« Crisis, and opportunity. | WILLisms.com | Letters to the Editor »

Bush and Foreign Policy Realism

The powerlineblog.com folks have been noting "President Bush's Higher Realism" (here, and here), a phrase international relations guru Robert Kagan elaborated on following President Bush's 2nd Inaugural Address.

The latest exploration of Bush's articulation of a "higher realism" in foreign policy is by Joshua Muravchik, in today's Wall Street Journal OpinionJournal.com:

"Those who are skeptical of injecting issues of freedom, democracy and human rights into the conduct of foreign policy call themselves 'realists,' and they accuse their opposite numbers--the so-called idealists--of an almost juvenile enthusiasm. But a sober reading of the historical evidence shows that President Bush and his fellow idealists are more realistic than the 'realists.'"

Indeed, as WILLisms.com noted immediately after the inauguration speech, "both an idealist and a pragmatist, President Bush is a reformer and a revolutionary, a visionary with a deep personal commitment to freedom and liberty."

The proof that liberty is spreading, and that the United States can promote liberty effectively, is out there. According to Freedom House, an organization founded by Democrats and Republicans more than 60 years ago, the number of free nations has grown significantly over the past generation.

Posted by Will Franklin · 25 January 2005 12:24 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.willisms.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/4

Comments

Posted by: poker at June 20, 2005 08:25 PM

Post a comment