What is the realist prescription to the States to ensure their survival in an anarchical world?

Anarchy and survival

• Kenneth Waltz’s structural realism: the organising principle is anarchy, so States must provide their own security.
• Hans Morgenthau’s classical line: interest defined as power, prudence, and a balance that checks any would-be master.
• E. H. Carr warned against relying on liberal harmony while others arm.

The operational prescription

• Self-help: maintain armed forces, intelligence, and economic capacity that can be mobilised.
• Balance of power: internally by arms, externally by alliances. NATO is a realist instrument even when dressed as a community.
• Relative gains: watch partners who may convert cooperation into tomorrow’s threat, a reply to Robert Keohane’s more optimistic institutionalism.
• Nuclear deterrence for those who can, as Waltz also argued that nuclear bipolarity can stabilise.
• Defensive realists (Waltz) say seek enough security, not maximum empire. Offensive realists (John Mearsheimer) say regional hegemony is the safer peak. Both still prescribe power, not disarmament by example.

What realists tell States not to do

• Do not outsource survival to the UN Charter’s collective security when the veto can freeze it.
• Do not assume trade or a regime will bind a rising peer. China policy debates inside Asia follow this caution.

Limits inside the school

• The prescription can feed security dilemmas. One State’s survival kit is another’s threat.
• It under-describes domestic choice and the pull of institutions that Keohane maps in After Hegemony.