Is realism in geopolitics accurate, or just normalized pessimism?
My dad asked me something recently that I couldn’t answer properly, despite studying geopolitics and IR.
He basically said:
“If the US causes so many wars/problems globally, why don’t all countries simply unite and collectively punish or isolate it? Stop buying US weapons, reduce dollar dependence, deny access to bases/resources, stop trade, build alternatives together, etc.”
My immediate reaction was “that’s unrealistic” because I’ve been exposed to realism in IR, petrodollar dependence, military alliances, weapons interoperability, investment flows, satellite/GPS dependence, global finance, supply chains, etc.
So intellectually, I understand why countries don’t do this.
But the more I think about it, the more I feel my dad’s idea comes from a kind of raw idealism that asks:
“If most countries are unhappy with a dominant power, why can’t collective human cooperation overcome dependency and fear?”
And now I’m confused whether realism is simply describing reality accurately, or we become so trained in pessimistic realism that we stop even imagining collective alternatives.
At the foundation level, my dad’s argument feels emotionally and morally intuitive:
Why should power override collective will?
Yet almost every geopolitical explanation seems to end with "because interests matter more than morality."
Is global politics genuinely trapped by self-interest and structural dependency, or
do we sometimes overestimate realism because the current world order normalized it?
Would love perspectives from people into IR, geopolitics, economics, history, philosophy, etc.