But this is what “realism” is all about. It is what sent Brent Scowcroft to raise a champagne toast to China’s leaders in the wake of Tiananmen Square. It is what convinced Gerald Ford not to meet with Alexander Solzhenitsyn at the height of detente. Republicans have traditionally been better at it than Democrats — though they have rarely been rewarded by the American people at the ballot box, as Ford and George H.W. Bush can attest. ~Robert Kagan

Andrew refers to this op-ed as “shameless domestic politicking,” but that is not exactly what this is. This is another volley in the endless neoconservative-cum-idealist war against the reputation of foreign policy realism. Kagan is not interested in scoring partisan points, nor is he even particularly concerned about categories of liberal and conservative here, as the targeting of Scowcroft, Bush I and Ford make clear, but he very much wants to use Obama’s correct response of restraint to bash realism. It is supposed to be some sort of damning indictment that the first Bush administration didn’t destroy the U.S.-China relationship in a fit of moral pique. East Asia and America are both likely better off because realism prevailed twenty years ago. It is now supposed to be a killing remark to say, “But once Mousavi lost, however fairly or unfairly, Obama objectively had no use for him or his followers.” In other words, he has so far acted the part of something very much like a responsible statesman. He has not acted like a glory-hounding demagogue who would rather appease his domestic audience with tough-sounding rhetoric that works to harm American interests throughout the region.

Obama’s response to the Iranian election reminds me of his initial remarks in response to the war in Georgia, which Kagan et al. likewise deemed insufficient and weak, but which were far more measured and intelligent than those made by McCain and the former administration. He subsequently fell in line with conventional anti-Russian rhetoric, but at the time he was still a candidate and could afford to be more careless with his statements. Now that he is President, he seems to be acting the part when it matters. While he infuriatingly continues to support Georgian accession to NATO at some point in the future, he seems less willing to destroy what remains of our relationship with Russia in the process. Obama does seem to understand that foreign policy is a matter of state interests, and that Iran and America have some shared interests regardless of the shape of the government in Tehran. His foremost responsibility is to secure American interests, and reasonably enough this involves rapprochement with Iran, so you’d better believe that he is not going to put the cause of Mousavi ahead of that of the United States. If Nixon could go to China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, which was a hundred times more brutal and appalling than anything we have seen in Iran over the last few days, Obama can and should persist in engaging Iran.

Kagan’s reference to the ballot box at the end is almost a throwaway line, and Kagan is utterly wrong about the political fallout of Ford’s pursuit of detente and Bush’s handling of Tiananmen and the collapse of the USSR. Except for hard-line anticommunists, voters didn’t care about Ford’s post-Helsinki gaffe, and Bush’s foreign policy problem with the electorate wasn’t that swing voters were outraged by insufficient outrage over Tiananmen or the “Chicken Kiev” speech, but that he spent almost all of his time on foreign policy to the perceived neglect of voters’ main economic and domestic concerns. Foreign policy idealism and humanitarian interventionism did not win Clinton a second term; a boring, plodding domestic policy reform agenda and a humming economy did that. Even if I disagreed with how Obama’s response to the Iranian election, it would be clear to me that he is trying to keep both his foreign policy and domestic agenda from being derailed, which is what one would expect from any President not yet five months into his first term.

P.S. It goes without saying that if Obama had taken a more ardently pro-Mousavi line, he would be catching flak from many of the same people who would attack his response as naive “Yes We Can” idealism detached from harsh realities. What is striking is how many of Obama’s more hawkish critics are prepared to argue that U.S. policy should be defined by syrupy sentimentality, hope and a lot of empty talk (all of the things they have accused Obama of offering in the past), while Obama has so far opted for caution, humility and restraint.