largely democratic countries (most of which, admittedly, had large, distinctly un-democratically-run Empires) who had a strong history of anti-Communism. On the other, you had a totalitarian Communist state which had killed nearly a million of its own people as ideological enemies and imprisoned a few million more. What brought them together — the only thing, even — was a common Enemy Mine in the form of Those Wacky Nazis and Italian fascism. While this did lead to beneficial co-operation between the two powers, it also led to things such as what some have termed the Western Betrayal. Winston Churchill, a vehement anti-Communist, rather famously summed it up as:
  If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.
  • American and Soviet Realpolitik after the war resulted in actions such as "Operation Paperclip" and "Operation Osoaviakhim", the repatriation of Nazi scientists and technical personnel who built the V2 Rockets for Germany, often using slave labor from concentration camps in dreadful conditions. Indeed, more people were killed making these rockets than the rockets did on its own. The most notorious is Wernher von Braun. The reason for this absorption was that, in the early stages of the Cold War, the two superpowers wanted to secure a head-start in The Space Race, with the Soviets winning out.
  • Although the Space Race was definitely important from the standpoint of propaganda and national prestige, the real reason behind these development programs was to perfect ballistic missile systems, because both sides had seen how the Nazis had developed a weapon that could fly between nations and couldn't be stopped, and you could be sure the Soviet Union was working on their own program.
  • Joseph Stalin was also one hell of a pragmatist — firstly, he organized mutual aid with Weimar Germany, as they were both troubled pariah states, despite Germany being a capitalist republic. He also abandoned Lenin's ideas of world revolution, focusing on "Building socialism in one country", and hijacked Trotsky's ideas of hyper-industrialisation. After Hitler's takeover, he still traded with Germany; then he tried to ally with the Entente against Hitler; after seeing their reluctance to stop him, he negotiated with Hitler, despite his rabid anti-communism, while re-arming and organizing the army. During World War II he united Russians with ideas of succession between Tsarist Russia and the USSR, glorifying old-time heroes like Alexander Nevsky or Admiral Ushakov, painting old invaders like Napoléon Bonaparte or Teutonic Knights as A Nazi by Any Other Name. After the war, despite anti-Semitic politics, he lobbied the UN for the creation of Israel.
  • The U.S. protected the majority of war criminals from the infamous Unit 731 in the Imperial Japanese Army and gave them political and legal immunity from prosecution in exchange for their cooperation in American bioweapons research. Almost all the core members of Unit 731 were notorious for conducting truly horrific experimentation on unwilling live subjects (mostly Chinese, White Russians and Koreans, although a few American, British and New Zealand POWs were also subjected to the experiments), such as vivisecting people while they were unconscious, forcing prisoners into pressure chambers to watch how they died, and herding entire village populations into huge chambers to be killed by the full effects of bubonic plague, anthrax or frostbite. By securing cooperation from the war criminals, the U.S. demanded that they shared the data obtained through those experiments with them. It should be noted, though, that the members didn't tell the Americans how they got the data, but simply the results. It's worth noting that many in the West, including the U.S. government, dismissed witness reports about the activities of Unit 731 as "communist propaganda".
  • Nationalist China, the fourth major Allied power, is an interesting case. The regime was a military dictatorship under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, controlling China as a single-party state. The Kuomintang ruling party encompassed various bickering wings, from socialists to traditionalists. However, each wing was kept united under Chiang, who settled on a centrist position and prided himself on it. This let China get foreign aid from Nazi Germany, the USSR, and America throughout the 1930s, especially once the devastating war with Japan began in 1937 proper. When China joined the Allies in 1941, it was ultimately America that took the most interest. America had plenty of business and missionary interests in China, and FDR believed that the nation deserved to become a world power (with American guidance). So Chiang decided to convince Roosevelt that China could potentially become a liberal democracy. This had some basis in fact — the KMT under Chiang was in the "People's Tutelage" stage theorized by its left-leaning founder, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, which prepared the people for democracy through single-party rule. Although the Americans initially believed this, it soon became abundantly clear that Chiang's government was a very corrupt authoritarian regime with no interest in transforming into a democracy any time soon. Said corruption and the KMT's terrible policy record on domestic issues disillusioned many American personnel. Yet China's contribution — tying down half of the IJA in China to stop them from re-inforcing Japan's Pacific territories — was invaluable to the Allied war effort. Roosevelt also maintained good relations with Chiang (it helped that both men had much in common, such as being staunch anti-imperialists). As a result, the U.S. did provide China with military aid and tried their best to prop up Chiang's government. By 1945, China had regained several territories (including Taiwan) from Japan, ended most of the unequal treaties, and was a permanent member of the UN Security Council. However, corruption had worsened and the regime was struggling to hold itself up after eight years of destructive fighting. The U.S. eventually got frustrated with Chiang and withdrew aid during the Chinese Civil War, which was one of the decisive factors in the eventual communist victory. Chiang, realizing that he had lost, fled to Taiwan in 1949 and set up shop there, pushing out crucial reforms but also establishing an even harsher military dictatorship than the one on the mainland. The U.S. and Chiang re-established relations, with Truman realizing the importance of an anti-communist bulwark in East Asia. It wasn't until 1973 that the U.S. (and most Western nations) finally acknowledged the PRC as the "real" China, in no small part due to the increasingly influential Chinese economy.
