Was Political Realism the Theoretical Basis for the National Security Doctrine? Reflections on the Matter

This paper will investigate to what extent the following idea, which became very popular during the last third of the twentieth century in Latin America, is true: that political realism was the ideological foundation of the National Security Doctrine. In other words, did the theorists of the National Security Doctrine inspire their postulates on key authors of this international relations paradigm? If so, did they use political realism to build their own political culture and their authoritarian-bureaucratic regimes, with a sharp military style? Bearing in mind that the specificities of this kind of regimes are already well-known, little attention will be paid to it in this text. As a matter of fact, this paper will focus on how realism operates ideologically, in order to check the applicability of the aforementioned relation