by Matthew Frederick
Simplification over Complexity
The United States retains an unparalleled capacity to project power globally, but it increasingly lacks confidence in the forms of knowledge that make power effective. American foreign and defense policy used to rest on shared assumptions that military strength requires interpretation, and diplomatic leverage necessitates nuanced understanding that force must be disciplined by intelligence, regional expertise, and institutional memory. In this framework, the United States does not merely act; it seeks, not perfectly, but deliberately, to understand how actions would be perceived, contested, and constrained over time.
The commitment to expert interpretation has become politically precarious. Public frustration with elite governance has not translated into a renewed demand for evidence-based restraint or institutional assessment. Rather, it has incentivized a preference for finality, clarity, and immediate action within a rhetoric of simplification. Complexity and contextual sensitivity have been increasingly treated as evasion, and equivocality as a limitation. In this environment, power is expected to be visible directly, and military force becomes normalized not only because it can be effective, but because it is legible. The military offers a readily intelligible manifestation of leadership to an electorate that has grown skeptical of the institutions and educational pathways that once conferred authority on expert judgment.
Performative Realism Replaces Classical Realism
The policy result is what might be described as performative realism: a hybrid style of statecraft that adopts the zero-sum language of power, competition, and danger of classical realism while discarding its theoretical coherence. Classical realism emphasized prudence, restraint, and sensitivity to context, whereas performative realism privileges publicly legible acts over situational analysis, treats toughness and “common sense” as strategy, and expertise as a potential political liability rather than as a national asset. This logic is evident across today’s most consequential foreign policy debates, including nuclear diplomacy with Iran, burden-sharing within NATO, and strategic competition with China. Professional assessments within these domains tend to emphasize calibration, alliance management, verification, escalation control, and risk reduction, all of which operate incrementally. Such assessments require explanation and often succeed precisely by preventing crisis outcomes.
Contemporary political incentives reward a different set of behaviors: plainness over granularity, speed over collective judgement, and spectacle over procedural framework. Democratic accountability pushes elected and appointed leaders to adapt to these prevailing incentives. Yet, when public trust in the military exceeds trust in civilian institutions, and skepticism toward educational expertise mirrors skepticism towards a free press, it becomes politically predictable to speak in the discourse of kinetic action rather than institutional knowledge. The risk is that what resonates most clearly and effectively with domestic audiences comes to dominate even when it rests on a vulnerable strategic basis.
When Visibility Replaces Authority
One of the most significant changes in American foreign-policy discourse has been the relocation of epistemic authority. While national security, domestic, and professional credentialed entities once served as primary arbiters of strategic judgment, the role is now increasingly shared and often displaced by popular traditional and social media figures, whose influence rests on perceptibility rather than institutional responsibility and professional competence. Commentary-driven narratives often frame international and domestic affairs through moralized and emotionally resonant categories: loyalty and betrayal, strength and weakness, national humiliation and restoration.
This emergence is not confined to one ideological faction. Hollywood celebrity advocacy and moral entrepreneurship have long conditioned public attention to international issues, particularly in humanitarian contexts. The concern does not apply to traditional civic engagement, but the growing proclivity for notability to substitute for institutional qualification. In an attention-driven environment, legitimacy flows from symbolic presence. Consequently, the boundary between informed judgment and persuasive performance becomes insufficiently defined, and foreign policy risks becoming a contest of confidence rather than a discipline of equilibria.
Authorized institutional perspectives rooted in professional expertise struggle to compete when popular media and the current political environment reward immediacy and moral certainty. Contextually, military action becomes a postured remedy applicable to any or all defense and foreign policy dilemmas despite cautions from senior officials with significant careers in defense and diplomacy that military power divorced from diplomatic coordination and institutional learning invites failure. Such perspectives emphasize limits: the constraints on force, the costs of intervention, and the necessity of interagency and allied cooperation. These forms of caution are structurally disadvantaged in a media and political milieu that rewards immediacy and certainty. Policy practitioners speak in contingent terms: risk, likelihood, unintended consequences; whereas public-facing framings favor declarative language: strength or weakness, resolve or retreat. In such an environment, expert knowledge is circumvented rather than refuted. This asymmetry carries consequences beyond rhetoric. When influential voices bear no responsibility for policy outcomes, they can dismiss intelligence assessments, normalize adversarial narratives, or reduce alliance politics to grievance without institutional cost. Professionals, by contrast, remain constrained by evidence, norms, and accountability. Confidence is often mistaken for competence, while caution is misread as hesitation.
Anti-Intellectualism as a Governing Constraint
The persistence of these dynamics reflects a deeper shift in how knowledge is valued in American politics. The observation by historian Richard Hofstadter, author of Anti-Intellectualism in the United States (1963), that the United States has had a historical suspicion not of intelligence but of intellectual authority remains instructive. What distinguishes the current juncture is the degree to which this suspicion has hardened into political orientation. Professional capacity is increasingly coded as partisan, elitist, or morally detached. Higher education, once widely viewed as a national asset and source of economic mobility, is now often framed as a cultural adversary. Credentialed knowledge is presupposed to be ideological, expert disagreement is treated as evidence of corruption, and “common sense” has a higher claim to democratic authenticity than does analytical rigor.
In foreign policy, this epistemic shift carries institutional ramifications. Suspicion toward education and analytical capacity increasingly shapes staffing decisions, advisory structures, and policy processes. Leaders face incentives to privilege ideological convergence and rhetorical plainness over technical competence. Advisory circles narrow and processes that generate nuance (extended interagency review, consultation with regional specialists, or long-form analysis) are treated as limitations rather than safeguards. Over time, the capacity for interpretive statecraft erodes not through formal rejection of expertise, but through systematic deterrents to rely on it.
