Keeping in mind that realism as a political school only appeared when first used by the international relations theorists E. H. Carr and Hans J. Morgenthau, the basic principles have a rich history. One of the most common historical examples of this tradition is the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides and his History of the Peloponnesian Wars, dating back more than 2400 years.

In a nutshell, Realism is considered to be a set of laws for elites that span both time and space i.e. history and geopolitics. Those laws have common strands threading throughout history. Of course, there are a wide variety of different schools within realism (far too many to cover here) but all of them contain some basic principles.

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