Re: Is Trump the Transactionalist also Trump the Realist

Another comment from Robert D. Kaplan arguing against Trump the realist:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/on-foreign-policy-donald-trump-is-a-fake-realist/2016/11/11/c5fdcc52-a783-11e6-8042-f4d111c862d1_story.html
"President-elect Donald Trump is being called a "realist" in foreign
policy. Don't believe it. He may have some crude realist instincts, but
that only makes him a terrible messenger for realism. Realists like
myself should be very nervous about his election.
Realism is a sensibility, not a specific guide to what to do in each
crisis. And it is a sensibility rooted in a mature sense of the tragic —
of all the things that can go wrong in foreign policy, so that caution
and a knowledge of history are embedded in the realist mindset. Realism
has been with us at least since Thucydides wrote "The Peloponnesian War"
in the 5th century B.C., in which he defined human nature as driven by
fear (phobos), self-interest (kerdos) and honor (doxa). Because the
realist knows that he must work with such elemental forces rather than
against them, he also knows, for example, that order comes before
freedom and interests come before values. After all, without order there
is no freedom for anybody, and without interests a state has no
incentive to project its values.
Trump has given no indication that he has thought about any of this. He
appears to have no sense of history and therefore no mature sense of the
tragic. A sense of history comes mainly from reading. That’s how we know
in the first place about such things as our obligations to allies and
our role as the defender of the West. All previous presidents in modern
times, without being intellectuals, have been readers to some extent.
But Trump seems post-literate, a man who has made an end run around
books directly to the digital age, where nothing is vetted, context is
absent and lies proliferate."