In an Oct. 31 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) spoke approvingly of Ethical Realism -- the new book by New America's Anatol Lieven and former Heritage Foundation scholar John Hulsman. An excerpt of Clinton's speech follows:

At our best, Americans have always lived in a creative tension between idealism and realism; between our clear-eyed insistence on seeing the world as it actually is and our deeply held desire to remake the world as it ought to be. This administration has abandoned that tension for a simplistic division of the world into good and evil. They refuse to talk to anyone on the evil side. And some have called that idealistic. I call it dangerously unrealistic. At the end of the day, you have to question whether this administration has led with our values or used our values as a cloak to justify its ideology and unilateralism. Something is wrong when our pursuit of idealistic goals has turned a good portion of the world against us.

Earlier this year, a progressive and conservative, Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, wrote a book together called Ethical Realism. You don't have to accept all of their policy proposals to learn something from the common ground they found. They remind us of a time when America's leading Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, cautioned us against believing that God was on our side; of a time when President Dwight David Eisenhower rejected rhetoric about a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union by asking, among other things, the practical question of how we would occupy the vast country if we won; of a time when the editor of Foreign Affairs invited a little-known diplomat named George Kennan to publish an article, an anonymous article, that established the bipartisan foundation of our Cold War foreign policy.

In every era we wrestle with how to reconcile the pragmatic with the moral elements of our strength and what we choose to do with both. We got it right, mostly, during the Cold War, when realists and idealists together built the institutions and policies serving our interests and our values. We got it drastically wrong when a small group of ideologues decided we didn't need those institutions or alliances or diplomacy or even the respect of other nations....

For the full transcript, please see the Council on Foreign Relations website.