Related Resources On NationalJournal.com Social Studies: "'Real' Is Not a Four-Letter Word" (6/9/06) · National Journal: "After the Revolution" (2/4/06) · National Journal Cover Story: "Plato, Anyone?" (4/1/05) · National Journal Cover Story: "On Her Own" (1/28/05) · Poll Track: National Polling on President Bush, the Middle East (8/23/06) · Poll Track: "Evading the Mideast Quagmire" (7/25/06) · Well-Read Wonk: "The Case Against Peace" (11/15/01) [an error occurred while processing this directive] Additional Resources On The Web Hans Morgenthau's "Six Principles of Political Realism" (1978) · "Mirror Image: What George Kennan's 1966 Senate Testimony Can Tell Us About Iraq in 2006" (Nicholas Thompson, Boston Globe, 6/25/06) · "Bipartisan Disaster": Anatol Lieven on "Orwellian doublethink" in U.S. foreign policy (8/31/06) · "A Higher Realism" (Robert Kagan, Washington Post, 1/23/05)

By Paul Starobin, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Sept. 15, 2006

In every crisis is the seed of opportunity, according to a maxim of international politics -- and maybe the same can be said of every debacle, too. At first glance, it may seem that America's unhappy adventure in Iraq, where U.S. troops, more than three years into the conflict, find themselves in the middle of what's looking more and more like an intensifying sectarian civil war, is the progenitor of little more than confused thinking and partisan sniping. In Washington, few leading Republicans or Democrats seem able to rise above recrimination to take a cold strategic view of America's national interests in the Iraq engagement as well as the broader conflicts roiling the Middle East and the Islamic world. Even a big thinker like Robert Kagan -- a neoconservative champion of the idea that America should use its stick to make the Middle East more democratic -- recently devoted his precious column inches in The Washington Post to an effort to protect his backside. "Almost every leading Democratic politician and foreign policy maker, and many a liberal columnist, supported the [Iraq] war," Kagan wrote in implicit defense of his own war advocacy.

He's absolutely right about that. And yet, there is, quite apart from the cast of characters mentioned by Kagan, a separate and distinct cohort of U.S. foreign-policy thinkers who stood in clear, unequivocal opposition to the Iraq war -- to the idea of the war, not merely its poor planning -- and who, despite being ignored back then, are now cobbling together an overarching strategic response to the fix America is in. This group is known as "the realists." This tag denotes a certain tradition and cast of mind in political philosophy. In shorthand, realists tend to believe in the supreme value of maintaining order in international politics, as opposed to pursuing policies, such as trying to turn dictatorships into democracies, that may proceed from good intentions but can invite a ruinous instability.

The realists tend to be killjoys: "You see, you idealist you, I told you this wouldn't work out!" In America, where optimism is a secular religion, that message usually doesn't play. But with 53 percent of the public saying that it was "a mistake" for the Bush administration to involve the U.S. in a war in Iraq, and with 76 percent saying that the world is "more dangerous" today than at any other time in their lives, this is, or at least could be, the realists' moment -- a moment, as realists would like to frame it, not so much of moral but of conceptual clarity.

And as it happens, there is one big forward-looking idea favored by leading realists -- most of whom are stationed not in Imperial Washington but in the hinterlands of academia, at such places as Dartmouth College in bosky Hanover, N.H. There, Daryl G. Press, a 37-year-old government professor, is a leading exponent for the notion, as he puts it in a memo that he has shared with colleagues and a few members of Congress, that America would best serve its national interests at this juncture if it would "withdraw U.S. forces from hostile regions -- particularly the Persian Gulf -- and defend key U.S. interests with 'over the horizon' military power." A U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, in this assessment, should be just one part of a much larger strategic withdrawal of U.S. military forces now based in the region.

Press, who has advised the Pentagon's Central Command, which is responsible for formulating Persian Gulf strategy, is not a pacifist. Like realists generally, he backed the U.S.-led strike in Afghanistan as a measured, necessary response to 9/11. But in a telephone interview, he explained that "the United States can protect all of its critical oil interests in the Persian Gulf region without a forward-deployed military presence. In fact, that presence harms U.S. interests" by fanning anti-Americanism, he said.

Strategic withdrawal is a bold, somewhat paradoxical (bolster American interests through a pullback?), and politically treacherous idea. In all these respects, it is the typical fare of realism. These folks delight in thinking big and unconventionally, and much as they may enjoy studying the science of power, many care little for the prospect of a Washington career. With the security of academic tenure, they are free to discuss taboo subjects -- such as whether America's strategic alliance with Israel is in the U.S. national interest. Some prominent realists assert that it is not.

