Pragmatic idealism revisited: Russia's post-1991 Cyprus policy and implications for Washington

Abstract

The article examines Russia's post-1991 Cyprus policy and implications for Washington. The pragmatic idealist hypothesis has received solid verification from both numerous official Russian sources and my former collaborator's interviews, which included those with three former foreign ministers of Cyprus. Some years later, former US secretary of state James Baker III adopted the term pragmatic idealism, but without elaboration on its original meaning. Pragmatic idealism, according to the original formulation, constitutes both an empirical description of actual foreign policies of states as well as a normative stance in international relations theorizing. Pragmatic idealism rejects the two extremes of international relations theorizing, that is, realism and idealism, as conceptually problematic and analytically inadequate. In addition, the pragmatic idealism fusion acquired an explicit moral or ethical dimension, deriving from the clear endorsement of the essential values of international ethics and the norms of international law.