The Return of the Realists

There are two conflicting clichés beloved by policy analysts:

1. That realism and idealism are the competing strands of American foreign policy.

2. That realism and idealism are indistinguishable these days.

Like most clichés, both have a lot of truth to them. However, the messy outcome of our occupation of Iraq, the resounding repudiation of that enterprise in the midterm elections and the ride to the rescue by Bush family fix-it man James A. Baker III prove that the first cliché remains more useful than the second.

The doctrine of realism, or its Prussian-accented cousin realpolitik, emphasizes a hard-nosed focus on clearly defined national interests, such as economic or security goals, pursued with a pragmatic calculation of commitments and resources. Idealism, on the other hand, emphasizes moral values and ideals, such as spreading democracy, and is apt to be more crusading and sentimental in its willingness to pay any price and bear any burden. Adherents of the second cliché argue that these days there is little distinction between the two because spreading democracy is in our economic and security interest. Our difficulties in Iraq, however, show that sometimes not every interest and ideal mesh seamlessly.

Ever since Woodrow Wilson draped foreign policy with a mantle of idealism by declaring that the U.S. should enter World War I to make the world safe for democracy, American leaders have tended in public to stress the idealist elements of the mix when justifying a foreign involvement. That's what President Bush's father did during the first Gulf War when he emphasized, rightly, the moral justifications for defending Kuwait against Iraq's aggression. But James Baker made a gaffe (defined by Michael Kinsley as a politician accidentally saying something true) by stating the obvious, which was that Kuwait's huge oil reserves made the war also an issue of the U.S.'s economic security and "jobs, jobs, jobs."

The current Bush Administration did the reverse in 2003 by using realist rhetoric about security interests (remember those WMD?) to cloak what was, more broadly, a neo-Wilsonian mission of spreading democracy. The two primary realists in the Bush court, Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft, were the most prominent castoffs by the end of the first term. And Condoleezza Rice, for years a sophisticated realist thinker in the mold of her mentor Scowcroft, underwent a post-9/11 conversion to the belief that there was no longer a useful distinction between democracy-crusading idealism and national-security realism.