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From about 1950 until the end of the Cold War realism was the dominant paradigm in international relations in the United States and widely influential abroad. It never went unchallenged and other paradigms have made considerable inroads. Within the realist paradigm there is now considerable diversity. Realism is unusual in being one of the few developments in international relations theory that has had significant impact in the wider world. Policymakers, military officers, intelligence officials and journalists, and not just in the United States, tend to be far more accepting of the so-called verities of realism than most scholars. Realism was propelled to the forefront of thinking about international relations by the pre- and early post-war writings of Nicholas Spykman (a Dutch immigrant), Arnold Wolfers (a Swiss who left Nazi Germany where he ran a prominent institute in Berlin), E. H. Carr (British), William T. R. Fox (American) and Hans J. Morgenthau and John H. Herz (German-Jewish immigrants). In the United States, by the far the most influential realists were Morgenthau and Herz. Politics Among Nations, first published in 1948, had an extraordinary print run. The sixth and posthumous edition, revised by Kenneth W. Thompson, appeared in 1985. John Herz's early works on international relations theory, published in 1950 and 1951, were followed by a widely read text in 1959. Morgenthau and Herz were particularly influential because they developed the theoretical outlines for a paradigm, and a full-blown theory in Morgenthau's case. Unlike Herz, who was shy and retiring and described himself as introverted, Morgenthau thrived on public exposure. His numerous lectures, newspapers, radio and television interviews, magazine articles and later, magazine articles about him, did much to publicize his books and propagate the fundamentals of his brand of realism. It is certainly possible that the paradigm of realism would have developed in the absence of these two German-Jewish refugees. In the aftermath of World War II and America's rise to "superpower" status (a term introduced by realist William T. R. Fox in 1944), realism provided the intellectual foundations for an activist foreign policy based largely on considerations of power. It seems less likely that home-grown realism would have been embedded in a general theory of international relations that claimed validity across cultures and epochs. Kenneth Waltz published such a theory in 1979, but it was written very much in response to the earlier works of Morgenthau and Herz. Their writings are distinct in another sense; they are worldly in a way more parochial American political science is not. While they aim at a synthetic and parsimonious treatment of international relations they are aware of numerous complexities, including the independent role of leaders and the importance and diversity of regime types; characteristic features of international relations that confound the kind of parsimonious theories they aspire to construct. Educated in the German idealist tradition, they conceived of international relations theory as a transformative project and one closely linked to ethical imperatives. These features of their writings were largely ignored during the Cold War even dismissed as irrelevant or embarrassing but have been increasingly welcomed and emphasized in the post-Cold War era by scholars attempting to reconstruct what has come to be called "classical realism.". Adapted from the source document.

Background to German reunification, US initiatives, and future relations now that imminent threat from the Soviet Union no longer exists; 2 articles.