[3] Neorealism emerged from the North American discipline of political science, and reformulates the classical realist tradition of E. H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, and Reinhold Niebuhr.
Classical realism originally explained the machinations of international politics as being based on human nature and therefore subject to the ego and emotion of world leaders.
John Mearsheimer made significant distinctions between his version of offensive neorealism and Morgenthau in his book titled The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
[6][circular reference] Structural realism holds that the nature of the international structure is defined by its ordering principle (anarchy), units of the system (states), and by the distribution of capabilities (measured by the number of great powers within the international system), with only the last being considered an independent variable with any meaningful change over time.
[7] This driving force of survival is the primary factor influencing their behavior and in turn ensures states develop offensive military capabilities for foreign interventionism and as a means to increase their relative power.
[10] Neorealism sees states as black boxes, as the structure of the international system is emphasized rather than the units and their unique characteristics within it as being causal.
Indeed, neorealists often argue that the ordering principle of the international system has not fundamentally changed from the time of Thucydides to the advent of nuclear warfare.
Neorealists answer this challenge by arguing that democratic peace theorists tend to pick and choose the definition of democracy to achieve the desired empirical result.
For example, the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Dominican Republic of Juan Bosch, and the Chile of Salvador Allende are not considered to be "democracies of the right kind" or the conflicts do not qualify as wars according to these theorists.
[28] With enough democracies in the world, Bruce Russett thinks that it "may be possible in part to supersede the 'realist' principles (anarchy, the security dilemma of states) that have dominated practice ... since at least the seventeenth century.
Among the issues that neorealism has been criticized over is the neglect of domestic politics,[33][34] race,[35][36] gains from trade,[37] the pacifying effects of institutions,[38] and the relevance of regime type for foreign policy behavior.
[39] David Strang argues that neorealist predictions fail to account for transformations in sovereignty over time and across regions.
These transformations in sovereignty have had implications for cooperation and competition, as polities that were recognized as sovereign have seen considerably greater stability.
[40] In response to criticisms that neorealism lacks relevance for contemporary international policy and does a poor job explaining the foreign policy behavior of major powers, Charles Glaser wrote in 2003, "this is neither surprising nor a serious problem, because scholars who use a realist lens to understand international politics can, and have, without inconsistency or contradiction also employed other theories to understand issues that fall outside realism's central focus.