He would face huge fundraising and organizational hurdles if he ran in the Republican primary, not to mention the fact that most Republican primary voters aren’t likely to warm up to Hagel given his opposition to the war in Iraq [bold mine-DL]. ~Chris Cillizza

Mr. Cillizza’s post helps explain the realist gap in the GOP field in a couple ways.  The first is political: realist critics have no popular constituency large enough to beat the opposition within the party.  The second is the imagined linkage of realist criticism of Bush to some purported opposition to the war.  The one does not necessarily entail the other.  Indeed, the one may have nothing to do with the other.  In treating opposition to the administration and opposition to the war as one and the same, GOP leaders and activists have helped to push more Republicans away from the party’s position on the war, because they are desperate to separate themselves from Bush even more than they are desperate to separate themselves from the war.  Supporting the war can be defended with all of the usual appeals to being patriotic and pro-military (even though this war is bad for the military and the country), so what nervous Republicans have wanted more than anything is to find a way to support the war without endorsing Mr. Bush’s leadership.  This is tricky and perhaps impossible to manage, but what many people take as Hagel’s opposition to the war is, in fact, his opposition to the administration’s handling of it.  The failure to discern between the two has led a lot of people to make mere administration foes into war opponents, which has in turn mislead others into thinking that Republican disenchantment with Mr. Bush means that there is a rebellion against war policy in the offing.  Of course, the rebellion never materialises, because these members typically come from districts where support for the war runs above even the GOP average.

There are no “internationally-minded realists,” as Ross described them, in the GOP presidential field, because the “internationally-minded realist” critique of Bush’s foreign policy does not hinge on strict opposition to the Iraq war.  Indeed, it is possible for the “internationally-minded realist” Baker-Hamilton consensus to recommend something very much like the “surge” in concert with diplomatic initiatives.  If realism acquired a bad name in neocon circles because it prized “stability” before the war, it is acquiring a bad name in antiwar circles because it prizes “stabilising” Iraq before attending to American interests (assuming as it does that trying to “stabilise” Iraq is in our interest). 

The Republican realist critique usually seems based in objections to the flaws in the generally aggressive neoconservative interventionist posture and associated hostility to international institutions that goes with that posture.  Relatively few establishment realists actually object to many of the goals that neoconservatives have in the Near East with respect to the major questions of stabilising Iraq and containing Iran and preventing Iranian proliferation.  It seems to me that most Republican realists would prefer attempting to reach those goals through greater use of diplomatic exchanges and international institutions and so on, but I think most Republican realists are committed to keeping the “Game” in the Near East, described so well by Prof. Bacevich, going for as long as they can.  They cannot offer a fundamentally or even significantly different alternative because they are deeply invested in most of the same projects that the neoconservatives want to pursue.  In the current atmosphere, realists find themselves offering what Jim Pikerton described Hagel as supporting: “hegemony lite,” whose slogan might be: “Great diplomacy, less militaristic.”  Such a view becomes background noise–why settle for the watered-down version, when you can have the full-strength foolish foreign policy?  

In short, anti-Bush realists suffer from the same problem from which skeptical realists and liberals suffered before the invasion: they accept almost all of the assumptions and goals of the more activist, aggressive party, but want to go about pursuing the goals in a different way.  This is the “yeah, but” foreign policy approach, and it always loses debates, because it has already conceded the moral and strategic high ground to the activists.  Antiwar arguments lost because they so often started by conceding, “Saddam Hussein is a threat” or “Hussein is evil, but…,” when it should have been strongly denied that he was a threat and declared to be immaterial whether or not he was evil.  Realist critiques fail to gain purchase today because they begin, “Of course, we can’t just leave Iraq…” or “Of course Iran is a huge, enormous, gigantic threat that I am really afraid of…”  If realists would stop conceding these points, they might get somewhere.  But they concede these points because they basically agree with the view that says Iran poses a dire threat to the United States.   

Hagel’s political predicament is related to the woes of the realists.  If observers across the spectrum are persuaded, or tricked, into thinking that Chuck Hagel actually opposes the Iraq war (rather than quibbling about how it is being fought and actively denying that he wants to withdraw), Hagel is still unable to gain traction as a realist critic of Bushian foreign policy because the GOP overwhelmingly still supports the war (as does Chuck Hagel in almost every respect) while war opponents think that a serious critique of Bushian foreign policy has to begin with opposition to the war.  Since he does not oppose the war, but everyone seems to think that he does, he wins over no constituencies on either right or left.  For Republicans, he is weak and “defeatist,” while as far as attentive antiwar observers are concerned he cannot be taken seriously.  He does not really speak for the disenchanted realists on the right, because his only enunciated difference with Bush’s foreign policy is the management of the war and the implementation of the new “surge” plan, and these are things that many of the disenchanted realists have been willing to support for the time being.  Meanwhile, other Republican realists do not launch into a full-scale critique of Bush’s foreign policy, because they still support the war and they realise that any coherent critique of Bush would have to involve taking a distinctive position on Iraq.