On the face of it, the title of this article must look rather odd, especially to any non-specialist who happens to light upon it. For ‘Realism’ surely connotes enterprises and appraisals of a realistic kind, ones which take full account of the facts and constraints of life. Accordingly, it might well be thought clearly superfluous to assert that such things, already identified as realistic, are indeed so.

No assessment of new or recently re-established democracies in Latin America can overlook the threat to these regimes posed by debt service obligations that are often heavier and more durable than the reparations imposed on Weimar Germany. No discussion of the weakening of the liberal international economic order (the trend towards trade protection, chronic instability in currency and financial markets) can disregard the extreme pressures to export, to compress imports, and to conserve foreign exchange that shape the economic policies of the heavily indebted LDC nations. No analysis of the scope and limitations of monetary policy in the developed countries (and especially in the United States) will be complete unless it takes into account the consequences for the major banks of a sovereign debt exposure which remains even now very large in relation to shareholders' equity, and which still frequently appears in bank accounts at an unrealistically optimistic valuation.

In 1976 Robert A. Kann, the well known authority on Habsburg history, wrote a Research Note in World Politics called ‘Alliances versus Ententes’.1 This rescued a distinction which had not been entirely overlooked in the post-war literature of international Relations2 but was certainly in danger of extinction at the hands of a broad, all-purpose concept of ‘alliance’.3 An alliance, Kann claimed, is distinguished by its ‘airtight commitments’; by contrast an entente entails ‘no definite commitments’ and is altogether a looser and more flexible kind of association between states. The entente he alternatively described as a ‘consultation pact’ or ‘flexible agreement’. Kann, however, was not concerned only with conceptual explication. Indeed, his main purpose seems to have been (he was a little vague on this) to advance the argument that although ‘many examples of workable alliances and meaningless ententes can easily be adduced’, the entente is in principle a more efficient device for serving ‘the interests of peace’ than the alliance. This is an argument which can be challenged both on internal as well as historical grounds.

In his lively essay on Hans Morgenthau Peter Gellman points out that the school of realism was essentially ‘an association based upon a common repudiation of unfounded hopes for a new world’. But he cautions that ‘beyond this shared purpose, the diversity of theoretical priorities among “Realists” … limits the utility of realism as a word that can either describe or enlighten’. Certainly, on the nature of power, the ends of politics, the role of morality, the national interest, the meaning of theory itself Morgenthau had his own views. On many of these matters Gellman sets us right. We have here, I believe, a fair account of Morgenthau's views and a profound analysis of his theoretical approach.

Disease is a transnational phenomenon which pays no heed to territorial state boundaries; yet it rarely features in the discussion of International Relations. It is important that the discipline should address the issue of disease and more broadly, health, not simply to facilitate containment of disease transmission across international borders but also because central notions of justice, equity, efficiency and order are involved.

Many scholars in International Relations will register surprise and perhaps amusement at the recent 'discovery' of the state by sociologists. They could accurately claim, it has never been similarly neglected in their own discipline. International Relations is about states and the system of states. Classical realism relies on explicit understandings about what states are and their place in the international system.