Adam Tooze:

Adopting a realistic approach towards the world does not consist in always reaching for a well-worn toolkit of timeless verities, nor does it consist in affecting a hard-boiled attitude so as to inoculate oneself forever against liberal enthusiasm. Realism, taken seriously, entails a never-ending cognitive and emotional challenge. It involves a minute-by-minute struggle to understand a complex and constantly evolving world, in which we are ourselves immersed, a world that we can, to a degree, influence and change, but which constantly challenges our categories and the definitions of our interests. And in that struggle for realism – the never-ending task of sensibly defining interests and pursuing them as best we can – to resort to war, by any side, should be acknowledged for what it is. It should not be normalised as the logical and obvious reaction to given circumstances, but recognised as a radical and perilous act, fraught with moral consequences. Any thinker or politician too callous or shallow to face that stark reality, should be judged accordingly.
I very much like this idea of Realpolitik not as a position but rather, properly understood, an aspiration. Often what people call their “realism” is simply their intellectual and moral laziness.

Perhaps related: I’ve always been slightly annoyed by the tagline of the New Criterion — “The New Criterion will always call things by their real names” — because it assumes that knowing the real names of things is easy. A better and more honest, if less resonant, tagline would be “We will always call things by their real names if we can figure out what they are.”