The distinction between realism and its pretenders is not an academic exercise.
This magazine found its first reason to be in opposing the Iraq invasion, and realism in foreign affairs has remained essential to its message ever since. The American Conservative has been—no one here is tired of saying yet—right from the beginning, a fact partly confirmed by the triumph of a Donald Trump campaign that promised to put America First and start no stupid wars. But this has meant that somewhere along the line in the last eight years, “realist” became an enviable label. It has been about five years since sad dad rock band The National encapsulated popular contempt for liberal idealist triumphalism, sarcastically citing an apocryphal relic of the Bush White House in “Walk it Back”:
People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
Whether or not anyone ever said this, it is impossible to imagine anyone saying it with a straight face today.
No, now the Atlanticists and the liberal internationalists claim that they too live in the reality-based community. If you have been following the Ukraine war with anything more than passing interest, reading not just our own but others’ coverage and analysis, then you have no doubt seen these new “realist” arguments. They often take a cost-benefit form, suggesting that American support for Ukraine is cheap. TAC friend and alumnus Michael Brendan Dougherty summarized these arguments thus in a typically thoughtful and careful rejoinder: “This view holds that for pennies on the dollar, the U.S. has been able to preserve a democracy threatened by an authoritarian regime, cripple a rival military, strengthen the NATO alliance, prevent Vladimir Putin from an inevitable invasion of NATO territory, and scare off Xi Jinping from ever messing with Taiwan.” When put that way it does sound like a pretty good deal.
As Dougherty demonstrates in his essay, though—read the whole thing—none of it is so simple as that if we think in terms of five and ten years instead of election cycles.
