A teacher, scholar, practitioner, and publicist, Richard Ullman has been a unique and influential figure in U.S. foreign and security policy over the past forty years. This volume, created on the initiative of some of Ullman's most accomplished former students, is less a summing up of his work than a sort of intellectual kaleidoscope held up to his ideas. The result is a spirited and highly readable set of essays on themes relating to U.S. foreign and defense policy in a period of nearly unprecedented dynamism in the international system. The volume includes contributions by David Gompert, I.M. Destler, Michael Doyle, Michael O'Hanlon, and eight other distinguished scholars and practitioners of international relations. Major issues addressed in The Real and the Ideal include:

· Changing international conceptions of state sovereignty, governmental legitimacy and ethics, and their relationship to national influence and power

· New roles played by military power, including an exploration of emerging guidelines for the use of force in the defense of norms and values that go beyond traditional definitions of national interest

· The domestic context for the setting of U.S. foreign and defense policy, including an analysis of recent and heretofore unpublished polling data regarding the public's propensity to support international engagement

· Assessments of the effects of alliance relationships on interstate relations, including case studies of trans-Atlantic relations in the post-Cold War period, the foreign policy of the unified Germany, and relations among China, Japan, and Taiwan

· A highly original, revisionist assessment of U.S. foreign policy of liberal isolationism in the 1920s, along with lessons for U.S. statesmen and policy makers today.

A Council on Foreign Relations book.