ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matthew Specter

Matthew Specter is Senior Fellow at the Institute for European Studies at UC Berkeley and lectures in History at Santa Clara University. An Associate Editor of History & Theory, and specialist in 20th century German history, he is the author most recently of The Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Political Thought Between Germany and the United States (Stanford University Press, 2022).

POSTS BY Matthew Specter

27 March 2022

Matthew Specter

Ukraine, Realism, and the Synchronization of Political Time in the US and Germany

What the US and Germany face today with Russia is evidently not a peaceful competition of rivals that can be managed by the pursuit of equilbrium and balance, the leitmotifs of 19th century Realpolitik. Nor is the Russian invasion a result of Western failure to heed realist caution about the project of NATO enlargement in Eastern Europe.