"Real" is a Four-Letter Word

The National Journal’s Jonathan Rauch draws a sharp distinction between “realism” and the foreign policy of the current president:

The idealist[ic rhetoric in] the JFK of the 1961 Inaugural Address. . .-- "We shall pay any price, bear any burden... to assure the survival and the success of liberty" -- leads in a straight line to President Bush's second Inaugural Address: "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.... So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

. . . [but] Kennedy. . . promised to "bear any burden" to defend the free world against communism -- not to free the whole world. . . [O]ne too easily forgets that JFK the practitioner was a hard-boiled realist. So were Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, George H.W. Bush, and, for the most part, FDR and Truman. . .

Ironically, the one presidential nominee in recent times to campaign explicitly as a realist was George W. Bush, who in 2000 derided "nation building" as tangential to U.S. interests and rejected as "arrogance" the notion that America should reform the world. But the realist revival was brief. Bush soon converted to the Bush Doctrine, which seeks to make the world peaceful by making it free. . .

Specifically, realism understands that:

· U.S. influence is a limited resource that needs conservation, and that using it requires leaders to . . . deal with bad guys.

· . . .stability should be a top-tier priority, never a mere afterthought.

· . . . America has too many status quo interests ever to be a revolutionary power.

· [Americans] will tolerate idealistic adventurism only briefly.

. . . even if it is true that "eventually the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul," as Bush declared in his second inaugural, "eventually" is a long time. . . From a realist point of view. . . Wilsonian reformers [are] too destabilizing. [Realism is] an indispensable ingredient of a grown-up foreign policy.

Understand. Michael Mandelbaum and this blog are about heeding the world’s cry for Wilsonian idealism, which is a cry for democracy, not status-quo “realism.”