Intelligence and the Limits of Political Realism

Intelligence is everywhere in international politics, yet largely absent from realist theory. Robert Schuett explores why that paradox matters.

In recent years, intelligence has become unusually visible in international politics. Governments now routinely declassify assessments, intelligence chiefs brief the media, and classified judgements are publicly invoked to justify diplomatic and military decisions. Intelligence, once defined by secrecy, has moved closer to the surface of political life.

Yet this growing visibility has not been matched by conceptual clarity. Intelligence is discussed constantly in policy debates, but, save a few consequential exceptions, rarely examined as a meaningful object of theory or philosophy. It appears as background noise—assumed to matter (at least to some degree), but seldom interrogated for what it reveals about how international politics actually works.

This gap is particularly striking in International Relations (IR) theory, and most of all within political realism—the venerable tradition most closely associated with power, uncertainty, and the logic of state survival.

Realism begins from the assumption that international politics unfolds under conditions of anarchy, where no central authority can guarantee security. In such an environment, states must rely on their own capabilities, anticipate the behaviour of others, and prepare for worst-case scenarios. Intelligence would seem indispensable to this task. Yet within contemporary realist IR theory, particularly neorealism, intelligence is largely absent from sustained conceptual analysis.

As Robert Schuett and John C. Williams have noted, there has been remarkably little “cross-fertilisation” between Intelligence Studies and IR theory, even within realism itself. This is surprising, given realism’s long-standing concern with raison d’état, power, and survival. They suggest that this separation stems in part from the discipline’s self-conception as an explanatory social science, shaped by methodological preferences that have discouraged sustained theorising about intelligence.

The shift toward structural explanation, most closely associated with Kenneth Waltz’s path-breaking Theory of International Politics (1979), further marginalised intelligence within IR theory. Neorealism’s explanatory ambition lies in identifying the enduring structural forces that shape state behaviour under anarchy, rather than examining the instruments through which states pursue security. Intelligence, in this framework, appears analytically secondary: a second-image phenomenon that sits beneath the systemic level of analysis.

Because neorealism locates the causes of conflict in the irresolvable security dilemma, there is little incentive to theorise intelligence separately. Uncertainty is treated as a permanent structural condition, rather than as something that varies with information, interpretation, and institutional practice. Intelligence is thus subsumed within the broader repertoire of national security activities, where military capabilities and material power occupy the central place. Parsimony is prioritised over practice, and intelligence disappears from view.

The result is a curious silence. Notably, the offensive realist John J. Mearsheimer has not directly engaged with questions of intelligence or espionage in his otherwise extensive, thought-provoking body of IR scholarship, rooted in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001). This absence is revealing—not because intelligence contradicts realism and its core logic, but because realism’s structural commitments render intelligence theoretically redundant.

A different, though equally puzzling, case is that of Robert Jervis, one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century IR. As Robert Art acknowledged, Jervis “almost singlehandedly” created a field that blended history, security, psychology, and international politics. Yet Jervis’s major contributions to intelligence—most notably his analysis of intelligence failure surrounding the fall of the Shah of Iran and Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction—sit somewhat apart from the mainstream IR canon.

It is almost as if the late Jervis wore two hats. Within IR theory, he is remembered for his work on perception, signalling, and the security dilemma. Within Intelligence Studies, he is widely regarded as a foundational figure—often described as its intellectual anchor. The separation is telling. Intelligence appears as an applied concern, rather than as something that might reshape how international politics itself is understood.

The pattern extends further back. The two towering mid-twentieth-century realists, Hans J. Morgenthau and John H. Herz, both engaged intelligence obliquely, but never systematically. Morgenthau’s most direct intervention came in 1967, when he publicly criticised the CIA’s involvement in domestic political activities, warning—echoing President Truman—that this was “how totalitarianism starts.” Intelligence here appeared not as a strategic asset, but as a political danger requiring restraint.

Herz, for his part, drew on his wartime service in the Office of Strategic Services to reflect on intelligence from a different angle. In his autobiography, Vom Überleben (1984), he recalled both the extraordinary intellectual calibre of many of his OSS colleagues and his frustration at how little of their expertise ultimately shaped organisational practice. Intelligence, even when staffed by exceptional minds, remained institutionally constrained and politically circumscribed.

Taken together, these cases point to a broader and revealing imbalance. Intelligence and espionage are pervasive features of state behaviour, yet they occupy a marginal position in the study of international politics—and, more surprisingly, even within political realism or realist IR theory itself. Where realism seeks to explain why states compete, intelligence illuminates how they do so. Where today’s realism appears to privilege structure over the political, intelligence draws attention to judgement, interpretation, and (political) choice.

From a realist IR theory perspective, intelligence reduces uncertainty, supports deterrence, and enables power balancing. Yet it also exposes the limits of realism’s explanatory reach. For the practice of intelligence is not merely an input into rational decision-making, nor simply a technical adjunct to military power. It is a social practice embedded in institutions, shaped by expectations, and constrained—however imperfectly—by political norms.

Realism helps us understand why intelligence is indispensable in international politics, but it tells us far less about how intelligence is practised, constrained, and recognised as legitimate among states. Intelligence does not operate in a vacuum of raw power alone; it functions within a web of shared expectations about secrecy, deception, restraint, and responsibility. These expectations are rarely codified, often contested, and frequently violated—but they are nevertheless very much real.

If intelligence is both pervasive and constitutive of state behaviour, then its marginalisation within IR theory in general, and within political realism in particular, is not merely an analytical or methdological oversight.

At a time of heightened geopolitical rivalry and domestic polarisation, this is a discomforting sign that something fundamental about the political life of international society remains undertheorised—and, as a result, poorly understood.

Robert Schuett is co-founder and managing partner at STK Powerhouse, a global risk advisory firm. A former Defence civil servant, he also serves as Chairman of the Austrian Political Science Association and is a long-standing Honorary Fellow at Durham University.

Photo by Octavian Iordache