E. H. Carr, Winston Churchill, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Us:

THE PROBLEM OF reconciling national-self-interest with transcendent ideals has loomed large in the perennial U.S. foreign policy debate and the academic study of international relations. ¹ Idealists, usually identified with Woodrow Wilson, have traditionally advocated a foreign policy based on collective security, international law, democratization, and the basic harmony of interest that exists among men and states. ² Realists, dismissing Wilsonianism as Utopian, have traditionally advocated a foreign policy based on a concrete, finite, conception of the national interest without moralistic or ideological content. Although two dominant schools of realist thought have different points of departure—the classical realists stressing the flawed nature of man; structural realists stressing the inescapable condition of anarchy in which all states operate—all realists stress the realm of necessity, whose limits sharply constrain statesmens' range of moral and practical choice. The essence of international politics is, according to the realist paradigm, the struggle for power and survival rather than the quest for harmony and justice. ³