Performative Realism Favors Military over Diplomatic Options
Public attitudes toward the military illustrate a distinctive feature of contemporary American performative realism. The armed forces remain among the most trusted institutions in the country, even as confidence in higher education, civilian institutions, and the media deteriorates. In public rhetoric and perception, the military is often imagined as a repository of practical judgment: decisive, disciplined, and immune to elite abstraction.
This perception is both politically powerful and fundamentally deceptive. Modern military effectiveness relies on extensive professional education, technical expertise, and institutional learning. Effective military operations are sustained by a constant evolution of war colleges, strategic planning staff, cyber and intelligence units, and complex logistics networks. Yet public discourse frequently erases this cognitive infrastructure, presenting the military instead as a symbol of instinctive moral resolve. In practice, this misperception elevates military force to a primary source of legitimacy while diminishing its role as a professional instrument of statecraft. Military action gains legitimacy not because it is strategically optimal, but because it reaffirms a popular cultural symbol of authentic and decisive measures. In this environment, institutional incentives bias foreign policy judgement toward military options, even where diplomatic or analytic approaches would better support long-term objectives.
Global Institutions as Constraints Rather Than Instruments
Performative realism also reshapes attitudes toward the institutions that structure American global power. Its rhetoric routinely frames regional alliances, international organizations, and even long-standing federal agencies as constraints imposed by unaccountable foreign elites rather than as instruments of American influence. NATO has been increasingly described in transactional terms, with alliance commitments evaluated primarily through the lens of cost-sharing and immediate financial burden, while the European Union has been considered a bureaucratic construct that undermines national sovereignty and obstructs decisive action. Within this context, multilateralism became synonymous with strategic vulnerability, consultation with delay, and diplomacy with gross compromise. This interpretive recasting does more than alter simple political discourse. It results in foreign and defense policy issues like deterrence and alliance management being seen as simplistic demonstrations of resolve rather than complex efforts to adjust differences in cooperative systems.
The Democratic and Strategic Risk
Performative realism gains populist traction by offering interpretive plainness. Yet this same orientation carries democratic and strategic risk by encouraging the reduction of multilateral systems, which are rooted in mutual commitment, credibility, and long-term risk management, into overly simplified frameworks. Effective deterrence relies on measured communication and disciplined escalation control which requires institutional continuity and abhors sensationalism. This tension is evident in the recurrent use of highly visible military deployments as symbolic signals of resolve and strength. The rapid movement of troops, carrier strike groups, or air assets is often presented as proof of commitment, even when such actions are undertaken primarily for political reassurance rather than operational necessity. While such actions may serve legitimate deterrent purposes, they tend to be interpreted domestically as demonstrations of “strong” leadership rather than as calibrated military communications.
Contextually, the armed forces become the primary signaling mechanism available to civilian leaders, even when professional military judgment would favor subtler postures, diplomatic sequencing, or allied cooperation These deployments may satisfy immediate populist demands for clarity and toughness, but they frequently occur without corresponding diplomatic sequencing or alliance consultation, narrowing strategic flexibility while enhancing the risk of misinterpretation by allies and adversaries alike. Additionally, regional alliance management depends on accumulated trust, procedural memory, and strategic patience. When the practices of effective deterrence and alliance management are reduced to naive tests of resolve or leverage, strategy gives way to pursuits of mere pageantry.
The broader danger is that performative realism creates an institutional shift in how legitimacy is produced and maintained. Democracies require a baseline level of epistemic trust to govern effectively. When professional expertise and institutional knowledge are systematically discredited, deliberation collapses into mere theatrics, and political leaders are rewarded for the mere appearance of decisiveness and strength rather than for being factually consistent. Strategic failure then becomes arduous to diagnose and correct. Societies hostile to intellectual authority risk substituting action for understanding and military might for strategy. An international order marked by ever-evolving and multi-layered strategic contentions such as nuclear proliferation, great-power competition, and transnational risk leaves little room for such substitutions. Visible resolve may reassure and be easily digested by domestic audiences, but it can obscure strategic vulnerability and severely increase the risk of miscalculation.
Rebuilding the Epistemic Foundations of Power
If performative realism reflects political incentives rather than strategic obligation, the reversal requires more than rhetorical appeals to expertise. It requires the rebuilding of bureaucratic and civic foundations which allow knowledge to function as a source of legitimacy rather than liability. That effort begins with reasserting analytical exegesis and contextual understanding as an integral component of diplomacy, deterrence, alliance management, and ultimately power. It also requires a recalibration of democratic communication. Democratic accountability does not require the reduction of interdependent problems to talking points and simple slogans; it requires judgments grounded in validity and objectivity. Political leaders are not required to simplify foreign and defense policy beyond recognition, but they are responsible for explaining and defending the institutions that convert uncertainty, risk, and competing interests into coherent policy on the public’s behalf, even when doing so carries political cost. The foreign policy and defense institutions that perform this work are not obstacles to democracy; they are prerequisites for it. When political or appointed leaders treat the institutional and strategic conditions that govern foreign policy decision-making as evasion rather than reality, accountability collapses into theatre, and policy becomes vulnerable to error and escalation.
America does not suffer from a deficit of power or information, but from a weakening commitment to the interpretive judgment that renders power sustainable. When complexity is treated as political weakness rather than strategic necessity, force becomes the default: available, legible, and strategically precarious.
Matthew Frederick is a US Air Force veteran with experience in executive airlift avionics and electronic warfare, including deployments supporting operations in Afghanistan and East Africa. Raised in Chiang Mai, Thailand, he brings a global perspective to his analysis of civil–military relations, US foreign policy, and great power politics. He holds a B.A. in International Relations with a concentration in Comparative Politics and earned an M.S. in International Affairs and Diplomacy from Seton Hall University.