Realism and the Democrats

Via David Lindsay, a highly edifying piece in The American Conservative by Salon’s Jordan Michael Smith.  A few choice quotes:

The beginning of the Truman administration was in many ways the apogee of Democratic foreign-policy realism. With Kennan an influential member of the State Department and Secretary of State George Marshall the most persuasive voice in the president’s ear, Truman reoriented U.S. foreign policy towards containing the Soviet Union. The Marshall Plan that did so much to rebuild Western Europe was, according to Kennan, the quintessential example of his containment theory in practice. The creation of NATO was likewise an essential move for convincing Western Europe of American security commitments. And Marshall nearly single-handedly kept the U.S. out of a potentially cataclysmic war with China, according to the political scientist Robert Jervis.

There is no doubt that the Truman administration also contained significant elements of liberalism and missionary zeal. Expanding the Korean War above the 49th parallel, the Truman Doctrine of aiding any government resisting Communism, a defense build-up beyond what was necessary—these policies lacked the crucial realist element of proportion, as Kennan, Lippman, and others warned at the time.

Yet the Truman administration synthesized a strategy for containing (and eventually defeating) the Soviets without waging war. Despite Truman’s mistakes, even his expanded containment doctrine was more realist-minded than the Republican plan of rollback, a more aggressive, forward-leaning policy than mere containment of the Soviets.

It was only during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that Democrats fully embraced crusading liberalism. As theorized by Kennan, Morgenthau, and Lippman, containment was only supposed to be applied to Europe, but the Korean conflict convinced policymakers that the Cold War was a global struggle. Kennedy and Johnson pursued this notion to its logical conclusion, ensnaring America in futile, counterproductive adventures in Cuba, Laos, and most disastrously, Vietnam. Nevertheless, “the idea that Democrats are the party of human rights and Republicans are the party of realists is just a caricature,” says Joseph Nye, assistant secretary of defense during the Clinton administration.

And:

With Kissingerism wrongly conflated with realism, it is no wonder the American public associates the latter with brutality. And even apart from that, there are those who argue that realism can never gain a dependable foothold in this country. They point to the messianic aspects of the American character and argue that liberalism is hard-wired into the country’s DNA. “Getting Americans to support realism is something of an uphill battle,” says Walt. “It often becomes popular in this country only when things get bad.”

But that’s why realism has made something of a comeback in the wake of the Iraq War. That misadventure is a prime example of how seemingly noble aims can lead to disastrous outcomes, both for the United States and for those the U.S. intends to liberate. With its doctrine of preventive war, disdain for allies, and disregard for the probable consequences of failure, the Bush administration was “explicitly anti-realist,” the prominent realist Kenneth Waltz said in 2006. He once voted for Republicans, 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,” the National Journal reported.

[...]

Now realists and liberals are increasingly lining up on the same side of the political balance sheet on issue after issue: withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, the need for U.S. pressure to force an Israeli-Palestinian peace, diplomacy toward Iran, cutting the defense budget, and protecting civil liberties. “What you’re seeing right now is realists, the left, and some libertarians acting together in opposition to liberal internationalists and the neocons,” says Walt. Michael Lind goes farther: “Obama comes out of the realist wing of the Republican Party,” he says. “I think he is basically a Rockefeller Republican.”

President Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan runs contrary to realist logic, which says that counterinsurgency and nation-building are doomed strategies. His foreign-policy advisers include numerous humanitarian interventionists, who prevailed on him to intervene in Libya last year. But there are at least elements of realism in the Obama administration, which is more than can be said for today’s GOP. Vice President Biden, for example, has pushed for the president to focus on defeating only Al-Qaeda, not the Taliban, in Afghanistan. “The person Colin Powell called most often when he was secretary of state was Joe Biden,” says Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s former chief of staff. Most realists have been disappointed in Obama, but the alternative—a Republican Party that remains in thrall to hawkish ideologues—may be even worse. Realists might have to get used to putting a “D” beside their names. It won’t be the first time they have done so.

My dad in particular likes to argue - and I agree with him - that Niebuhr is slightly oversold in this day and age. But there is a good reason for it, if for no other reason than that our current situation looks so much like the Vietnam Era - but with the liberal internationalists and the neocons on the Republican side rather than on the Democratic one.  It is interesting, but far from surprising, to see the argument that FDR and Truman were more conservative - more realist - than the Republicans of their time, and that it was only with Kennedy and Johnson that Wilsonian liberalism returned in force to the Democratic Party.