The Coward’s Bargain: How “Realism” Became a Doctrine of Submission

On Trump's "Peace Deal".

There exists a particularly noxious species of intellectual who mistakes capitulation for wisdom and calls the result “realism.” You’ll find them in think tanks and faculty lounges, on cable news and in leaked diplomatic cables, all peddling the same rancid formula: when confronted by superior force, the rational response is to kneel.

Curtis Yarvin wants monarchs because democracy offends his sense of efficiency. John Mearsheimer wants Ukraine to surrender because Russia has more tanks. Different domains, identical cowardice. Both have constructed elaborate philosophical architectures to justify what amounts to the eternal ethic of the collaborator: resistance is futile, principles are sentiment, and the strong do what they will while the weak suffer what they must.

Let us follow this logic to its obvious terminus. The Allies were fools to fight Hitler—seventy million dead to stop a regime that merely wanted its sphere of influence. Better to have negotiated, to have been “realistic” about German power, to have understood that Polish sovereignty and Jewish lives were luxuries that geopolitics doesn’t honor. The camps would have been regrettable, yes, but pragmatism demands we distinguish between what we wish and what is.

Do you flinch at this? You should. Because this is precisely what these “realists” counsel Ukraine today: surrender the Donbas where a quarter-million of your citizens live, cut your military so you cannot defend what remains, enshrine your subjugation in your constitution, and accept amnesty for those who massacred your children in Bucha. Call it peace. Call it wisdom. Above all, call it realistic.

But this plan isn’t even born of considered strategy or cold calculation. It emerges from Trump’s impatient vanity—his hunger to be praised as peacemaker, to have his Nobel moment, to impose order on the world in service of his self-image. He wants the photo opportunity, the ceremony, the historical footnote that says he ended a war. That the “peace” guarantees the next war, that it ratifies genocide, that it teaches every tyrant that mass murder works if you hold out long enough for Trump to get bored—none of this penetrates the armor of his narcissism.

What is this realism that finds resistance irrational but genocide negotiable? What species of pragmatism measures lives lost fighting tyranny but not lives lost submitting to it? They count Ukrainian casualties and declare the price too high, but the price of submission—the spiritual death of a nation, the message sent to every strongman that mass murder works if you’re powerful enough, the guarantee of future wars when appetites grow—this somehow escapes their calculation.

Peace without justice isn’t peace. It’s an armistice that teaches the aggressor that aggression pays. It’s Versailles without even the pretense of accountability. It’s Munich with better graphics and a Thanksgiving deadline. Every colonial “realist” who counseled accommodation, every Western diplomat who urged democratic movements to accept “stability” under dictators, every sophisticated voice explaining why this particular tyranny must be tolerated—they all used this same vocabulary. They were wrong then. They’re wrong now.

But call this what it is: not realism but metaphysical authoritarianism dressed in academic robes and tailored to flatter a vain man’s delusions of grandeur. It rests on the claim that power is the only real force in politics, that values don’t motivate action, that dignity is negotiable, that justice is whatever the powerful say it is. This isn’t description of reality—it’s prescription for how they wish reality worked, because in that world their counsel to submit would constitute wisdom rather than what it actually is: sophisticated cowardice in service of crude ego.

The Declaration of Independence is, by their lights, a monument to foolish sentiment. Those colonists should have accepted reality, understood their position, been pragmatic about British power. That they didn’t, that they fought and bled and somehow won, that they founded a nation on the radical proposition that some truths are self-evident regardless of who holds the gun—this is the refutation of everything the “realists” claim.

So when they counsel Ukraine to surrender, understand what they’re really saying: that America’s founding was a mistake, that every resistance to tyranny was irrational, that the proper human response to evil with power is accommodation. They’re not being realistic. They’re being authoritarian. And that they’ve dressed this authoritarianism in the language of pragmatism to serve the vanity of a man who can’t distinguish between peace and the mere absence of news coverage just proves that the cleverest people are often the easiest to fool—especially when the fool and the fooled are the same person.

Remember what’s real.

---

Go Deeper into the Circus

---