May 2026
In the spring of 1988, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) began laying mines across the shipping lanes of the Persian Gulf. The Ayatollah’s navy had spent months dissuading tanker traffic from the Strait of Hormuz, and Washington responded with the largest convoy operation since the Second World War. Within a year, the American navy had sunk or crippled half the Iranian surface fleet in a single afternoon’s engagement – Operation Praying Mantis – and Tehran was forced to accept a ceasefire it had rejected for eight years. The strait reopened. Oil flowed. The episode was filed away as a footnote to the Iran-Iraq War and largely forgotten except among history buffs.
Thirty-eight years later, the strait is closed again. And the overwhelming majority of Western strategists, including those who lived through the 1980s tanker war, write and speak as though Iran’s capacity to choke the world’s most important oil chokepoint were some unprecedented riddle rather than a recurring test of naval power with a well-documented resolution. This forgetting is deeper than it looks. It reveals something about how facts travel – and fail to travel – through the cogs of foreign policy.
This essay proposes a framework for that phenomenon: magical realpolitik. I summarise it as the rubric in which practitioners of hard-nosed, interest-based statecraft increasingly evade a coherent factual foundation to entangle with two frequently hostile species of fact, each obeying its own logic and each capable of overriding the other at unpredictable intervals. Rather than enlightenment through friction, the result is often enchantment: a trance-like confidence that the world will behave as one’s preferred category of evidence predicts, even when the other category is screaming otherwise.
About Two Facts
Realism, as Fukuyama noted in his celebrated critique, begins from a simple and powerful premise: the world should be engaged as it is, not as we wish it to be. For this insight Kissinger was canonised by his admirers. Hans Morgenthau, channelling his inner Machiavelli, would build whole curricula. Every foreign-policy professional educated since 1945 has absorbed some version of it. The trouble is that “the world as it is” contains two quite different kinds of raw material, and realism has never adequately reckoned with the tension between them.
The first kind of fact is what we might call expert-mediated fact, facts as they congeal in the minds of sages. Think of them as the product of structured inquiry, peer review, institutional memory, and the slow accumulation of case studies. Robert Pape’s finding that strategic bombing has never toppled an entrenched regime on its own is an sagely fact. So is the democratic peace thesis. So is the well-attested pattern, documented by Barbara Geddes and her collaborators, that personalist dictatorships are more brittle than party-based ones but also more reckless in their final phase. Such facts draw breath from journals, and flourish in seminar rooms, and in the briefing memoranda that policy planners circulate before principals’ meetings. They carry the weight of evidence which is not the exact same thing as the weight of experience.
The second kind of fact is what I call a fact on the ground, workaday or commonplace things visible at the perceptual level, accessible to anyone with eyes and a map. The Strait of Hormuz is closed to most shipping traffic: that is a fact on the ground. Russia occupies parts of eastern Ukraine: fact on the ground. China has built artificial islands in the South China Sea and garrisoned them with anti-ship missiles: fact on the ground. These facts do not require the tutelage of sages. They require attention.
Both species of fact claim residence in the house of realism. Both are, in principle, about the world as it is. But they can pull in opposite directions, and with surprising regularity, because they answer different questions. Sagely facts usually tell you what tends to happen – the regularities, the probabilistic patterns, and the structural constraints. Facts on the ground tell you what has already happened. The specific configuration of power, geography, and committed action at this moment, say.
Of Populist Realists and Establishment Realists
The analytical payoff of this distinction emerges when you watch it operate inside actual strategic behaviour. Consider the current American administration. The MAGA foreign-policy apparatus, as Rebecca Lissner of the Council on Foreign Relations has observed, presents itself as a new kind of illiberal superpower. Realist in posture, and civilisational in self-conception. Its instincts run overwhelmingly toward facts on the ground. The Iranian nuclear programme was bombed: that is a fact on the ground, and it is treated as a solution. Houthis are still launching missiles at commercial shipping? Fact on the ground, treated as an insult requiring kinetic response. The border with Mexico is crossable: fact on the ground, demanding a wall.
People like to say that MAGA are totally anti-factual. That is not entirely true. They do care about facts-on-the-ground, hence the constant effort to influence perceptions of them.
What the MAGA apparatus treats with far greater suspicion is the sagely layer. The proposition that air campaigns do not produce regime change – a finding supported by every major empirical study from Pape onward – is precisely the sort of expert-cultivated fact that the populist realist finds suspect, open to challenge. It introduces constraint where the ground-level observer sees opportunity. Pape’s data set covers over a century of cases. The populist realist would rather trust the smoking rubble of a specific compound in Tehran.
