Why The Sudden Love Affair With Realpolitik?
It’s true – conservatives have replaced liberals as the visionary idealists. Increasingly, opponents of Bush’s policy seem to have discovered a love for Kissingerian intrigue late in life. Take (please!) Madeleine Albright:
[T]he administration must stop playing solitaire while Middle East and Persian Gulf leaders play poker. Bush’s “march of freedom” is not the big story in the Muslim world, where Shiite Muslims suddenly have more power than they have had in 1,000 years; it is not the big story in Lebanon, where Iran is filling the vacuum left by Syria; it is not the story among Palestinians, who voted — in Western eyes — freely, and wrongly; it is not even the big story in Iraq, where the top three factions in the recent elections were all supported by decidedly undemocratic militias.
In the long term, the future of the Middle East may well be determined by those in the region dedicated to the hard work of building democracy. I certainly hope so. But hope is not a policy. In the short term, we must recognize that the region will be shaped primarily by fairly ruthless power politics in which the clash between good and evil will be swamped by differences between Sunni and Shiite, Arab and Persian, Arab and Kurd, Kurd and Turk, Hashemite and Saudi, secular and religious and, of course, Arab and Jew. This is the world, the president pledges in his National Security Strategy, that “America must continue to lead.” Actually, it is the world he must begin to address — before it is too late.
If you suddenly feel like you’re knee-deep in – um, poop, join the club. Seldom have I read a more ridiculous prescription for conducting our foreign policy.
I give to you the pre-9/11 mindset in all its glory; playing factions off of one another in a never-ending game of chess, and forever chasing our tails. Thank God no one listens to Albright…
I think it was Jonah Goldberg who wrote an essay arguing that so-called realpolitik (or, by its snarkier-named version, the reality-based community) is not so much based on reality so much as the notion that the present reality is permanent. It’s really status-quo politics. While there is certainly great merit in seeing the world as it is, and it doesn’t pay to be naively idealistic, it seems to me it’s equally naive to operate on the assumption that the same SOBs we deal with now will always be in power, and so we should just keep doing what we always do. Realpolitik does seem to deal very well with the real changes of the world, be it the Iranian revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall or Sept. 11.