But as their track record shows, the realists cannot be dismissed as ivory-tower gadflies. They possess a theory about international politics with a useful predictive value. Being right about Iraq is by itself sufficient to buy them a seat at the table of the grand debate, now unfolding, about where American foreign policy should go from here.

What Realists Believe
"WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA'S NATIONAL INTEREST." So declared the headline of an advertisement placed on the op-ed page of The New York Times on September 26, 2002, some six months before the shooting started. There were 33 signatories, and filmmaker Michael Moore's name was not among them: All of the signers were international-relations scholars from academia -- including three from the University of Chicago and three from Columbia University.

The scholars noted in their ad that Iraq "is a deeply divided society" that could ensnare U.S. forces, even if Saddam Hussein was easily toppled. That worry was commonplace among war critics -- the anxiety that Iraq could be another Vietnam-like quagmire. (Realists, back in the 1960s, were early opponents of the Vietnam engagement.) The more distinctive insight offered by realists was that Saddam's removal "could spread instability in the Middle East" by upending an order in ways that harm America's interests. Realists did not have a crystal ball, but what is perhaps the signal geopolitical consequence of the Iraq war -- the resurgence of a Shiite Iranian regime that is no longer contained by a Sunni-controlled Iraq and is pursuing its ambitions from Baghdad to southern Lebanon -- is like a proof out of a realist theorem.

The Times ad, which cost $38,000 to place, was orchestrated by a pair of realist bigwigs: Harvard's Stephen M. Walt and the University of Chicago's John J. Mearsheimer. "No theory is perfect," Mearsheimer recently told me, but the call on the Iraq war was a relatively easy one for realist adherents because the war "contradicted basic realist logic."

If that phrase -- the war "contradicted basic realist logic" -- sounds like what a physicist might say about the known properties of the atom, welcome to the world of realism. Although realist scholars don't quite claim to have discovered the immutable laws of the political universe, they do come fairly close.

The "science" of realism involves how to keep order. (Liberty and justice for all can come later.) The realist manual of strategic principles thus contains such phrases as "balance of power" and "divide and rule." In defense of such amoral-sounding tenets, realists are apt to cite chapter and verse from their bible: the bloody testament of history. Scratch a realist and you're apt to find a history buff. Some people may have forgotten the lessons of the Peloponnesian War of ancient Greece, as chronicled by Thucydides (the key here is "misperceptions"), but the realists are not among them. They cast one eye toward the future while keeping the other trained on the past. The home page of Mearsheimer's Web site reproduces an Otto Dix painting of disfigured corpses piled up on the World War I killing ground of Flanders.

In the press, realism is typically associated with the political scientist Hans Morgenthau (who taught at the University of Chicago and died in 1980) and policy makers like Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft. But in realist academic circles in America, there is no more esteemed name than Kenneth N. Waltz, who long taught at the University of California (Berkeley). Waltz is the author of such classics as the 1954 book "Man, the State, and War," and he has been the mentor for scholars such as Walt, whose doctoral dissertation he supervised.

Realists of the Hans Morgenthau school are associated with the insight that human beings are at bottom power-seeking political animals. Their "realism" stems from a keen appreciation of humankind's limitations. This is not, however, where Waltz and his camp derive their realism. For them, the core source of instability in international politics is not the human actor but the basic architecture of a system of sovereign states. An inescapable condition of this system, in the Waltzian view, is anarchy, because no state has a monopoly on power. States cannot solve the problem of anarchy; they can only try to cope. Aggression is a frequent byproduct.

"In a world where security is precarious," Stephen Walt explained in a recent interview, realists tend to harbor "a deep skepticism about the ability of human beings to use force and get predictable outcomes." And realists, Walt added, share "a profound belief that the world tends to look with great suspicion at concentrations of power." Shortly after 9/11, with so much of the world in sympathy with America, Walt presciently wrote in a paper published in International Security, "If U.S. leaders assume that the current surge in international support will enable them to ignore the interests of other states in the future, they will squander the diplomatic capital that the United States now enjoys and increase the risk of a backlash when the immediate challenge recedes." Thus, even America, "the last best hope of earth," in Abraham Lincoln's phrase, is viewed by realists as bound by the impersonal laws of history. So realists stand apart from the venerable notion, known as American Exceptionalism, that America has a unique role in the world and thus a unique historical trajectory.

