Primacy of Foreign Policy

Realpolitik has become a foreign-policy concept. Only rarely is it used in domestic settings anymore. Though they are not quite equivalent, Realpolitik has become largely aligned with foreign-policy realism. As Bew explains, this is in part the result of its reworking by British and American observers, who in the early twentieth century equated it with Prussian militarism. Yet the transition from domestic to foreign setting began earlier. Foreign-policy considerations were never absent from Rochau’s thinking, though they took a back seat to domestic issues.