Even America’s recent humanitarian interventions—Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya—have aimed at saving lives, not installing democracy. ~Peter Beinart

That’s a stroke of luck, since not a single one of them has succeeded in producing anything that we would recognize as a functioning liberal democracy. The ongoing non-democratic project of neo-colonial administration in Bosnia continues to be one of the strongest rebukes to the idea that Western interventionists know or care how to create the conditions for liberal democratic politics. Most of them have been failures on the count of saving lives, too, but other than that they’ve been very impressive operations.

Beinart naturally regards the realist tag as something of an insult or an embarrassment to be explained away. In fact, there was a time when Obama very deliberately presented himself as someone operating more in the tradition of the elder Bush, and this was a widely-shared view of Obama’s overall foreign policy. What was lost in the discussion of Obama-as-realist was that it was the elder Bush who sent American forces to Somalia on the wooliest of humanitarian missions, and it was his administration that recognized the independence of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia. The elder Bush was the one who spoke positively of a “new world order” that alarmed many traditional realists. Had the elder Bush been the thoroughgoing realist that realists today sometimes like to remember, it is doubtful that he would have done many or all of these things. The more significant point here is that Presidents identified with realism or “pragmatism” can still make bad mistakes.

The problem with the younger Bush’s would-be universalism wasn’t that he wasn’t universalist enough in practice. The problem was that he pursued insane policies in the name of universalism. Bush used universalist rhetoric and arguments to justify his greatest mistakes, and it was only after the disasters started unfolding that Beinart and those like him discovered that they had been wrong to support his policies. For the most part, aside from the significant exception of Libya, Obama still seems unwilling to be that reckless, but when he has erred, as he did in Libya, he wraps up his error of judgment in the rhetoric of universal rights and moralism. The lesson from all of this isn’t that it’s completely wrong to call Obama a realist, but that realists can also make terrible mistakes when they allow themselves to be caught up in universalist pretensions.

Beinart continues:

The more strongly a country backed America’s wars, the less Bush’s freedom talk applied to it….

Of course, that is precisely what is happening under Obama as well. Did we hear anything from Obama today about the universal rights of Qataris and Emiratis? No, we didn’t. They are faithfully supporting the Libyan war, and have provided the U.S. and NATO with political cover among Arab nations, and so Obama has nothing whatever to say about their involvement in suppressing Bahraini dissent. Bahrain and Yemen receive the weakest of rhetorical rebukes. The closer we look, the more we find that Obama’s “moral universalism” is not that much more substantive than Bush’s, and his willingness to look the other way or say nothing about allied abuses is not significantly less. That isn’t really intended as a criticism of Obama. It is intended as a refutation of the tedious partisan hagiographers who would now like to make Obama into some sort of moral visionary because he has given a few speeches and started a war in the name of universal rights.