Nor are the Hugh Hewitts going after Paul because they’re “afraid” of him, as Andrew would have it; they’re going after him because he’s a poor spokesman for opposition to the Iraq War – sure, it’s intellectually consistent to oppose the 2003 invasion and the first Gulf War and the creation of NATO, but it’s not a plausible position for the contemporary GOP to take – and because they can use his tendency to stray into deep right field as a way to discredit any criticism of the Bush Administration.

The vacuum that Paul currently occupies is supposed to be filled by an internationally-minded realism. Indeed, it’s precisely the coexistence of realism and idealism in Republican foreign policy, the fruitful tension between the two strains of thought, that has long made the GOP the party to be trusted in international relations – because the idealists elevate the realists, and the realists keep the idealists grounded. When the pendulum swings too far in one direction or another, this tension has usually produced a correction, of the kind that, say, the original neocons and then Reagan provided to the cynical machtpolitik of Kissinger. But there’s no sign of a realist corrective in the current GOP field: There were ten  [sic] candidates on that stage besides Ron Paul yesterday night, and not one of them was willing to call the Iraq War a mistake, which seems to me like the place that a serious realist critique of his Presidency’s foreign policy needs to begin. ~Ross Douthat

As much as I don’t want to admit it in this particular case, Ross makes some good points here.  (However, I obviously think “hard isolation” is the serious and genuinely realist alternative, or else I wouldn’t advocate for some form of it.)  It isn’t plausible for the GOP to declare retroactive opposition to the founding of NATO.  I propose a compromise solution (one of the few times you will see me doing this): if the GOP adopts as part of its platform a call for the dissolution of NATO today, I think we non-interventionists can all see our way to agreeing (for the sake of progress) that creating NATO was a good, temporary answer to the problems of the time.  What do you say?

Okay, on a slightly more serious note, Ross really does make some good points.  Ross is right that Hewitt isn’t afraid of Ron Paul when he attacks him–Hewitt continues to pursue his mad plan to turn the GOP into a fifteen (or less)-state party as soon as possible by weeding out all of the traitors who think for themselves and question bad policies.  Ross is definitely right that Chuck Hagel appears to be a “self-promoting buffoon.”  Ross is also right that there should be foreign policy realists out there somewhere willing to make the case for opposition to the Iraq war or at least to make a sharper critique of the assumptions behind the invasion (rather than the usual nitpicking about implementation).  Unfortunately, most Republican realists who are already not running for President cannot manage to make this argument, so how much less likely is it that someone trying to satisfy a party base of die-hard war supporters in a primary election would offer a robust critique, even if he were in the race?

If the space filled by Paul should be filled by an internationally-minded realism, then why isn’t it being filled?  Because it is not at all clear that most of the internationally-minded realists in the GOP actually believe, for example, that the Iraq war was a mistake.  If they do believe this, there is little evidence that most realists think the answer is to withdraw from Iraq in some fashion sooner rather than later.  If acknowledging that the Iraq war was a mistake is the starting point for a realist turn away from Bushist foreign policy, realists who actually say this seem to be thin on the ground.  Perhaps I am missing some of them.  They do exist, but they are not very numerous nor are they usually very prominent, and those who tend to be prominent are prominent because they are reliable CFR types who never say anything too wildly interesting or creative.

If 40% of the public doesn’t think it was a mistake, and you can bet almost all of these are Republican voters, what are the odds that many Republican realists think that the war was a mistake?  Many will kvetch about execution, lack of planning, lack of international support and the like, but when it comes to the assumptions of what U.S. foreign policy is supposed to be and what the government is suppossed to do overseas it is hard to find self-described realists (with notable exceptions, such as Bandow and Bacevich) who will argue that the war was a mistake both in principle and in execution.  This is because “internationally-minded realists” tend to think that deposing Hussein was a net good, even if it has brought about the ruin of Iraq, a refugee crisis and considerably more regional instability, and since they are so “internationally-minded” they are even less likely to propose concrete alternative policies in favour of withdrawal because they fear the effects this will have on the region as a whole.  Put another way, the foreign policy establishment gave it their best shot with Hamilton-Baker and discovered that Mr. Bush doesn’t care what they have to say, which has basically caused them to stop doing much talking. 

Come to think of it, the Democrats have the same “problem” of a lack of distinct realist voices, but they have the national political advantage that all of their candidates actually want to end the war in fairly quick fashion.  They have the hard-core progressive non-interventionist in Kucinich, a progressive antiwar candidate in Edwards, a progressive interventionist (who is nonetheless against the war in Iraq) in Obama, and the centrist hawk act of Richardson, Clinton, Biden and Dodd (all of whom are also against the war).  Bizarrely, all of the Democrats know that their voters will let them be whatever else they want to be on foreign policy, so long as they still oppose Iraq, while all but one of the GOP candidates have hitched themselves to Iraq and seem to allow Iraq to dictate their entire foreign policy stance.  The lack of foreign policy realists in the GOP is closely tied to the stunning lack of political realists in their ranks, since the party seems to be operating on the assumption–which makes great propaganda and lousy campaign strategy–that the American people are not against the war, but are just discouraged and simply want “victory.”  That might even be true, if you could actually define this end-state and knew how to get there, but without these two crucial elements it is a false assumption.  Yet on this assumption all GOP candidates but one are pinning their electoral hopes in any general election contest. 

Personally, I think of the balance between “idealists” and “realists” a little differently.  Lukacs observes that the opposite of idealism in foreign policy, as in all things, is not realism but materialism.  Those who believe that history is made by what people think and believe are equal parts “idealist” and “realist,” because they understanding the central role of ideas in history and they are apprehending the world as it really is, while the materialists believe that the material order creates the immaterial.  Meanwhile, the ideologues, the adherents of abstractions, are actually as opposed to the mix of idealism and realism as the materialists, but in a way that often leads people to confuse them with idealists.