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Foreword Between Fear and Hope There are those for whom Barry Zellen ’ s The Realist Tradition in International Rela- tions treatise is long awaited. When I arrived at the University of California at Berke- ley as a PhD candidate in 1991, International Relations (IR) luminaries Kenneth Waltz and Ernst Haas inquired about their wayward bright young star who had left the Bay Area for the cooler pastures of the Arctic in the early 1990s. Readers will quickly understand their interest: Zellen ’ s passion for international relations theory never waned, nor did his capacity for serious academic thought. In this multivolume opus, he offers unique insights into the entire concept of the nation-state. This is a massive journey, in its entirety not for the faint of heart! Yet there is something in here for everyone. One can gain from his history of the devel- opment of realist thought, or his explication of the essential tenets of realism, or simply his elucidation of constructive realism. Similarly, each of the four volumes can also stand on its own. One can focus on the historical rise of the state, or its contemporary challenges—though doing so will deny the reader the full flavor of the important connections that inform the remainder of my thoughts here. Most interesting to students of IR theory will be Zellen ’ s development of construc- tive realism, which grounds the thoughts and actions of the neocons who dominated American foreign policy making in the first decade of the 21st century in several millennia of international relations theory. Zellen is impressed with the importance of Kenneth Waltz ’ s first image, the role of the individual in politics or, as he puts it in his typically engaging style, “the strategic value of brains . . . in the political arena.” People try to shape events, rather than being channeled by structures and systems into automatic responses. This is Zellen ’ s basic critique of neorealism. But the cri- tique can just as easily be applied to the entire political science discipline, for in this most essential approach it can most assuredly be said the political science discipline is of late woefully deficient, having lost its way in mindless mathematical formulae and methodology. People matter, and it is in people that politics resides.