Matt Yglesias

Obama and the Realists

The publishers of The National Interest — the policy journal of traditional Republican realist thinking — offer a split decision on the presidential election. A split is a bad result for McCain since, as they note, “Senator McCain would be a natural choice for both of us, as a fellow Republican and a friend who served with distinction on The Nixon Center board for many years.” The other point is that their complaints about Obama are overwhelmingly concerns about his domestic policy agenda, which I wouldn’t expect any kind of Republican to be enthusiastic about. But both authors are primarily national security people and their publication is primarily about foreign policy, and on this front they clearly prefer Obama, with their main reservation being that some Democrats (Richard Holbrooke is their example) are too neoconnish for their taste.

Clearly, this isn’t going to be the difference-maker in next year’s election. But in terms of the competition among elites and interest-groups that does a lot to shape the actual policy environment once the electoral die is cast, this is a sign of important things to come. Obama has a real opportunity to eschew the excesses of the neocon-lite wing of the Democratic Party and add the bulk of realist practitioners to his coalition. Alternatively, realists might do some work inside the Republican coalition and try to make a serious effort to retake control from the neocons.

Hagel on McCain and Russia

Connie Bruck takes a look at Chuck Hagel’s steady alienation from the GOP national security mainstream. Iraq, of course, played a big role but apparently in was John McCain’s decision that he wanted to take neocon policy and start applying it to great powers like Russia that was really the last straw:

Hagel, citing McCain’s repeated calls for Russia to be expelled from the Group of Eight, the association of major industrial democracies, said, “You’re not going to isolate Russia—that’s completely crazy!” He told me that McCain’s approach to Russia was one of the reasons that he could not endorse him. [...]

Critics have suggested that McCain’s League of Democracies could diminish the role of the United Nations. When I mentioned this to Hagel, he said, “What is the point of the United Nations? The whole point, as anyone who has taken any history knows, was to bring all nations of the world together in some kind of imperfect body, a forum that allows all governments of the world, regardless of what kinds of government, to work through their problems—versus attacking each other and going to war. Now, in John’s League of Democracies, does that mean Saudi Arabia is out? Does that mean our friend King Abdullah in Jordan is out? It would be only democracies. Well, we’ve got a lot of allies and relationships that are pretty important to us, and to our interests, who would be out of that club. And the way John would probably see China and Russia, they wouldn’t be in it, either. So it would be an interesting Book-of-the-Month Club.”

It’ll be interesting to see where traditional Republican realists go over the next couple of years. At the moment, an awful lot of the most prominent and most committed of them — Hagel, Jim Leach, Colin Powell — are neither de facto or de jure supporting Obama. Will they be able, post-election, to take control of their party again and steer it off the neocon course? At this point, it seems more likely that they’re going to wind up defecting en masse to the Democratic coalition, even as the Democratic Party’s own neocons-lite scramble aboard the bandwagon.

No One Could Have Predicted…

Here’s an interesting clip of Francis Fukuyama and Robert Kagan talking some time ago — before the war between Russia and Georgia — with Fukuyama presciently recognizing that America’s status quo “we get our way on everything, and Russia gives up on everything” approach to Russia was unlikely to be accepted. He offers what are, I think, some wise ideas that could have avoided the war:

To return to the bugaboo of mine, conventional punditry would classify Fukuyama here as the cold-hearted “realist” while Kagan is the morally infused “idealist.” But watching events unfold in the real world, there’s nothing especially moral about letting moralism push you toward policy that result in bad outcomes. At the end of the day, the “pro-Georgian” line in US politics and policy has not done Georgia any good. What people all over the world need are practical policies that deliver results. That’s pretty moral from where I sit.