What the Godfather of Foreign Policy Realism Would Say

It's a good bet that most Americans have never heard of Nicholas Spykman. He was born on October 13, 1893, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He attended Delft University and during the First World War served in Dutch diplomatic posts in Cairo and the Dutch East Indies. In 1920, he came to the United States, and three years later earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, writing about the theories of the sociologist Georg Simmel.