Max Boot dredges up an old smear against realists:

But it is precisely the kind of calculation that a cold-blooded and aloof president who has often in the past expressed his admiration for the “realist” foreign policy of George H.W. Bush may make.

Bush, recall, was the president who gave the infamous Chicken Kiev speech urging the Soviet Union to stay together in 1991 just at the moment when it was dissolving.

Bush’s 1991 speech in Kiev has nothing to do with the Syria debate, so it’s strange for Boot to bring it up. To the extent that speech became “infamous,” it was because Bush’s words were misinterpreted or deliberately misrepresented.

It’s worth revisiting the speech again to understand how dishonest this interpretation is. Bush didn’t urge the Soviet Union to “stay together.” He warned his audience in Kiev against replacing distant tyranny with local tyranny. When we note how few ex-Soviet republics have become functioning democracies and how many remain repressive authoritarian states twenty years later, that seems very sensible. His exact words on this point were: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” In saying this, Bush was arguably being much more “idealistic” in his rhetoric than realists are supposed to be. In fact, the U.S. has supported the independence of new states under authoritarian leadership, and at times it has chosen to support governments because of their loathing for their neighbors. In practice, the U.S. has backed political independence for states that aren’t prepared for it, and it has sometimes encouraged ethnic separatism despite the fact that this has bred conflict and abuse. Bush was exaggerating what the U.S. would and wouldn’t support in the post-Soviet era, but there was nothing wrong with what he said.

As a statement of how the U.S. could and should respond to changes in the USSR in 1991, and as a short discussion of basic political principles, Bush’s speech was responsible and unobjectionable in its content. Bush’s fears of reviving nationalism in the Soviet republics were reasonable. The danger that the USSR as a whole might dissolve in violently, as Yugoslavia did, was a distinct possibility. Fortunately, it was one that was not realized for the most part, but Bush was right to be concerned about this.

Elsewhere in the speech, Bush said:

We will support those in the center and the Republics who pursue freedom, democracy, and economic liberty. We will determine our support not on the basis of personalities but on the basis of principles. We cannot tell you how to reform your society. We will not try to pick winners and losers in political competitions between Republics or between Republics and the center. That is your business; that’s not the business of the United States of America [bold mine-DL].

I think it’s this last line that angered and still angers certain ideologues so much. The idea that the political development of other nations isn’t the business of the U.S. is intolerable to those who think that practically everything on earth is our business.