Realpolitik

Wilson’s vision of politics—along with his emphasis on liberal values—was presented as a powerful alternative to the shortsighted cynicism that realpolitik seemed to denote.
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The irony of this was that Wilsonianism was closer to Rochau’s version of realpolitik than anyone imagined.

As the Great War turned in the Allies’ favor, and they began to write the victor’s version of its origins, realpolitik featured heavily in their explanations.
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This brought a raft of uniquely talented historians and theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr...
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By the outbreak of the Second World War, realpolitik was sufficiently established in the American political lexicon to no longer need elaborate definition. It had crept into discussions about Hollywood in the 1930s, as some called for an “awakened sense of Realpolitik” in the movie industry as a corrective to the “sugar-coated” endings that contributed to the decline of cinema audiences in the period of the Great Depression.
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Typically, it was President Obama’s favorite philosopher, Reinhold Niebuhr, who in 1944 came closest to finding a happy medium between what he called “the most rarified heights of constitutional idealism” and “the depths of realpolitik.”

The Real Origins of Realpolitik

[выделено мной - вс]

а вот как пишет о любимом философе Обамы Niebuhr'е Raymond Aron:

It is a theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who is considered the ideologist of the so-called realist school. Now, his criticism of the liberal, optimistic, individualistic philosophy of foreign policy has as its origin and basis a certain conception of human nature. Man is corrupted by sin. He is selfish and violent. The collective beings that constitute states are worse than individual beings. The former occasionally practice the Christian virtues, the latter never. The immorality of states in conflict with one another is all the greater in that the citizens can have the legitimate feeling of acting morally when they dedicate and occasionally even sacrifice themselves to the state. But since the latter is fundamentally immoral, self-seeking, violent, the citizens remain prisoners of a sort of tribal egoism, even when they serve the collectivity.

Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1966), pp. 591-600