ABSTRACT
Political realists give the concept of the national interest a central importance in the conduct of contemporary international affairs. Political realism is as much an insight as it is a theory-an insight into the dilemma of explaining power and security within a single framework. Political realism insists upon the primacy of conflict among individuals and groups for dominance over their respective state, class and community units. Political realism is a broad term for some commonalities shared by otherwise diverse political thinkers. Realists such as George Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr have also taken national interest to be a thing civilized by some intuitive adherence of men to the idea of survival. The realist proponents of the national interest have not deeply probed the dilemma, to the detriment of both "realism" and the "national interest".
