Realism & Idealism
A classic idealist foreign policy
The foregoing short descriptions of several prominent conceptual pieces of international relations and foreign policy as they are understood by idealists do not even begin to address the complexity of their political ideology, but hopefully it should be enough for non-specialists to get a feel for it. For in-depth treatments, peruse the bibliography, where you will find many of the best titles on the subject from various points of view. What follows, here, is a brisk look at a well-know modern idealist approach to international relations.
As an idealist visionary, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson strongly fought for as long as he could, against powerful arguments to the contrary from his own cabinet, to keep America out of the first world war. Working to seek peace between the Allies and the Central Powers in the early years of the war, Wilson argued that American neutrality was the right policy, and he succeeded in sustaining it until a tipping point had been reached, due largely to the increasingly high numbers of American commercial ships that were being sunk in the Atlantic German submarines. Even so, the eventual decision to take America into the war was, as historian Margaret MacMillin writes, an “agony for Wilson,” who eventually justified the decision to go to war, to himself and to the America public, as “a crusade, against human greed and folly, against Germany and for justice, peace and civilization.” (MacMillan, Paris 1919, 2001, pp. 6-7.)
the eventual decision to take America into the war was, as historian Margaret MacMillin writes, an “agony for Wilson,”
Wilson, Seabury writes, justified his eventual decision by seeing profound moral implications in the war. By entering, the United States “could employ its power and moral influence to eliminate the hated balance of power, to establish the League of Nations as a mechanism for preserving peace, and to establish the conditions of security for democratic nations.” (Seabury, “Realism and Idealism,” p. 862.) This was quite unlike how Theodore Roosevelt, a realist, defended America’s entry into the war. Roosevelt, whose presidency ended four years before Wilson took office, argued that Germany was a threat to America’s national interests. A German victory, in his mind, would threaten the European balance of power, from which America greatly benefitted.
Immediately after the war, Wilson’s moral idealism shone for a season as he rallied much of Europe – but in the end, not the U.S. Senate – to an international reorganization that he called the League of Nations, his centerpiece of the peace settlements that ended the war. The League of Nations, Wilson believed, would put an end to balance of power arrangements, which he thought had been discredited by the war as a way to maintain peace. He argued that the League would keep the peace through collective security and international law. Of this idealist vision, MacMillan writes: “There would be no more secret diplomacy of the sort that had led Europe into calculating deals, rash promises and entangling alliances, and so on down the slope to war. The peace settlements must not leave the way open to future wars.” Wilson’s vision was, in short, “collective security.” (MacMillan, Paris 1919, p. 13.)
The vision had gained wide public support by the end of the war. For idealists this was a good thing, Macmillan writes. They assumed that now people would bring a much needed common sense to international relations, eschewing war and expensive arms races. “A growing middle class provided a natural constituency for a peace movement preaching the virtues of compulsory arbitration of disputes, international courts, disarmament, perhaps even pledges to abstain from violence as ways to prevent wars.” These visionaries “took as models their own societies, especially in Western Europe, where governments had become more responsive to the will of their citizens, where public police forces had replaced private guards and where the rule of law was widely accepted. Surely it was possible to imagine a similar society of nations providing collective security for its members?” (Ibid., p. 85.)
However, when he was back home from Europe after the Paris peace talks, Wilson made costly political misjudgments about the popularity of the League. In the end, he refused to make compromises with U.S. Senate moderates on both the Treaty of Versailles and its League of Nations covenant. As a result the United States never ratified either, and the League ran its General Assembly out of Geneva without official U.S. participation.
When the League failed to curb events in Europe that contributed to a second world war, when that war broke out, what remained of Wilson’s liberal internationalist vision lost the rest of its street cred. This had strong implications after the second world war for realist political ideology, which easily returned to the halls of power in the Eisenhower administration and has been prominent in many White Houses ever since.
Rethinking Idealism and Realism
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and especially due the surprise attack on America the morning of September 11, 2001 and U.S. responses to it, the inherent weaknesses and limits of both idealism and realism have become evident to all but the most ardent ideologues. As result, many of the more honest political advisors and analysts became unsure how they should identify themselves.Realist? Idealist? Neither?many of the more honest political advisors and analysts became unsure how they should identify themselves
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was among the leading figures who was quite open and frank about her own ambivalence. As she told Charlie Rose during a television interview: “I’ve had increasing problems with the division of idealist and realist…. I don’t know where to put myself. So I’ve often called myself an idealistic realist or a realistic idealist. And the reason for that is that if you don’t have a vision and ideals, you don’t know where you’re going. But if you are not realistic, you won’t get there. So you do need somebody that has a view of where the United States should be going, or what our relationship with a particular group of countries should be, but you have to be very practical, and you have to be very tough, and you have to have experience about how to handle a lot of these problems.”
The confusion and ambiguity seems to be the norm across the political spectrum during the George W. Bush years, starting with the man himself. During the first term of his presidency, Bush was labeled a neoconservative by many journalists, but others, more accurately in my view, tagged him as an “idealistic realist” because of his vision to turn Iraq into a democracy through military power. On the other hand, maybe “idealist” should have been the noun, and with a utopian modifier. For this was the president who, in his second inaugural address, plainly stated that the foreign policy of the United States has “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”
It was a time when ideological allegiances were slipping and sliding in all directions. In 2008, during his run for the presidency, Republican Senator John McCain described himself as a realistic idealist in foreign policy. But Senator Joe Lieberman, a Democrat who did the unthinkable and crossed the aisle to endorse McCain for president, identified McCain as an idealistic realist! And to the dismay of those who see him as a liberal internationalist, President Barack Obama seems to be more an idealistic realist in many matters of U.S. foreign policy. You decide.
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