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Realism entered the plane of government and diplomacy. Influential among the realists who applied theory to policy was George Kennan, a student of history, diplomat, policy analyst, and expert on Soviet affairs. Kennan believed that the most serious fault of American policy was what he called the "legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems." That approach he labeled idealistic, for it projected the common concepts of American law and politics into international relations--as in the Hague conferences on disarmament, the Kellogg Pact to make war illegal, and the League of Nations. Remarkably, Kennan asserted that realism would free foreign affairs from concepts of right and wrong, and correct the "assumption that state behavior is a fit subject for moral judgment.... It is a curious thing, but it is true, that the legalistic approach to world affairs, rooted as it unquestionably is in a desire to do away with war and violence, makes violence more enduring, more terrible, and more destructive to political stability than did the older motives of national interest." Kennan pleaded in the early 1950s for the realism of power politics--or, as he wrote, for whatever "is realistic in concept, and founded in an endeavor to see both ourselves and others as we really are." In his cabled dispatches from Moscow to the State Department, Kennan urged--as strongly as in his later writings, including Realities of American Foreign Policy--that relations with Russia be placed entirely on a "realistic and matter-of-fact basis," guided not by morality or altruism, but by the strengths and weaknesses of nations.

The nation's rise in the world, from the perspective of the realists, rested on power and its elements, which included geography, natural resources, population, industrial development, military ability, and national morale. The balance of power enabled the United States in the mid-twentieth century to pursue interests in remote regions of the earth through trade, cultural activity, and war. Opposed as it was to moralism, realism nevertheless reflected not merely a concern for fact or reality but also a regard for elemental power as force and influence. Realism was a way of looking at the world, comprehended as power politics. For our purposes, power is defined as the qualities or properties that make possible the national exertion of influence or force in the world. Power, in this sense, means essentially capability rather than actual force or influence, though we may find that the ways influence was exerted might indeed eventually enhance or weaken the power that supported it.