They're Americans, Too
But while realists are not subscribers to American Exceptionalism, neither are they some sort of foreign (read: Continental European) implant -- a stereotype nourished by the high profiles of Morgenthau and Kissinger, both immigrants from Germany. Stephen Walt, the son of a Lockheed rocket scientist, grew up in Northern California in the 1960s and dates his interest in warfare and military strategy to age 10 or 11, when he read about the Battle of Britain in World War II. John Mearsheimer is a 1970 West Point graduate who went on to serve as an Air Force officer for five years before starting his career in academia.

As for Kenneth Waltz, the dean of realists, he is a child of the Depression, born in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1924. Neither of his parents graduated from high school, but Waltz, a good student with an interest in math and physics, attended Oberlin College and went on to study economics in grad school at Columbia, before turning to political philosophy.

Now 82, Waltz spends part of the year at his home in Maine overlooking Penobscot Bay. I caught up with him on the telephone on a recent weekday afternoon and found him in a cheerfully blunt mood. "This government is the worst I have ever seen," he pronounced of the Bush regime. "They are explicitly anti-realist. Realists believe that if a country has a great deal of power and abuses it, there will be retribution. How long it will take, one can't say," he continued. But "these guys [in the Bush administration] don't believe that." What about Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who in her earlier life, in academia, was generally associated with realist thinking? "I think she is one of the most intelligent and sensible people in this administration," Waltz allowed, "but that's not saying much."

What should America do about Iraq? "Get out!" Waltz bellowed. How? "By withdrawing troops. Bring them home. Reduce the size of the Army. What's wrong with that?"

Waltz signed that September 2002 New York Times ad opposing the looming Iraq engagement. In the 1990s, he had joined realists like George Kennan in warning that NATO's expansion into the lands of the former Soviet (and Russian) empire was likely to provoke a harsh backlash from Moscow. At the time, both liberal and conservative freedom warriors scoffed at those admonitions. But circa 2006, with a resurgent, oil-enriched Russia becoming more assertive in defense of its perceived interests around its perimeter, the warnings appear prescient. "How would we like it," Waltz asked, "if Russia or China were ensconced in Canada or Mexico?" Empathy, an underrated quality in foreign affairs, often yields realism's sharpest insights.

The first senator for whom Waltz ever voted was a Republican internationalist, Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, but like most of today's realists, Waltz is now a Democrat -- a trend that he views as a reaction to the capture of the Republican Party, from Ronald Reagan onward, by remake-the-world ideologues. Waltz, "a lapsed Lutheran," fears that George W. Bush is trying to fight a religious war against the Islamic world. The idea that America, as the Pentagon asserts these days, is involved in a "Long War" against Islamic terrorism strikes Waltz as "absurd." "Terrorists have been a pain in the neck for millennia, but to think you can fight the terrorists as you can fight a war is silly," he said.

The Big Idea: Strategic Withdrawal
One of Waltz's devoted students -- "I taught them well," he told me -- is Barry Posen, 54, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And Posen, in turn, was the thesis supervisor for Daryl Press, the Dartmouth professor working on the strategic withdrawal idea. (As an undergraduate, Press attended Mearsheimer's classes at the University of Chicago.)

For realists, part of the appeal of an idea like strategic withdrawal -- the label is my own -- is its implicit presumption that America should not be in the business of building an empire. Or as several dozen realist scholars and analysts, including Posen, Press, Walt, Waltz, and Mearsheimer, declared in a 2004 statement of principles for the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, a Washington-based group: "An imperial strategy threatens to entangle America in an assortment of unnecessary and unrewarding wars." The declaration concluded with a favorite realist maxim, John Quincy Adams's assertion that America "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy."

Posen elaborated on these anti-empire principles in a recent telephone interview. In Washington, he told me, there is close to a bipartisan consensus on "the primacy path" for 21st-century America -- the notion "that the U.S. should be the world's manager of security issues." What's missing, he said, from this rote formulation of U.S. responsibilities -- Madeleine Albright, a secretary of State in the Clinton administration, once called the U.S. "the indispensable nation" -- is an understanding that no great power will ever be perceived by lesser ones as a disinterested "manager" of global affairs. And so, "the harder we push, the harder they push back. The trick should be to make the United States less present in the lives of other countries," Posen said.

