The Importance of Realism in Foreign Policy

There's an ideological underpinning to that, which is that we forced ourselves to believe after the 30 years war as a way of trying to create a system where you could have states that were content to sort of live and let live. And it just doesn't explain a lot about how regime type influences foreign policy, right? Why was the Chinese Communist Party always so threatened by the U.S.? Well, because they understood that the liberal norms of a system run by a democratic superpower were ultimately going to be corrosive and potentially fatal to the illiberal norms of the domestic system that they ran. Putin very well understood that NATO expansion was foreclosing that opportunity for Russia in its near abroad