Realism, Eurasia, and the American Constitutional Order
The future of the United States, constitutional government, and the West itself is at stake. The greatest danger to all three is the emergence of a consolidated Eurasia under Chinese leadership. A sober assessment of U.S. interests demands not only that we avoid war with Iran, but also that we deliberately restructure our alliances to fracture China’s rising bloc. This may require a realignment with both Iran and Russia, states that are neither friendly nor free, but which remain rational and deterrable. And this, in turn, will provoke both domestic and international resistance, especially from the entrenched interests of Israel. Israel is a friend and should be treated as such—but it must not be permitted to dominate American grand strategy.
For too long, U.S. foreign policy has treated Israel not as a sovereign partner, but as a manipulative dependent, one whose perceived security needs corner Washington into strategies that ultimately imperil both nations. Israel is geographically Middle Eastern, but civilizationally Western. As Leo Strauss argued, Israel, as understood through the biblical tradition rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures, introduced the idea of divine law transcending political authority. It was this idea that inaugurated the enduring tension between Jerusalem and Athens, between revelation and reason. That tension formed the spiritual and intellectual backbone of Western civilization, preventing its collapse into either secular rationalism or theocratic dogmatism.
This is what is at stake. The West must not lose its center. And in a multipolar age, realism must speak not only in terms of security and deterrence, but also in terms of survival, identity, and order. The logic is not new, but it is more urgent now than at any point since the Cold War.
Red Sun Rising
In 1904, British geographer Halford Mackinder warned that the future of global power would be determined by whoever dominated the vast interior of Eurasia. He called it the “Heartland,” and his thesis was simple: control over the central landmass of Europe and Asia would eventually dictate control over the world. His prediction has returned with a vengeance in the 21st century.
Eurasia contains the majority of the world’s population, natural resources, and productive capacity. It is home to the largest armies, the most diverse energy supplies, and many of the key industrial nodes that support global commerce. From the ports of the South China Sea to the railways of Central Asia and the oil fields of the Persian Gulf, Eurasia remains the strategic epicenter of the global order.
China understands this. It is not merely rising—it is building toward hegemony. Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China is stitching together a network of overland and maritime trade routes that bypass the Western-controlled global commons. Through its investments in Central Asia, Pakistan, Iran, and beyond, Beijing is creating strategic dependencies that entrench its role as Eurasia’s center of gravity. China is expanding its military footprint, securing port access, building airfields, and forging energy corridors that reduce its vulnerability to U.S. naval power.
If China succeeds in dominating Eurasia, the United States will become a peripheral power. It will find itself excluded from major trade flows, cut off from the leverage it once enjoyed over regional disputes, and increasingly irrelevant in the shaping of global norms. Economic influence will erode. Military alliances will fray. The dollar itself, no longer indispensable, will be displaced by a rising system of rival financial institutions, reserve currencies, and transactional blocs.
Mackinder’s logic holds because geography has not changed. But what has changed is the speed and precision with which China is acting to realize that logic. The United States cannot remain indifferent to this consolidation. If it does, it will wake up in a world where the rules are no longer written in Washington, and where the moral and political assumptions that undergird constitutionalism will be quietly replaced by the civilizational ambitions of a state that sees liberty as a threat.
This Chinese strategy mirrors, in many ways, what the United States once pursued through the Monroe Doctrine. In the early 19th century, American leaders recognized that if foreign powers were allowed to entrench themselves in the Western Hemisphere, the republic’s independence and long-term security would be imperiled. The Monroe Doctrine was not simply about avoiding European entanglement. It was a grand strategic assertion that the Americas must remain free from external control in order to preserve America’s integrity. It maximized American geopolitical advantage for the sake of the country as a whole, and for the benefit of its citizens.
What China now seeks is a kind of Eurasian Monroe Doctrine, but without the assumptions of liberty. Its vision is not the protection of sovereign development, but the imposition of a hierarchical order rooted in dependency, surveillance, and ideological conformity. If the United States allows such a system to solidify, it will find itself in the position once occupied by the European empires it resisted, unable to project meaningful influence into a consolidated rival hemisphere. The difference today is that the rival hemisphere would contain most of the world.
India, often treated as a natural counterweight to China, could also be drawn into this bloc if left to drift. Though civilizationally distinct from China, India shares with it a deep skepticism toward Western liberalism. Its “Hindu Nationalism” is reflected in a growing stake in multipolar institutions that bypass American leadership. Should India, Russia, and Iran all remain aligned with Beijing by default or inertia, the United States will face a Eurasian superstructure too large to isolate and too integrated to divide. Preventing that outcome must be the central strategic task of American statecraft.
Yet any move toward this kind of realignment will not go uncontested. Within the United States, such a strategy will encounter entrenched resistance from political factions, institutional lobbies, and foreign policy elites who view engagement with Iran or Russia as anathema, regardless of shifting global priorities. Chief among these voices will be those aligned with Israel’s strategic worldview, which sees Iran not as a state to be balanced, but as an existential threat to be destroyed. The challenge, then, is not only diplomatic but also domestic. Realism must confront not only the structure of Eurasian power, but also the structure of American power as it now exists.
