The (Ex) Washington Realist

If anything was missing from the discussion about these schools of thought, it was a discussion about theory. Kenneth Waltz has noted that "realist theory" has no general paradigm. The different variants of realism, such as offensive and defensive realism have similar though different evaluations of historical events and different prescriptions for foreign policy. He also noted that theories are primarily useful for explaining past events not predicting the future or dictating what policy should be. If a particular theory has explanatory power, then its usefulness to foreign policy thinkers will be to tell us what the likely consequences of our actions would be.