On Thursday, Feb. 19, Jonathan Kirshner, the Vincent Q. and Mary Ann Giffuni Professor at Boston College and the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Professor of International Political Economy Emeritus at Cornell University, visited campus to give the political science department’s 2026 Gilbert Lecture. Named after Charles Gilbert, the college’s first provost and longtime political scientist, the annual talk addresses contemporary political and economic issues. Kirshner most recently published “An Unwritten Future: Realism, Uncertainty, and World Politics” in 2022. His talk evaluated the foreign policy behavior of the first and second Trump administrations, labeled by the federal government as “America First,” through a classical realist perspective.
Kirshner opened the talk with a brief introduction to the theory of realism. This framework understands the international political system as essentially anarchic, lacking any ultimate authority to arbitrate disputes or to restrain state behavior. As a result, states are very sensitive to imbalances in military or economic power between themselves and other states. Realists also see international clashes of interests as inevitable, observing that old conflicts, rather than leading to lasting peace, are frequently followed by new wars and tensions over different issues.
Narrowing his definition of realism further, Kirshner distinguished between structural and classical realism. Structural realism, often labeled as neorealism, emphasizes the constraints placed on states by the anarchic system. Focusing on classical realism, however, Kirshner stated the importance of analytical uncertainty, summarized as “unknown unknowns.” Under this assumption, states are not only uncertain about future events and the probability that they may occur, but also cannot anticipate the full range of potential future events. In this sense, people essentially can not predict what might happen to affect the international political landscape. Citing economist John Maynard Keynes, Kirshner summarized this view by saying “our knowledge of the future is fluctuating, vague, and uncertain.”
While realism emphasizes the sensitivity of states to power and conflict in international relations, Kirshner clarified that “realism is not inherently [or] reflexively violent, nor is it necessarily morally indifferent to the implications of policy choices.” He also noted that “there is a difference between observing a world in which the behavior of actors may be barbaric [and] embracing a cavalier disregard for innocent life.”
Kirshner explained that realism functions as a broad theoretical category, and that “there will never be [one] realist foreign policy.” He did, however, outline four broad tenets. First, there was what he labeled as the “primacy of politics,” in other words, the notion that political goals and ambitions are the primary motivator of states. Therefore, national interests — defined as the shared values and goals of society as a whole — will inevitably come into conflict.
Quoting American diplomat George Kennan, famous for his “Long Telegram” that helped establish the formative American foreign policy of containment during the Cold War, Kirshner asserted that “all challenges and objectives are political in nature.” Force, therefore, “can only be deemed successful if it achieves its desired political goals.”
Second, Kirshner also discussed the belief that “sabres are best left unrattled,” where force is understood to be best used in reserve. Essentially, signaling to others a state’s willingness and capability to use force is more effective than actually using it. Communication and diplomacy are therefore critical, especially during peacetime.
Continuing, Kirshner elaborated on the third tenet: “actions elicit reactions.” This tenet encapsulates the observation that the behavior of a state like the U.S. shapes how other states view the country, and ultimately informs their policies toward it. Referencing the behavior of the Trump administration toward its close allies and neighbors, Kirshner emphasized that under realism, “given the priority that states place on retaining their political autonomy and advancing their own interests,” there is “the presumption that states prefer not to be pushed around, and therefore it’s probably unwise, to the extent that it can be avoided, to engage in bullying behavior, because gratuitous throwing of elbows is not realism.”
Additionally, Kirsher cautioned against “protectionism without understanding of consequences,” as changes in trade policy affect other nations, and in the case of the U.S., may undermine our national interests. He emphasized that although “realism is often associated [in] the popular imagination with toughness … realists rarely engage in trash talk.”
Fourth, the understanding of long-run national interests leads to an appreciation of the importance of “milieu goals,” particularly for a great power like the United States. Specifically, states are primarily engaged in issues concerned with shaping the “nature of world politics in ways that [shape] the international environment” in ways that suit them, but that are not necessarily directed to survival.
Kirsher posited the “America First” foreign policy against this tenet, summarizing it in his view as “short-sighted, transactionalist, and narrowly selfish, a perspective that views every interaction with friends and foes alike as a confrontation in which the objective is to extract the largest possible share of the perceived, visible gains achieved by uninhibited recklessness.”
Kirshner compared present U.S. foreign policy to the interwar years between World War I and World War II. Kirshner argued that American isolationism and protectionism contributed to the 1931 financial crises through a seizure of European war debts and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which established highly protectionist tariff rates. Following WWI, the U.S. emerged as the dominant power, yet became increasingly isolationist and refused to join the new League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations. Kirshner argued that the abdication of the U.S. from leadership, combined with global financial strain, helped contribute to the rise of political alternatives to capitalism, including communism and fascism.
Kirschner further denounced U.S. foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere, including the military intervention in Venezuela and particularly its hostility towards Canada, as “geopolitical self-immolation.” This is particularly so “because realists observe and emphasize that one of the most astonishing, unique things about the U.S. experience as a great power, almost unprecedented in its advantage as a great power in human history, has been its uncommonly warm relations with its closest neighbors.”
In response to a question about the origins of the “America First” doctrine, Kirshner pointed to rising populism and to the grievances and political discontent that followed the 2008 Financial Crisis, as well as long-term stagnation in median incomes. However, Kirshner expressed that he does “not find it surprising that U.S. foreign policy changed,” but rather that “it changed in this way.”
Referring to the speech given by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney during January’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, Kirshner further emphasized the implications of these behaviors as “signaling the broader collapse of U.S. global political influence.”
In regards to American policy in the Middle East under the second Trump Administration, Kirshner cast doubt upon the geopolitical importance of the Middle East for the U.S. However, in reference to the recent heightening of tensions with Iran, Kirshner expressed that “it doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you stop thinking of the United States as a country pursuing a realist vision of the national interest, and start thinking of it as something closer to a personalistic regime whose policies are designed to enrich the royal family and close codier of affiliates,” referencing the Trump and Kushner families’ reported significant personal financial investments in the region.
Kirschner was also bewildered by the American approach to ending the war in Ukraine, which marked its four-year anniversary on Tuesday — in essentially “seeking to end the war on Russia’s terms” and thereby sending potentially dangerous signals to other authoritarian powers about the success of similar interventions.
In regard to the shifts in international expectations and American reputation resulting from the “American First” policy, Kirshner addressed the growing global consensus that the U.S. “is a country that is more radical, that is more dangerous, and that is less predictable in its behavior,” whose “word is meaningless, its values absent, and its interests beyond enriching the royal family are indecipherable.”
Kirshner concluded that “America First” “is pursuing the opposite of realism” and that “in practice, over the long-run, ‘America First’ will likely lead to ‘America alone’ — getting less of what it wants in a more dangerous world.”