Culture of Conformity
The greatest obstacle to a realist reorientation of American grand strategy may not lie in Moscow, Tehran, or even Beijing, but within Washington itself—specifically, within the dense network of political, ideological, and institutional alignments that define the U.S.-Israel relationship. Any serious attempt to rebalance U.S. posture toward Iran or Russia, to peel them away from China’s orbit, will be met with fierce opposition from those who regard the permanent isolation of Iran as a non-negotiable foundation of American foreign policy.
Israel’s concern with Iran is not feigned. It is visceral, existential, and deeply rational within its own framework. The Islamic Republic funds and arms proxy groups on Israel’s borders, cultivates anti-Zionist rhetoric as a regime pillar, and seeks regional dominance through asymmetric means. The specter of a nuclear-armed Iran is, for Israeli policymakers, not an abstract proliferation concern, but a direct threat to national survival. That fear translates into a doctrine of preemption and pressure, reinforced by decades of successful coercive diplomacy and military superiority.
But what serves Israel’s immediate security calculus does not necessarily serve America’s global strategic interest. In fact, the two have begun to diverge. The central challenge of American statecraft today is not the denial of nuclear capability to rogue states, but the prevention of hemispheric consolidation by a peer rival. Iran, for all its hostility, is a middle power playing a regional game. China is a civilizational empire seeking global primacy. Realism requires the United States to allocate its attention, its leverage, and its alliances accordingly.
Yet within Washington, the machinery of policy has been shaped to treat Israel’s priorities as axiomatic. This is not a conspiracy, but simply a structural fact. AIPAC, pro-Israel think tanks, neoconservative networks, evangelical pressure groups, and a bipartisan consensus formed during the War on Terror have produced a political culture where hostility to Iran is a litmus test for seriousness. Proposals to engage Tehran diplomatically are treated as appeasement. Suggestions that Israel’s security may not always align with America’s strategic interests are dismissed as subversive.
This environment has consequences. It narrows the range of acceptable debate. It penalizes restraint. And it ensures that any realist recalibration will be cast not as prudence, but as betrayal. The irony is that by clinging to a rigid, confrontational posture toward Iran, American policy may be accelerating the very alignment it fears: an Iran fully integrated into the Chinese-led Eurasian bloc. What begins as loyalty to an ally ends as strategic paralysis.
Israel must be treated as a friend—but not as a compass. The United States must be willing to say no, not as an act of hostility, but as an act of realism. A true alliance is one that allows for disagreement, not one that requires self-subordination. For too long, America has pursued Israel’s enemies as if they were its own, even when doing so weakened its position elsewhere. That era must end if American power is to survive the century.
The Foreign Policy Class
A realist grand strategy must not only assess threats abroad but also understand constraints at home. One of the most serious obstacles to reorienting American power for the 21st century is the internal condition of its own policymaking apparatus. The foreign policy establishment, once guided by balance-of-power logic and strategic discipline, has ossified into a class that resists adaptation and often operates independently of the national interest. It functions as a captured class.
This capture is not simply a matter of individual corruption or partisan dogma. It is structural. The institutions that produce and sustain American foreign policy, the security bureaucracies, think tanks, foundations, media outlets, and donor networks, have been shaped by decades of alignment with causes that no longer serve the evolving needs of the country. Chief among these causes is unwavering deference to Israel’s strategic worldview, which remains a bipartisan reflex in Washington. Yet this is only one example. Other powerful drivers include the military-industrial complex, the democracy promotion industry, and the interests of transnational finance and technology firms. Each of these centers of power imposes its own logic: the logic of endless engagement, inflated threat perception, and permanent crisis.
Together, they form what can only be described as a foreign policy class. This is not a formal aristocracy, but a network of professionals, consultants, elected officials, and media figures whose careers depend less on successful strategy than on the maintenance of institutional continuity. This is a priesthood of the state religion, throwing aside transcendence. They speak the language of national interest but operate according to the incentives of class survival. The rise of China as a systemic rival should have demanded a full reorientation of American statecraft. Instead, the response has been halting, filtered through older regional loyalties and ideological obsessions. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Middle East, where the fixation on Iran continues to dominate analysis and policy alike, despite its declining relevance to America’s primary strategic objective. Religion, as always, demands a devil.
The realist sees clearly that internal political structure shapes external strategic capacity. A republic at peace with itself, led by statesmen, can pursue diplomacy grounded in long-term interest and prudence. However, a regime governed by special interests, bureaucratic inertia, and inherited pieties cannot. The challenge today is not merely to draft a better foreign policy. It is to dismantle the grip of a policymaking elite that has mistaken its own preferences and affiliations for the good of the nation, and the separate roles for state and church.
