On the (Con)fusion of Geopolitics, Machtpolitik, Power Politics, and Realpolitik: A Hallmark of Anti-Realism in the Global/American Discipline of International Relations

An often-overlooked issue in the study of international politics is the conceptual imprecision — or, at times, the deliberate conflation — of the historically distinct concepts of Machtpolitik, power politics, Realpolitik, and geopolitics within American political thought. Beyond assembling relevant evidence of this political-conceptual phenomenon within the global/American discipline of International Relations and in contemporary analyses of U.S. foreign policy, this paper offers an interpretation for this conceptual trajectory as symptomatic of the liberal anti-realism (that is, a genuine interpretation of it too) defining both the IR discipline and the American foreign policy imaginary. The argument centers on key features of the American political imaginary: the hegemony of liberal (internationalism) in political thought, the positioning of pluralism (and realism) as its legitimate academic opposition, and a deep-seated historical aversion to a sociology of conflict within American (international) political theory. As "geopolitics" becomes a buzzword of the present era and that fusion increasingly reveals its confusion, the performative functions of this conceptual blending become exposed —particularly in its role in legitimizing an internationalist liberal elite in U.S. foreign policy and in sidestepping genuine realist perspectives not only within its decision making environment, but also from the global periphery, as exemplified by the paradoxical case of peripheral realism.