The same selective factual metabolism operates among Iran’s clerical-security elite. The IRGC’s proxy architecture – Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces, for instance – was a masterclass in facts-on-the-ground statecraft. It said: build physical presence, arm local allies, establish territorial corridors, and create the irreversible. Tehran’s strategic planners understood leverage in the most tactile sense. They placed men with weapons in places where their removal would be costly.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel exhibits a structurally identical pattern. Since October 2023, Israeli military operations have expanded across Gaza, southern Lebanon, and Syrian territory with relentless tactical vigour. Each operation creates new facts on the ground: buffer zones, military outposts, and the detritus of demolished infrastructure. Former senior Israeli security officials have described Netanyahu’s approach as tactical politics masquerading as strategy. But the ground-level facts speak for themselves: Hamas battalions degraded, Hezbollah’s leadership decapitated, and Syrian military infrastructure obliterated.
Yet sagely evidence on counterinsurgency – from Algeria through Vietnam to Iraq – consistently shows that military dominance over a hostile population without a political settlement underproduces pacification and inflame perpetual insurgency. US intelligence assessments have projected years of continued resistance from Hamas regardless of how many battalions are destroyed, because the armed movement is sustained by conditions that military force alone cannot alter.
There is no sign nonetheless that Netanyahu’s coalition partners will cave in to such purported wisdom. Many in that camp perceive it as the prejudices of a liberal international order they have already rejected. They point to the real ablation of ISIS, its smoking ruins, regardless how potent its remnants may be. The facts on the ground are dazzling. The facts in the research are devastating. But one can still pick and choose.
Choices, however, have costs. Iran’s planners proved spectacularly vulnerable to the sagely fact that ideological movements built on external threat rarely survive the domestication of that threat. The Islamic Republic’s founding legitimacy rested on anti-Americanism and anti-imperialism. When Joseph Nye described soft power as the ability to attract rather than coerce, he was articulating the mechanism by which values – more than, say, weapons – reshape the preferences of populations over time. The clerical establishment spent four decades insisting that its revolutionary values were magnetically attractive. The January 2026 protests, with five million people in the streets chanting for the return of the Pahlavi monarchy, were sagely fact made flesh: ideological legitimacy is a depreciating asset, and no quantity of IRGC ground presence in Lebanon can compensate for its evaporation at home.
Enter Enchantment
Here is where the magical enters the realpolitik. The Trumpian administration, the clerical-IRGC apparatus, and the Netanyahu coalition all demonstrate a phenomenon that purely rationalist accounts of foreign policy cannot explain: the willing, eyes-open refusal to integrate one species of fact with the other, even when the cost of refusal becomes critical.
The enchantment works differently in each case, but the underlying structure is identical. For the populist realist, sagely facts carry the odour of the establishment – the class of professionals, academics, and career diplomats whose authority the populist project exists to displace. When the RAND Corporation publishes a study showing that maximum-pressure sanctions campaigns against authoritarian regimes rarely produce regime change and often entrench the incumbents, the populist realist does not engage the evidence. He looks right past the messenger. The sage is marginalised for belonging to the old order, the one that lost Iraq and bungled Libya and let China into the WTO. The contingent accuracy of a particular research finding must be subordinated to the stolid fact – the ground-level, perceptual, emotionally vivid fact – that his class failed in such-and-such real time and place.
For the clerical-security realist in Tehran, the enchantment runs in the other direction but with structurally similar results. The IRGC’s strategic culture is built on a theory of civilisational destiny – the Shia revolutionary state as the vanguard of resistance to Western hegemony. When facts on the ground contradict this narrative – when the Syrian corridor collapses, when Hezbollah’s leadership is decapitated, or when Iranian cities erupt in monarchist slogans – the clerical establishment does not update the theory. It doubles down, because the theory is the institution. To abandon the narrative of revolutionary destiny would be to dissolve the very basis on which the Supreme Leader’s authority rests. For Netanyahu, the enchantment takes yet another form: a theology of territorial maximalism inherited from Revisionist Zionism’s most acute interpreters, in which every military gain confirms providential destiny and every call for political settlement is read as weakness. The sagely consensus – that promoting new occupations without broad-based legitimacy erodes the occupier – simply bounces off this armour.