A related realist objection to empire-building is akin to the "free-rider" problem in economics. A self-declared "indispensable nation" is apt to be the target of pleas for help from others hoping to get the U.S. to do their own work free. "A lot of what goes on in world politics is passing the buck to others," Walt pointed out, and it used to be, he added, that "we were pretty good at that." In a post-Cold War world, "we can go back to more of the buck passing" and "rely on local actors to uphold the balance of power" in troubled regions like the Middle East, Walt said.

Realists, moreover, view strategic withdrawal as a corrective: In their minds it would return America to the stable geopolitical ground that it once occupied but, after the Cold War, mistakenly abandoned. Throughout the Cold War, Mearsheimer explained, America correctly played the role of "offshore balancer" in the Persian Gulf by keeping U.S. military forces "over the horizon," available for deployment only as "a last resort" in case the Soviet Union, say, attempted an invasion.

But then, he continued, Washington made two big errors. First, after Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the successful U.S.-led war to expel the invading Saddam from Kuwait, the U.S. "adopted the foolish strategy of 'dual containment,' which called for permanently stationing American troops in countries like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Furthermore," Mearsheimer added, "instead of using Iraq to check Iran and vice versa, the United States took it upon itself to contain both of them, making bitter enemies of each."

This mistake, in Mearsheimer's view, was compounded by George W. Bush's post-9/11 strategy, when "the Bush administration abandoned dual containment and adopted an even more foolish strategy: 'regional transformation,' which called for using American military power to turn the Middle East into a sea of democracies."

So now, Mearsheimer concluded, "it is time for the United States to return to offshore balancing." America's principal objective, as during the Cold War, would be to make sure that "no one country" dominates the Middle East. Many realists say this can be accomplished by reliance on a rebuilt, technologically improved, rapid-deployment force, for potential use in the Gulf and other hot theaters.

Strategic withdrawal, as realists see it, would reduce the risk of Islamist revolution in countries such as Saudi Arabia, where America's Middle East presence is a major irritant, as well as free the U.S. to "relentlessly pursue Al Qaeda" and other anti-U.S. terrorist groups "using every means available," as Press puts it in his memo on "a balanced foreign policy." (The co-author is his Dartmouth colleague Benjamin Valentino.)

Realists also recommend a renewed U.S. diplomatic offensive to engage Middle Eastern regimes in the joint project of combating Al Qaeda and related jihadists. That may sound like a fruitless endeavor, but realists tend to believe that states share a common interest in controlling "non-state actors" like Al Qaeda, because such secretive groups can cause the states unanticipated trouble. Syria, which is ruled by a secular family dynasty that is despised by some Islamists, insists that it wants to cooperate with Washington on halting the infiltration of jihadists into its territory. But such pleas, Damascus says, have fallen on deaf ears in the Bush White House, which views Syria's authoritarian regime as one of the obstacles to creating a "new Middle East."

Realists generally believe that Washington should not quail at talking to any other power, if it serves U.S. interests. Thus, the United States should "end the diplomatic isolation of 'rogue' states such as Iran," said Christopher Preble, the Cato Institute's director of foreign-policy studies and an organizer of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy. In the early 1990s, Preble served as a naval officer aboard the USS Ticonderoga, a missile cruiser that was deployed in the Persian Gulf.

How Realists Think About Israel
As controversial as "strategic withdrawal" may be as a policy -- it is easy to hear a critic substitute "retreat" for "withdrawal" -- it is mild stuff compared with the fare that some leading realist thinkers are serving up on the related matter of America's relationship with Israel.

The cloistered circles of realism -- and circles well beyond -- were roiled by "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," a 42-page piece (plus 40 pages of endnotes) written by Mearsheimer and Walt, and published in March as part of the "faculty research working papers series" of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. The authors' premise was that a long-standing policy of "unwavering U.S. support for Israel," dating back at least to 1967, "jeopardized U.S. security" by helping to inflame Arab and Islamic opinion and was, therefore, not a policy in America's national interest.

"Pressure from Israel and the lobby was not the only factor behind the U.S. decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was a critical element," they wrote in what was probably their most disputed conclusion. "I don't think it was right to say that Israel was critical to our decision to invade Iraq," Waltz told me in our telephone chat.