This is not a call to retreat from global engagement. It is a call to restore political clarity. American foreign policy cannot again serve the common good until it is disentangled from the interests of those who benefit from confusion and fragmentation. This will require more than rhetoric—it will require institutional reform, public reckoning, and a re-politicization of strategy itself. Realism, if it is to be anything more than an academic virtue, must become a governing principle. That will only be possible if the nation regains control over the machinery that acts in its name.
Existential Danger
The survival of the American constitutional order depends not only on internal cohesion but also on external structure. A free republic requires more than civic virtue—it requires strategic breathing room. When a rival civilization gains the power to dominate trade, set norms, and dictate terms, the space for liberty narrows. History shows that constitutional governments rarely survive geopolitical subordination for long.
For generations, the United States thrived under favorable conditions: oceanic buffers, weak neighbors, global economic dominance, and a largely Western-aligned world order. These structural advantages insulated its political system and allowed liberal institutions to flourish. But that insulation is eroding. China’s pursuit of Eurasian consolidation would create a rival sphere of power with the ability to challenge not just American interests, but the constitutional viability of the regime itself.
A China-led Eurasia would control the world’s key energy corridors, industrial capacity, and digital infrastructure. It would operate on a model that rejects natural rights, suppresses dissent through surveillance, and seeks ideological conformity. This is not mere authoritarianism—it is an explicitly civilizational project that views core Western presuppositions as a threat to be contained or replaced.
The 2013 draft report “The Strategic Consequences of Chinese Racism” captured this clearly. It warned that the Chinese Communist Party’s worldview is not only nationalist but also racialized. The Party promotes a vision of Han supremacy, often portraying non-Han peoples as disorderly, corrupt, or unfit for sovereignty. This is not fringe rhetoric—it is embedded in Chinese political thought, media discourse, and foreign policy posture. From Africa to Central Asia to the Pacific Islands, China’s engagements often reflect this implicit hierarchy. And when racial ideology fuses with geopolitical ambition, it becomes a strategic threat. A Eurasian order shaped by such a regime would seek to delegitimize and dismantle the very philosophical foundations of the West.
The danger is existential. If the United States loses its capacity to shape the world system, it will also lose the conditions that sustain ordered liberty at home. Economic decline invites executive overreach. Global irrelevance produces domestic crisis. Elite consolidation, surveillance expansion, and social fragmentation are the predictable consequences of foreign defeat. The constitutional order would not fall overnight. It would slowly hollow out under pressure.
Realism must therefore extend beyond military and economic metrics. It must include civilizational survivability. Preventing Chinese hegemony in Eurasia is not just a matter of strategy. It is a condition for preserving the American regime. The defense of liberty abroad and its preservation at home are not separable. They stand or fall together.
Balancer, Not Enforcer
This is no longer an age of hegemony. The unipolar moment has passed, and with it the illusion that the United States can shape every conflict, discipline every regime, or enforce liberal norms across every region. The new world is defined by diffusion—of power, of technology, of capital, and of political legitimacy. In this environment, American security will depend not on global dominance, but on the construction and maintenance of balance. That means preserving enough leverage to prevent a hostile consolidation of Eurasia, while avoiding the strategic overextension that exhausted past empires.
In practical terms, this means a posture rooted in denial rather than enforcement. The United States should abandon the role of enforcer and adopt that of balancer. It should support regional power centers that resist Chinese dominance, encourage hedging strategies by middle powers, and cultivate flexible alignments based on common interest rather than ideological purity. At times, that will involve uncomfortable choices—engaging rivals to weaken greater threats or restraining allies to prevent escalation. But this is not weakness. It is prudence.
Military spending must shift away from prestige platforms and toward denial capabilities—drones, missile defense, cyber resilience, and survivable deterrents. And diplomacy must be rehabilitated as a tool of power, not of sentimentalism or apology. The task before the United States is not to recover a vanished hegemony, but to preserve the conditions under which liberty can survive. That requires more than nostalgia or rhetorical resolve. It requires a foreign policy grounded in clarity, discipline, and prioritization; the sober recognition that not every fight is ours to wage, and not every alliance is ours to keep.
To prevent the consolidation of Eurasia under Chinese leadership is to preserve the structure of the world in which the American constitutional regime can continue to exist. That structure is now under pressure from both without and within. Abroad, a rising civilizational power rejects our foundational ideals. At home, entrenched interests prevent strategic adaptation. Together, they form a pincer movement that threatens to suffocate the republic.
This is about our very survival. Avoiding war with Iran is the first test. To say yes to realignment in defiance of domestic resistance is the second. Realism must pass both. For the realist understands what the ideologue forgets: that liberty depends on order, and order depends on prudence. And in a world growing more dangerous, more fragmented, and more ideologically hostile to the West, prudence must begin with the recognition that survival is the precondition of everything else.
Image: Cardinal Richelieu on the Sea Wall of La Rochelle at the time of the siege, 1881, Henri-Paul Motte. Wikimedia Commons.