Perhaps the most instructive case, however, belongs to an establishment realist rather than a populist one. John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago’s most prominent offensive realist, argued from 2014 onward that NATO expansion was the “taproot” of the Ukraine crisis and that the West bore principal responsibility for provoking Russia’s invasion. This was a textbook exercise in expert-cultivated factual reasoning: structural realism predicts that great powers will resist encroachment on their spheres of influence, therefore Russia’s behaviour was rational and foreseeable. The theory was internally coherent and Mearsheimer’s stature lent it considerable authority. The difficulty was that his framework systematically screened out an accumulating pile of ground-level facts. As the New Statesman’s analysts observed, there had been no groundswell of Ukrainian support for NATO membership before Russia annexed Crimea in 2014; Finland, with its 1,340-kilometre Russian border, joined NATO in 2023 without provoking invasion; and Putin’s own rhetoric – denying Ukraine’s existence as a nation and comparing himself to Peter the Great – pointed to imperial motivations that structural realism’s billiard-ball model cannot accommodate. Mearsheimer’s enchantment was the mirror image of the populist’s: where the MAGA realist rejects expert findings because they constrain ground-level ambition, the academic realist rejected ground-level evidence because it complicated an elegant theory. Both achieved the same result: a selective factual metabolism that felt rigorous and was, in practice, blind in one eye.
Fukuyama captured something adjacent to this dynamic in The End of History, where he observed that virtually everyone professionally engaged in the study of politics had believed in the permanence of communism, and that its worldwide collapse was almost totally unanticipated. The failure, he noted, cut across the political spectrum. That universality is the hallmark of magical realpolitik. Factual enchantment transcends partisanship. In my own country of Ghana, I dubbed a variant of the phenomenon State Enchantment for this very cross-partisan character. This structural spectrality. It afflicts whichever faction has allowed one species of fact to colonise the space that should be occupied by both.
A Liberal Blind Spot
To be fair to the populists, the authoritarians, and the territorial maximalists, their liberal-internationalist counterparts are hardly immune. The liberal establishment’s characteristic error is the mirror image: an overextension of expert-cultivated sagely facts at the expense of ground-level realities that ought to be blindingly obvious.
Consider the persistent failure of Western strategic commentary to remember that Iran has already tried to close the Strait of Hormuz and was physically dislodged by American naval power. The tanker war of 1987 – 88 is not classified information. It is taught in war colleges. And yet the analytical class repeatedly treats Hormuz closures as though they were entering uncharted territory, when the historical precedent points unambiguously to a specific resolution: concentrated naval force, applied with political will, historically reopens the strait. America’s slimming fleet size (from nearly 1250 in 1946 to less than 300 today) and overreliance on its technology edge is the real bottleneck here. Not to talk about the Navy’s failure to maintain its minesweepers. The expert-mediated overlay – game-theoretic models of escalation, scenario analyses of Chinese and Russian responses, elaborate calculations of oil-market elasticity, etc. – buries the ground-level precedent under layers of contingent complexity until the simple poignant ground-fact disappears.
Or consider the 1953 Iranian coup. The standard liberal-internationalist reading treats the CIA-sponsored overthrow of Mossadegh as the original sin of American policy in Iran, and the clerical revolution of 1979 as its karmic consequence. This reading is politically elegant. It is also, at the policy level, an extraordinary compression of contradictory ground-level facts. Ayatollah Kashani, the most powerful cleric in the Mossadegh coalition, was actively undermining Mossadegh’s secular-nationalist programme months before the coup. US Embassy cables from 1952 document Kashani sabotaging National Front candidates in the 17th Majlis elections. The Iran Party warned publicly that the country faced a dual threat: military dictatorship and the rule of the clergy. The clerics were neither Mossadegh’s loyal partners betrayed by the West or the mere exploiters of a nationalist-ideological vacuum created by the coup. They were rivals with a longrunning program independent of western imperialism. And the 1979 revolution – far from being the fulfilment of Mossadegh’s programme – was in important respects its antithesis: theocratic where Mossadegh was constitutional, clerical where he was secular, and authoritarian where he was parliamentary.
The sagely narrative flattened all of this into a seamless story of Western interference and indigenous resistance, producing an analytical tradition that, for over forty years, systematically underestimated the depth of the clerical-secular fault line within Iranian politics. When that fault line cracked open in January 2026, with millions chanting for a return to the pre-revolutionary order, too many analysts were caught unprepared. Because despite extensive factual granularity, the preferred theories had long since overwhelmed the ground-level detail.
Hence a Dialectical Trap
Magical realpolitik as a doctrine then is not confined to any single faction per se. It is a condition that emerges when the foreign-policy establishment fractures along factual lines – when the sagely class and the ground-level practitioners stop speaking the same evidentiary language and begin treating each other’s facts as noise.
