A Geopolitics of Bystanders?

Who is willing to fight for what, when, and how? Robert Schuett argues that any serious political realism begins with power—and upholds moral purpose.

Drawing on Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister, whom Jeremy Paxman once pointedly asked whether he prayed together with George W. Bush, rarely invites much applause. Too New Labour. Too wedded to power. Too Atlanticist. Too stubborn. Too interventionist. That, at least, is the customary bill of indictment—not mine, but familiar enough in polite company.

Yet in the Channel 4 documentary The Tony Blair Story, Blair reflects on watching Schindler’s List in 1993—the film in which a German industrialist saves more than a thousand Jews from the Holocaust by employing them—and described the profound effect it had on his personal and political philosophy: “you cannot be a bystander.”

How right he is—at least to me. One cannot be a bystander, one should not be a bystander, one must not be a bystander. As I have argued elsewhere, in the language of what I call “open society realism”: beware of power politics, and because of it, “beware of the bystanders” (Hans Kelsen’s Political Realism, p. 145). The world cannot afford them.

Coincidentally, on the very day the Munich Security Conference 2026 kicked off, The Times ran an article revisiting the Siege of Sarajevo and its “sniper tourists”—more than thirty years on.

In Munich, the language was saturated with geopolitics. Panels dissected geoeconomics, defence technologies, China’s strategic ambitions, escalation management, and the future of the transatlantic relationship. “Burden sharing” within the alliance returned as a mantra. European strategic autonomy was debated. Competition among great—and not so great—powers was assumed, and quite rightly so; the strategic environment has indeed changed.

And yet, allegations resurfaced concerning what has long been whispered about Sarajevo: that wealthy foreigners—reportedly from different countries and walks of life—indulged in a form of luxurious yet raw violence, described in some accounts as a “Sarajevo Safari”, paying large sums to shoot civilians from sniper positions above the city; that killing a child or a pregnant woman commanded a higher price, allegedly pocketed by a local Bosnian Serb commander. Whether every detail withstands judicial scrutiny is, of course, for the courts to determine; the matter is currently under investigation by Italian magistrates.

But the siege itself—years-long and brutal—was real. The systematic targeting of civilians was real. So, too, was the moral failure of delayed response.

In the early 1990s, there were policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic who insisted that Bosnia was not merely a civil war but a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Among them was then-Senator Joe Biden, who argued forcefully that inaction carried both strategic costs and moral ones. Eventually, under President Bill Clinton’s leadership, NATO intervened—of course, it was late and imperfectly so, but decisively enough to shift the trajectory of the war.

A few years later, during the crisis in Kosovo, Bill Clinton was cautious yet again. It was the energetic British Prime Minister Tony Blair who pressed forcefully for action. The American president, for a range of domestic and strategic reasons, was hesitant to escalate and firmly opposed to deploying US ground troops. By both men’s later accounts, Blair’s persistence proved decisive in shifting the momentum toward intervention. As Clinton would later recall, “As we say at home, he could talk an owl out of a tree.”

One need not romanticise these episodes in order to acknowledge a simple fact of political and international life. Intervention requires individuals willing to assume political risk. It requires leaders prepared to argue that strategic calculation does not exhaust moral responsibility beyond the boundaries of their own political community. As Blair argues, “it is not just your job to look after your country…you owe some responsibility to the bigger world.”

Today, after Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a growing tendency to treat any appeal to the enforcement of human rights as naïve— “widely declared a failure.” The language of realism has hardened into negation: no more interventions, no more entanglements, no more moral crusades. Strategic competition with China and Russia is framed as the overriding priority; everything else is deemed peripheral.

Yet political realism, properly understood, was never a license for indifference or for being a bystander. Realism begins with human nature and power, but it does not deny human agency and responsibility. The classical realists warned against hubris, but they did not rage against moral judgement. To reduce realism to pure realpolitik—to the management of spheres of influence and defence budgets—is to empty politics and international society of its ethical dimension. It would transform a venerable tradition of sober responsibility into a doctrine of minimalism, if not cynicism cloaked in high-flying strategic language.

At Munich, very few voices addressed this tension directly. Discussions of burden sharing and deterrence dominated. That is understandable in an era of renewed great-power rivalry. But it is striking how rarely the conversation turns to the circumstances under which the use of force might again be justified—not for territorial defence, but to halt gross violations of human rights.

My deeper concern is not that the West will intervene too readily. It is that it will cease even to entertain the possibility: not intellectually, not politically, and not strategically. From a balance-of-power realist perspective, such hesitancy—a form of “bystanding writ large”— carries consequences: if would-be perpetrators no longer fear external intervention by force, the likelihood of future atrocities increases.

If today’s new-found affection for political realism across many corners of society becomes a language in which “no” to questions of moral purpose and the good in international life—which often require being backed up by force—is the only permissible answer, we should not be surprised if future crises are met with disciplined or methodical detachment.

I would not want this to be seen as an argument for moral adventurism at the barrel of a gun. It is, rather, an argument for sustaining, exercising, and asserting moral agency in a geopolitical world.

If a rules-based international order in an “anarchical society” has any meaning, there will be times when force is required to help rid the world of evil, or at least to bring evil actors to the negotiating table.

Robert Schuett is a career civil servant (currently on leave), serving as Chair of the Austrian Political Science Association and as the 2025-26 Fulbright-Botstiber Visiting Professor of Austrian-American Studies at Stanford University.

Photo by  Anastasia  Shuraeva