Dan Trombly responds to Dionne’s “democratic realism” column:

Reviving democratic realism and its strategical “democracy talk” appears to have accomplished very little for US national interests aside from providing a consensus among Washington Post columnists. If “we want a constructive foreign policy debate,” then reviving democratic realism would only be useful to showing how limited and unsatisfying the acceptable range of foreign policy debate among the political classes really is, and dispel the myth that the Obama administration and its partisans were ever, as conservatives too often claim, a bunch of cold, heartless realists.

One of the more bizarre things to come out of the last decade is that self-styled conservatives now readily endorse the idea that it is a bad thing to be a realist. That led many conservatives to attack administration decisions from early on in the language that hawks once reserved for supporters of detente. While neoconservatives and hawkish interventionists often try to deny that foreign policy realism is realistic, they are more inclined to attack realists because the latter lack sufficient zeal for exporting democracy and berating other governments over their internal abusive practices. These attacks have their desired effect in limiting the debate, such that the supposed realist in the GOP presidential field keeps talking about a “values-based agenda” in our dealings with Russia. In itself, the phrase “values-based agenda” could mean anything, but in practice it means putting the promotion of certain political values ahead of the national interest, bilateral relations, and political stability.

One reason that “democratic realism” keeps coming back is that it never has to produce good results to gain and retain adherents. U.S. democracy promotion has largely failed or badly backfired in virtually every place it has been tried in the last 12-15 years, but it keeps coming back no matter how many times events appear to have discredited it. For one thing, bad results are ignored or spun to look much better than they are. For true Iraq war dead-enders, Iraq’s government has not devolved into an illiberal, semi-authoritarian regime, but represents a great triumph of the “freedom agenda.” It doesn’t seem to matter that the much-hyped “color” revolutions have empowered zealots and nationalists, or that most of them swiftly decayed into new authoritarian and one-party systems. All that matters for boosters of “democratic realism” is that the U.S. has an “obligation” to promote its “values,” and it doesn’t trouble democratists that the end result is usually antithetical to many of our actual political values.