bq. It has become conventional wisdom that international relations theory and policy have little in common. So someone like Stephen Walt tries to argue that realism, a major IR theory, would have led to different policy choices since the end of the Cold War and he gets criticized for not realizing that policymakers don’t care about IR theory.
bq. That contention is wrong: scholars and policymakers share much more information than is usually acknowledged…I am not here to defend realism. I am here to defend the idea that there IS greater overlap between the policy and academic worlds than is usually acknowledged.
That’s political scientist Jeremy Pressman. More here.