Battle of the Idealists and the Realists

With the presidential battle heating up in the US, analysts begin to wonder what model the future president will follow. Can we expect a headstrong military driven conqueror, a dialogue pushing peacenik, or something in between?

Just last December it seemed highly unlikely that an African-American with a Muslim father and the middle name Hussein could make a decent showing in the race for the US Democratic nomination for president. Yet in January, Obama won the Iowa caucuses, eclipsing veteran Hillary Clinton. Five months later, with his win in Oregon, Obama has won a majority of “pledged” or elected delegates and is in a strong position to win the nomination. 
If Obama does win the nomination, he will compete against Republican John McCain, a Vietnam War veteran and former prisoner of war. What are the ideas, attitudes, and tendencies of the two men? And what difference could they make for Syria?
The short answer is that McCain is a cautious “Idealist;” and the Idealists are the ones who gave us the current Iraq War. McCain justifies the war, still beats the tired victory drum, and promises a long term occupation on some days—then predicts a withdrawal over four years (which will necessarily require him to broker a deal with Syria).
Obama is the most idealistic US political figure in a generation. Yet he has praised George H. W. Bush’s “Realist” approach to foreign policy. Still, as a Democrat, he is at pains to prove that he is tough on foreign enemies. Although he will attempt a quick withdrawal from Iraq over two years with help from Syria and Iran, look for him to ratchet up US military intervention in Afghanistan.
Rather than attempting to predict specific actions by a future president, it is more sensible to consider the underlying principles. In recent years, Americans have talked about foreign policy as a continuum between two poles: Realist and Idealist. The Realists are regarded as leaders like George H. W. Bush, the father of the current president. The elder Bush was close to the Saudis and saw no problem in supporting the dictators of the world in the interest of stability and prosperity. His leading adviser, Brent Scowcroft, is a leading proponent of the realist position. The prime tenant is to avoid military conflict while using the threat of military action to give teeth to diplomacy. Realists point to their success in the Cold War to show that even implacable enemies such as the Soviet Union can be managed and ultimately vanquished using a Realist approach.  
If Bush the father was a Realist, his son George W. Bush is thought of as an Idealist. The Idealists are those who favor military action as a tool for reshaping and improving the world. Their idea is to overthrow dictators in order to instill “democracy.” A democracy is a country that has elections that are internationally supervised and certified to be competitive, free, and fair.  
However, if the country in question is called Palestine and if the winner of the certified fair and free election is Hamas, the Idealists will still tag the elected government as “terrorist.” Therefore we need to add to the Idealist definition of democracy. In practice, Idealists regard as democracies those countries that support US interests in their region and hew to the American line when it comes to touchstone issues such as support for Israel. Critics will add that Idealist think of democracies as countries that also provide profit-making opportunities for major US corporations—especially those corporations that have or are likely to employee the Idealists when they are no longer in government. 
The Idealists are militarists—they believe in the efficacy of military action—yet, typically, they are not military generals. For that matter, few have ever even served in the military. In the current administration, the Idealist philosophy was most strongly promoted by men like Paul Wolfowitz in the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld at Defense, and Vice-President Dick Cheney. The latter avoided service in the Vietnam war while his contemporaries were being drafted and sent to the jungles. Why? As Cheney famously remarked, “I had other priorities at the time.”  
One irony of the administration of Bush the son has been that the Idealists were opposed by Realists such as Colin Powell and Richard Armitage in the State Department—two men who had served in the military and who knew the costs of war first hand. So we had civilians acting as militarists and promoting the US invasion of Iraq while we had military men who were trying to avoid armed conflict.
One significant wrinkle: when Americans talk about Realists and Idealists, they are specifically talking about Republicans. Democrats don’t fit the bill easily. Why? Because their Republican opponents in US politics, at least since World War Two, have tagged Democrats as hopeless dreamers without the strength to vigorously oppose foreign enemies and without the backbone to engage in military conflict. This argument has proved potent in electing Republicans as president, although less effective in Congressional contests.
As a result, Democratic presidents tend to snarl the neat dichotomy between Realist and Idealist. In other words, they tend to pursue a Realist agenda while using military force—partly as a way of protecting themselves against charges of weakness. John F. Kennedy launched the ill-fated invasion of Cuba and initiated the Vietnam conflict by sending “advisors” to support South Vietnamese troops against the North. Lyndon Johnson, recalling Republican attacks that it was Democrat Harry Truman who “lost” China to the Communists, did not want to be tagged as the leader who lost Vietnam to the Chinese-supported Vietnamese Communists. So he escalated the conflict into a major land war based upon shaky Congressional approval of the Tonkin Gulf resolution in response to a murky and perhaps contrived provocation.
Another snarl for Democratic leaders is that they often are idealistic leaders who seek to inspire Americans and citizens of the world to act on behalf of the common good. Yet their “idealism” does not make them Idealists, because they look to diplomacy, alliances, international organizations (Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations and the United Nations) rather than military action to accomplish their goals. Democrats will say that they are using “soft power,” yet they are exposed to Republican charges that they are just plain soft.
Jimmy Carter announced that “morality” was going to be an important principle in his pursuit of foreign policy—a striking statement from the leader of a nation that is at the mercy of Saudi sheiks and their oil spigot; a nation that, in the past, overthrew democratically elected leaders in Chile and Iran while inspiring the first coup d’etat in modern Arab history to overturn the elected government in Syria in 1953. Jimmy Carter’s morality doctrine helped him broker a peace deal between Egypt and Israel. Yet it also left him exposed politically. In 1979, Iranian students took over the US embassy in Tehran. In response, Carter turned to the military and launched a rescue attempt. When US helicopters crashed and burned in the Iranian desert, Carter’s reelection hopes crashed and burned as well.
John McCain served in the military, so one would think that he would be a Realist such as Colin Powell or Richard Armitage rather than an Idealist like the civilians Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Cheney. Yet Matt Bai, writing in the New York Times Magazine, points out that McCain was a pilot who spent most of his Vietnam time in a prison in Hanoi. He came away from Vietnam with his belief in the efficacy of military power, gained in military college, more or less intact. Others, in the Marines and Army, served on the ground and spent time “in country.” Many came away with the understanding that there are some wars that simply can not be won militarily—no matter how many troops and how much military power is expended.
Barack Obama has not served in the military and, as a man of forty six, he was only eleven years old when the Vietnam war ended. Obama has no personal lessons from military conflict and he does have the experience of living in a Muslim country as a child. Of course, his father’s side of the family is from Kenya—another connection of Obama to the world outside US borders. Add these together and you would predict that Obama will be a talker, not a fighter.  
The wild card? As a well spoken Democrat who hopes to avoid Carter’s fate and lose reelection, one suspects that the first term Obama presidency might well be accompanied by military action. Think Jack Kennedy. What we don’t know is if Obama will be the Jack Kennedy who launched the utterly bizarre and completely hopeless invasion of Cuba by a proxy army of Cuban expats, or the Jack Kennedy who displayed his toughness by facing down Nikita Kruschev with a naval embargo in the Cuban missile crisis.

Scott C. Davis is the author of The Road from Damascus: A Journey Through Syria. He is also the founder of Cune Press. www.cunepress.net.