• During the Cold War, the rationale for the democratic US to prop up, support, and aid autocratic strongman regimes and dictatorships with dubious if not outright brutal and horrific human rights records just to fight Communism, even overthrowing democratic regimes to make way for such autocracies or totalitarian juntas, was based upon realpolitik. Whether it worked or was effective or not, or whether more humane decisions could have been made to fight Communism (i.e: letting the countries remain democratic and try to work with them), is a very controversial topic when examining US history. The U.S. has pursued a similar policy in their dealings with the Middle East, with the goals being (a) keeping oil prices reasonable, and (b) minimizing overt hostilities between Israel and her neighbors.
  • While this was pretty commonplace worldwide, it got very twisty towards the last couple of decades of the 20th century in Iraq and Iran. It seems strange considering that Iran is the biggest state threat to U.S. interests in the Middle East, but the Reagan administration sold arms to the Khomeini regime in order to financially prop up the pro-America, anti-socialist Contra death squads in Nicaragua. It gets double weird because it's not like relations between Iran and America were amicable after the Iranian Revolution and deteriorated over time; they were bad from the start of the Islamist government, and the United States heavily favored Iraq during the ongoing Iran-Iraq War. It gets triple weird because the leader of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war was Saddam Hussein, and anyone with a basic knowledge of post-Cold War American foreign relations knows how that turned out.
• In the American two-party system, "primary elections", where candidates compete for their party's nomination, is a major part of deciding the next president. Many candidates, if they're losing in the primaries, will graciously bow out so as not to "fracture the party". Frequently, they'll endorse a candidate who they have some disagreements with, to prevent the victory of the other party (and may be rewarded with a position in that former opponent's administration).
  • Candidates can run without the support of either of the major parties, but very few such candidate have won in modern history. A few notable exceptions include Bernie Sanders (Senator from Vermont) and Bill Walker (former governor of Alaska), both independent candidates. The irony is that such a run diverts votes from the candidate with more similar positions, which may enable the victory of someone who you strongly oppose. This effect resulted in Theodore Roosevelt causing Taft's defeat to Woodrow Wilson, and is often credited as a deciding factor in the 2000 US election, where Ralph Nader split the vote with Al Gore. This is why politicians who want real power very rarely run outside the two-party system.
  • The irony of Gore's loss is that he became Vice President because of George H. W. Bush's loss to Bill Clinton (the President Gore served as Veep to) in 1992, thanks to Ross Perot splitting the vote. Bill Clinton, although winning both his presidential elections, never received the majority of the Popular Vote (only the plurality) because of this as well. He remains the only President to twice be elected despite never having a majority of the popular vote.
  • As general elections have become increasingly cut-throat and polarized, this trend has bled over to primary elections as well, with candidates becoming more and more fond of mud-slinging and "negative campaigning" even against their in-party rivals. It can be quite jarring to have a candidate unequivocally endorse a former rival after calling them unfit for office and a threat to the nation the week before. There may be a point where realpolitik becomes so blatantly cynical that it erodes voter trust, but the jury is still out on that one.
• During general elections where there are more than two major parties, if a voter finds their preferred candidate is not popular enough to get elected, they will vote for a candidate they only mostly agree with to keep out someone they really dislike. The other alternative is to vote for a party one strongly disagrees with to split the vote for the opposite aisle in general. Of course, any of the above attempts at "strategic voting" can backfire.
  • In Canada, prior to the 2015 federal election, there were open discussions among voters about strategic voting between the NDP and the Liberals in order to knock the Conservatives — who had been in power for 10 years, never with an absolute majority of the vote — out of office. What they suggested was that, in ridings where it was quite clear that either the Liberal candidate or NDP candidate would probably be in third place, said third-place candidate's potential voters should instead vote for the candidate (Liberal or NDP) who would be in second place, which would theoretically allow them to beat the Conservative who would otherwise win a three-way (or more) race by a plurality.
  • In the 2016 US Presidential elections, both candidates were polling below 50% for much of the campaign. (One poll among millennials found that both candidates polled lower than a third term for Obama, a machine that would select at random one eligible person who wasn't Donald Trump or Hilary Clinton, and a meteor the size of Texas striking the planet.) A few optimists saw the possibility that third party voting would increase, but in the end, many people voted for one candidate because they could not stand the other. In the end, overall voting was a record low (in spite of record early voter turn out), but exit polling revealed that Donald Trump actually did a few points better with minority votes than 2012 candidate Mitt Romney, while Hillary Clinton had lost a larger percentage of minority voters than the gains seen by Trump (indicating other candidates or non-voting).
  • In Northern Ireland, the unique situation brings realpolitik very much into play during elections, due to voters generally voting for a party's constitutional position on The Irish Question in spite of their other policies or positions. For example, the DUP are very right-wing, but strongly in favour of keeping NI in the UK; while Sinn Fein are very left-wing, but strongly in favour of moving NI to be part of the Republic of Ireland. Thus a left-wing British unionist or a right-wing Irish nationalist will likely still vote for the DUP or Sinn Fein respectively simply to, in their mind, keep out 'the other side'.
  • The concept of Ranked Choice Voting is designed to eliminate these calculations. In RCV, you explicitly indicate your first choice, your second choice etc., and your ballot gets automatically re-allocated if your first choice loses in an early round of counting.

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