merica would inhibit their ability to expand within Europe, as they lacked the manpower and leadership capabilities to focus on both. For this reason, their action of selling the Louisiana Purchase is illustrative of offensive realism because they focused on expanding their power as much as possible within Europe, since it would be a limited expansion within the Western hemisphere. Furthermore, by establishing peaceful agreements with the United States, the French also allowed themselves to be more likely trade partners with the United States than the British, which also allowed the French to maintain some power in the United States (Elman, 571). Again, it becomes important to recognize that though this act that could simply be seen as power-maximization to prevent the growth of Britain and expand the power of the French, it is also a reflection of human nature within such action. One of Hobbes’ four tenets of human nature stands that humans do not always behave in a rational way, but they are always capable of rationality. This same statement gives rise to the fact that Napoleon was able to rationalize between himself and French officials of the time that the state would benefit more from focusing on their European empire and selling their only holdings of whatever empire they had in the Western hemisphere. As such, the selling of their land in North America demonstrates offensive realism, but more importantly how human nature played a developmental role in allowing this example of offensive realism to form.

It appears, after these examples and explanations of both defensive and offensive realism, that yes, human nature was in fact the driving factor of conflict and cooperation within international politics. However, it is also relevant to recognize that human nature is almost too much of a simplification of international politics, that human nature is only the beginning of an explanation. Human nature is the foundation to the larger structure of realism and all of its subdivisions. It is this same understanding of human nature and the larger whole of realism that requires a detailed understanding of each situation and the various ways in which human nature can begin to result in the behaviors between states. Among these actions between states were those taken by the United States and United Nations in Kuwait, those of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States in World War Two, as well as the actions of the French in the United States by selling the Louisiana Territory in 1803. In such examples, it seems the obvious conclusion is that human nature is not the only way to explain interstate behavior. However,  it is the baseline explanation for why the internal growth theory can be desc