Geopolitical Realism: The Missing Element in Western Democracy’s Foreign Policy Debate

In a recent examination of Britain’s Lord Robertson’s extraordinary claims urging the British population to prepare for a potential war with Russia, a deeper and more troubling pattern in Western democratic discourse has emerged. What initially appeared as alarmist rhetoric proved, upon closer analysis, to be part of a systematic pattern of propaganda designed to manufacture consent for military escalation.

The exchange began with a questioning of Robertson’s fearmongering statements. When placed in proper context, these statements revealed themselves not as reasoned security analysis but as deliberate threat construction—propaganda designed to create public acceptance of expanded military budgets and confrontational policies toward Russia.

This pattern highlights a profound democratic deficit in Western nations. Geopolitical realist perspectives, such as those articulated by scholars like John Mearsheimer, are systematically excluded from mainstream political discourse. These realist viewpoints typically challenge the moral framing that justifies military interventions, emphasize the limits of military power, acknowledge the legitimate security interests of adversaries, and counsel restraint rather than confrontation.

The marginalization of such perspectives isn’t accidental. Realist analyses are deeply inconvenient for defense industries that profit from threat maximization, political classes that derive legitimacy from moral crusades, bureaucracies like NATO whose budgets depend on perceived threats, and media ecosystems that thrive on dramatic good-versus-evil narratives.

Perhaps most troubling is not disagreement with realist arguments but the refusal to engage with them at all. When perspectives like Mearsheimer’s warnings about NATO expansion—which predicted with remarkable accuracy the current crisis in Ukraine—are dismissed rather than debated, we witness not a contest of ideas but the enforcement of orthodoxy.

This suggests several concerning features of modern Western “democracies.” Public deliberation has become largely theatrical, occurring only within acceptable parameters while positions outside those bounds are simply excluded. Foreign policy apparatus operates with considerable autonomy from democratic accountability, with decisions on matters like NATO expansion presented as technical necessities rather than choices requiring robust debate.

Lord Robert Skidelsky’s direct commentary on Robertson’s rhetoric demonstrates what genuine deliberation might look like. His systematic dismantling identifies the internal contradictions in portraying Russia as simultaneously failing yet existentially threatening, examines the complex history of the Budapest Memorandum, highlights Western hypocrisy regarding spheres of influence, and exposes military Keynesianism as an economic driver behind rearmament calls.

The problem may run even deeper than institutional failures. French intellectual Emmanuel Todd suggests the crisis reflects not just a failure of democratic process but an erosion of what he terms “anthropological faith”—the underlying belief structure that gives meaning to collective sacrifice and shared values in Western societies.

In this analysis, democratic procedures persist, but democratic substance has atrophied. Threat construction fills the void left by the loss of positive collective purpose, and elites can manufacture consent because populations lack a cohesive alternative worldview needed to resist manipulation.

If Todd’s diagnosis is accurate, the problem cannot be fixed merely through better procedures or more access to dissenting voices. It requires a cultural and spiritual renewal—a reinvention of the faith that motivates belief in values. This suggests that Robertson’s propaganda works not because it’s particularly clever but because it fills a meaning vacuum in contemporary Western society.

The implications are sobering. If Western democracies systematically exclude realist analysis when it challenges military expansion and threat inflation, then foreign policy operates largely insulated from genuine democratic deliberation. Citizens are mobilized to support decisions already made rather than consulted about whether to make them.

As tensions continue to escalate and the rhetoric of inevitable confrontation with Russia intensifies, the absence of substantive debate becomes more dangerous. Without the counterbalance of realist perspectives in mainstream discourse, populations are being prepared psychologically for conflicts that diplomatic alternatives might resolve—alternatives that remain unexplored because they challenge the institutional interests driving current policies.

The cost of this democratic deficit cannot be measured solely in defense budgets but in the estimated two million lives already lost in Ukraine—a conflict that might have been averted had Putin’s pre-invasion requests for security architecture negotiations been taken seriously instead of dismissed.

For citizens concerned about the erosion of democratic substance in foreign policy deliberation, the challenge is formidable. It requires not just challenging specific narratives like Robertson’s but addressing the deeper cultural exhaustion that makes such propaganda effective in the first place.