But the larger point of the paper -- the argument that America's tight support for Israel is "a strategic liability" to the United States, as Mearsheimer and Walt wrote, is one that commands support from a fair number of realists. "In general, I am in agreement that we coddle Israel, and we do so at our peril," Waltz said. Jeffrey Record, a professor of strategy at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala., told me that America should "dissolve the strategic partnership" with Israel. "I would announce the termination of all military and other assistance over, say, a five-year period," said Record, a signer of the "Perils of Empire," the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy's 2004 statement. He is a former Capitol Hill aide to Sam Nunn, the ex-senator and Georgia Democrat who was a powerhouse on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Waltz's rap on Israel is actually a lot like his rap on America. "If you are overwhelmingly strong in your area, as Israel is, and a strong country abuses its power, as Israel does, what do you expect the other people to do?" he asked. "They are not going to just assume a supine position."

Waltz was speaking in early August, before it was evident that Israel, in the battle then raging in Lebanon, would fall well short of its aim of destroying the military capability of the Hezbollah guerrilla force. In realist terms, the current, U.N.-imposed peace looks tenuous, mostly because Israel, its nose bloodied, may feel impelled to deal more aggressively with Hezbollah at some future point.

So what does the realist model prescribe for a more durable peace between Israel and its enemies? A genuine state for the Palestinians, yes, but also this: "It is almost indisputable that the Middle East would be more stable if both Iran and Israel had nuclear weapons," said Mearsheimer, reasoning along the lines of Cold War deterrence, when both the United States and the Soviet Union had the power to destroy each other but didn't, because each side knew it wouldn't survive the attempt.

Realists clearly enjoy being provocative -- but the main reason they make statements like that one is that their theory of the world virtually demands it. All theories, even in the "hard" sciences, simplify; the question is whether realists oversimplify and, in so doing, miss important realities.

Realism's greatest defect may be its tendency to view states as impervious billiard balls. Others in political science, perhaps more plausibly, are inclined to view the state, even when it comes to foreign-policy-making, more as a hive for competing interests. And in this alternative view, a state's foreign policy may not be, as realists tend to present it, a rational response to the behavior of other states; it might even be somewhat irrational. Indeed, Mearsheimer and Walt themselves suggest an example of how this can work in their argument about the influence of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy. (The Israel lobby "is one of the big exceptions" to standard realist theory, Walt told me.)

Realists may also overrate the importance of the state in today's world. Although they appreciate the dangers presented by, say, nationalism, an "ism" organically linked to the modern nation-state, they tend to overlook other hazardous "isms," like religious fanaticism, that are not.

On temperamental grounds, realism can also be faulted for an excess of pessimism. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, some realists worried that a post-Cold War Europe could plunge into continent-wide armed conflict, a la 1945; a gloomy Mearsheimer essay on this theme, "Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War," was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Asked about the piece, Mearsheimer replied, "Please remember that I said that trouble would ensue when both the Americans and the Soviets pulled out of Europe."

Still, this is not a disabling critique of realism. The fact remains that the realist model, even with its limitations, has done a fair job of predicting and accounting for some of the most important trends in global politics over the past decade. No other model has done better.

Waiting for FDR?
In political-marketing terms, the big problem with realism is that such concepts as "balance of power" and "pass the buck" are not exactly the kinds of principles apt to inspire an upstart nation that came into being by challenging King George III. Realists understand that. That's why Walt and Waltz are not sanguine, the Iraq debacle notwithstanding, about the chances of a policy course correction in the direction of realism. America's idealistic approach is "deeply ingrained," Waltz said with a sigh.

But this may be an overly bleak assessment of realism's political prospects. If it is true that unadorned realism does not sell as a foreign-policy approach, history, as realists like to say, provides a textbook example of how core realist principles can be pursued by America's stewards in the guise of traditional, freedom-spreading rhetoric. The trick, it might be said, is a generous dollop of deviousness.

The example is offered by the most cunning (and most successful) realist ever to occupy the White House: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The myth, at least in the U.S., is that America, with Britain and France flat on their backs, saved the world for democracy in its defeat of the Nazis in World War II. The reality, of course, is that the struggle against the Nazis took its decisive turn not on the beaches of Normandy in June 1944 but in lands deep within Soviet territory, especially at Stalingrad, in 1942-43. It was there that the Nazi war machine was first met head-on and repelled. For the Red Army, the toll was immense: 9 million killed in the war. U.S. forces suffered 300,000 deaths.

It was FDR who foresaw Stalin and Soviet forces playing such a role and, in a remarkable feat of "buck-passing," did all he could to help make it possible. The tale is told in the recently published "My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin."