A dialectical quality attends the fracture. The more the liberal establishment insisted on the primacy of expert-cultivated knowledge – multilateral institutions, norms-based order, and democratic peace etc – the more it alienated populations and practitioners who experienced international politics primarily through facts on the ground: lost manufacturing jobs, unchecked migration flows, and wars that experts promised would be short and proved interminable. The populist reaction, in turn, overcorrected: it elevated ground-level perception to the status of gospel and dismissed institutional knowledge as captured, corrupt, and irrelevant. What I call the “age of proteus” ensued. The result is not entirely a new realism. It is, instead, a new kaleidoscope of enchantments wearing realism’s clothes.
The Iranian variant follows a parallel trajectory. The revolution’s founding generation understood, at a functional level, the need to integrate theological vision with operational pragmatism – Khomeini made coldly rational calculations about the ceasefire with Iraq in 1988, comparing it to drinking poison but drinking it anyway. His successors, cocooned by decades of ideological consolidation and a suppressed policy feedback loop, have lost that integrative capacity. The Israeli trajectory runs in parallel: a security establishment that once prided itself on cold-eyed assessment – the tradition of conceptzia, the standing intelligence estimate, etc. – has been progressively captured by a political leadership whose ideological commitments override the intelligence product. The October 7 intelligence failure was more sinister than an aberration; it was the system reacting to known allergens, with inconvenient expert assessments sidelined in favour of a politically convenient ground-level picture. That Hamas had been contained, the Palestinian issue managed, and the Abraham Accords ascendant.
Analysts must embrace both factual categories and more
For the international political economy analyst, the strategist, and the policy adviser, the implications of magical realpolitik have practical consequences beyond philosophical exploration.
The first implication is epistemic discipline. Every significant strategic assessment should be explicitly stress-tested against both species of fact. What does the expert-mediated evidence say about the likely trajectory of this situation? And what do the observable, ground-level configurations of power, geography, and committed resources actually look like right now? But the sweet spot is in the tensional zone. Where the two conflict, the analyst’s job is to sit with the conflict rather than resolve it prematurely through theoretical fiat. The tanker war precedent and the Pape bombing data point in opposite directions regarding Iran: naval force can reopen a strait, but air power cannot topple a regime. Both are true. The competent analyst holds both simultaneously and designs for the resulting uncertainty.
The second implication is narrative scepticism. Wherever a foreign-policy programme presents itself as a seamless unity – whether “resistance” in Tehran, “America First” in Washington, “rules-based order” in Brussels, or “total victory” in Jerusalem – the analyst should look for the seams. The IRGC’s economic empire benefits structurally from the continuation of sanctions. The MAGA coalition’s tariff architecture conflicts with its energy-dominance ambitions. Netanyahu’s refusal to define an endgame in Gaza reflects something other than strategic patience. It is mostly about the the structural impossibility of satisfying his coalition’s theological maximalism and his military’s operational realism simultaneously. These fractures are the fuel of analysis.
The third implication is historical recovery. Magical realpolitik thrives on amnesia. The populist realist forgets the expert findings that would constrain his ambitions. The liberal internationalist forgets the ground-level precedents that would discipline her theories. The authoritarian ideologue forgets the internal contradictions that preceded his regime’s consolidation. And the academic realist, as Mearsheimer’s Ukraine commentary illustrates, forgets the ground-level evidence that would destabilise his model. The antidote is granular, unflattering, specific historical knowledge. The kind that resists compression into tidy narratives. The analyst who knows that Kashani betrayed Mossadegh, that the Shah completed oil nationalisation in 1973 with policy and political deftness that Mossadegh couldn’t muster, that Iran was forcibly ejected from the Strait of Hormuz in 1988, that the IRGC profits from the sanctions it publicly denounces, and that Israeli intelligence warned of Hamas’s capabilities before the political leadership chose to look away, possesses a factual toolkit that no amount of theoretical elegance can substitute. They rule the sky of clarity and the ground of consequence.
The fourth implication, and perhaps the most uncomfortable, is accepting that realpolitik itself is not a stable paradigm. The tradition that runs from Machiavelli through Metternich to Kissinger assumed a unitary factual world in which hard-headed observation could, with sufficient rigour, yield reliable strategic guidance. That assumption was always somewhat heroic. In a world where facts themselves have fractured into competing epistemic registers – where the expert and the practitioner, the data set and the satellite image, the historical pattern and the breaking headline, inhabit different cognitive ecologies and serve different institutional masters – the realist claim to privilege “the world as it is” becomes a question rather than an answer. Which world? Whose facts?
Magical realpolitik makes fantastic claims of resolving the question. The savvy strategist and analyst resists that enchantment, fact by fact.