FDR, despite what critics later said, understood quite well the nature of Stalin and the USSR. "The Soviet Union," he asserted in a February 1940 speech, "is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world." Nevertheless, even before the U.S. itself entered the war, at the end of 1941, the president made it his personal business to give the tyrant all manner of assistance. Thus, on August 30, 1941, two months after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, he wrote War Secretary Henry Stimson, "I deem it of paramount importance for the safety and security of America that all reasonable munitions help be provided for Russia, not only immediately but as long as she continues to fight the Axis powers effectively." A recalcitrant bureaucracy kicked into action, shipping the Soviets massive quantities of planes, tanks, and anti-aircraft guns, along with boots, woolen uniforms, surgical gloves, and amputation saws. The army that whipped the Nazis at Stalingrad was built up with U.S. aid.

FDR also projected the full force of his considerable charm on Stalin -- and did so, in fact, at the expense of his democratic and cultural kinsman, Winston Churchill. At the first meeting of the "Big Three," at the Tehran conference in November 1943, FDR spurned Churchill's invitation to reside at the British Embassy and instead accepted Stalin's hospitality at the Soviet one. Over dinner, FDR humored Stalin's incessant needling of Churchill -- and even managed to respond with a joke when Stalin, in all seriousness, suggested the cold-blooded murder of "at least 50,000" of Germany's military officers in the interests of postwar peace. FDR replied in jest that it would likely be sufficient to settle at a mere 49,000. Churchill was left to smolder.

"The question is not why Roosevelt acted as though he believed in Stalin," editor Susan Butler notes in her introduction to My Dear Mr. Stalin. "It is, rather, what other tactic would have worked as well. Roosevelt wanted to win the war; he wanted to win the peace that followed," Butler writes. And thus did the U.S. "save the world for democracy" through close collaboration with one of history's all-time fiends.

Early in his presidency, George W. Bush, in his courting of Vladimir Putin and Pervez Musharraf, the autocrats of Russia and Pakistan, respectively, showed that he was not altogether impervious to the realist mind-set. But his dominant approach, as a willing breaker of order -- in the belief that wars of choice to implant liberty can establish, in the long run, an international environment friendlier to the U.S. -- was put to the test in Iraq, where the experiment has so far been found wanting. Bush practices "a faith-based foreign policy," said Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, a Washington think tank that takes a steady realist line.

In small but telling ways, though, a chastened Washington is starting to move in the direction sought by realist thinkers. The once-vilified French, with Condoleezza Rice's blessing, are taking the lead in trying to re-establish peace in Lebanon. A war-hawk Democrat, Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, is calling for a redeployment of U.S. troops out of Iraq to an "over the horizon" posture in the Persian Gulf. Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a favorite of realists, recently delivered a speech, apropos of relations with Iran and Syria, praising the idea that "even superpowers have to talk to bad guys." Dennis Ross, the veteran adviser on the Middle East to past Democratic and Republican administrations, advocates cutting a deal with Damascus to enlist its cooperation in making Lebanon more stable.

Come January 2009, it might be auspicious for realism if a Democrat is in the White House, but then again, it might not be. The last Democrat to rule, Bill Clinton, flouted realist standards by devoting more attention to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans than to the gathering menace of Osama bin Laden. His spouse, putative presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, uses "the same naive and utopian language" employed by the current, Republican president, Washington analysts Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman point out in their forthcoming book, "Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World." "History can blind you to the possibilities that lie ahead," Hillary Clinton declared in a January speech. So much for the realist idea of history as a lantern that illuminates the pitfalls in store for the incautious adventurer.

Of course, FDR used such optimistic rhetoric. All U.S. presidents do, as do all ambitious senators. The big question is whether a new president, FDR-like, will find a way to cloak a policy of realism in a suit of ideals. Mearsheimer is more optimistic than are Waltz and Walt that this can be done. "Regarding actual policy (as opposed to public discourse)," he told me, "the United States is likely to act in a much more realist fashion over the next decade, not only because the public has lost its appetite for war but also because large portions of the elite have come to understand the limits of military force."

In true realist fashion, this sets up a paradox. The savior who can extract America from its foreign-policy entanglements may be the one who expressly does not practice the idealism that he (or she) preaches. But maybe, after all, that's just a rough definition of statecraft.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Need A Reprint Of This Article?
National Journal Group offers both print and electronic reprint services, as well as permissions for academic use, photocopying and republication. Click here to order, or call us at 877-394-7350.