Paul Wolfowitz's provocative critique of foreign policy realism has several key flaws. Most importantly, he sets up an artificial and contrived version of realist thought and fails to engage the problem of positive and negative variations in America's stock of power.

In his essay, Wolfowitz acknowledges the classic distinctions between realism and neoconservatism--that realism prescribes dealing with states as they are in an anarchic international system while neoconservatives and their left-leaning, fellow-traveling liberal interventionists want to change the internal character of states as a primary goal of American national security policy.

Given President Obama's shift in a semi-realist direction at the beginning of this term, FP asked Wolfowitz to respond to the assertion that "we are all realists now." Appropriately, the architect of George W. Bush's Iraq War responds "No." Of course, we aren't--but we are not all values militants either.

Wolfowitz makes a case against a gold standard version of .999 "pure realism" that simply doesn't exist anywhere in the world except perhaps in University of Chicago lectures inspired by Hans Morgenthau and carried on by disciple John Mearsheimer and his followers. Wolfowitz sets up his debate with academic realists--not policy realists who have significantly evolved in practice and perspective since the days of Kissingerian-style realism.

Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski--both identified as realists in the Wolfowitz critique--differ on many micro-policy issues, as Wolfowitz points out. In fact, Wolfowitz acknowledges that he supported Scowcroft's position on the Gulf War and Brzezinski's view that NATO should be expanded. He facetiously asks if that makes him a realist or renders them ideologues.

Scowcroft and Brzezinski--as they noted in their recent joint book America and the World: Conversations on the Future of U.S. Foreign Policy, a set of edited discussions with David Ignatius--are not in complete sync when it comes to certain national security priorities and do not frame challenges identically. And they are not the kind of realists to whom Wolfowitz seeks to compare himself. Both former national security advisors are "hybrid realists" who believe that American power is constrained today and diminishing in part because of a set of very misinformed, strategic mistakes made by the George W. Bush administration, mistakes that compounded the failure of Bush's father and Bill Clinton to reorganize the terms and realities of America's global social contract after the fall of the Soviet Union.

By the end of his essay, Wolfowitz identifies himself as a hybrid realist as well--choosing the term "democratic realist." I'd call Scowcroft and Brzezinski adherents of newly emerging hybrid schools of "ethical realism" and/or "progressive realism" in which they worry first about the overall ability of America to achieve its global objectives vis-à-vis other states, but with a sensitivity to and concern for both the internal realities of other countries and the increasingly disconcerting transnational challenges that are facing the international system as a whole.

In other words, these hybrid realists of the Scowcroft/Brzezinski sort do believe in states as the primary actors of the international system, but they see tremendous value in institutions like the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions, in negotiating international deals on many issues, including arms, nuclear weapons, and climate change. Brent Scowcroft even sits on the board of one of Al Gore's major climate-action groups. These hybrid realists are sensitive to the role that global public opinion--inside countries--about the United States and its policies plays internationally. These are not characteristics of the type of classic realists that Paul Wolfowitz contrasts himself with in his essay.

Progressive realism attempts to maintain a logic of costs and benefits of American action in the international system. As Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon frequently pointed out in their written treatments of U.S. foreign policy, the traditions of both pragmatic, interest-driven realism and idealism are deeply embedded in the core structures of the country.

To some degree, the Nixon era was a highpoint for foreign-policy realism, with strong echoes during the George H. W. Bush administration, while values militancy and democratic idealism swelled during the Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush terms. But even under these ideal-driven presidents, a commitment to reorder the internal guts of other countries coexisted and wrestled with a constant counterargument of realist scenarios and arguments.

Ronald Reagan was a values crusader against global Soviet interests in his first term and then pivoted towards a realist-informed engagement with Gorbachev in his second. George W. Bush's Iraq invasion had many contrived rationales far beyond those offered in the Wolfowitz essay but nonetheless was part of a values crusade in the region that differed greatly in character and objective from any other contemporary American military effort since Vietnam. But whereas Reagan was able to turn his rhetorical messianism into engagement with the Soviets, George W. Bush turned his military provocation into swagger and conceit during his first term--failing to use the edge he had built to forge a new relationship with Iran which, intimidated by the quick military U.S. success in Iraq, had privately reached out to the Bush White House. Bush's realist shift came during his second term, frustrating his hawkish, torture-endorsing, Dark Side-hugging vice president, but too late to reverse any of the key disasters hatched during the first term.

The "hybrid realism" to which most policy practitioners subscribe entails using American power in ways that increase and enhance America's power position. It means shaping the international order in ways conducive to American interests but also promulgating American values, civil institutions, and our democratic example in ways that don't undermine core interests or American power.

Paul Wolfowitz punts on the Iraq War--not wanting to debate it in this essay. But by dropping the subject, he misses a fundamental reality for any presidency--the power a president inherits when he or she gets the keys to the White House is not the same from president to president.

Barack Obama, in his early foreign-policy moves, has found his "inner Nixon" and made a number of key realist-like gestures not because Nixonianism was lurking just under the skin of his campaign for the White House all along--but because he had to. John McCain also would have been compelled to find his "inner Nixon" and to push back the Max Boots and William Kristols and John Boltons who want to hatch yet more wars amid those now underway. McCain also would have found his way to a hybrid realism not unlike what we are seeing Obama deploy--because America is so substantially constrained today and doubted by much of the world as a superpower in decline that has not exhibited of late an ability to achieve the objectives it sets out for itself.

The Iraq war punctured the mystique of America's superpower status and exposed military limits, followed later by economic limits that have undermined the confidence of key allies in American power and dependability. These weaknesses have also animated the pretensions of foes, problem states, and transnationally organized enemies.

Thus, George W. Bush's "stock of power" was far greater at the beginning of his presidency than was Barack Obama's.

To not recognize that the Iraq war--no matter how legitimate and necessary Wolfowitz feels that war was--deflated American power is a significant gap in his analysis. Had the Iraq invasion not occurred, had the Bush team dealt a crushing blow to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and come home, the world and America would be in a different place. In those circumstances if Barack Obama were still residing today in the White House, he might be less interested in the combined work and writing of Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Richard Nixon. He might have been the type of values crusader that George Bush got to be--at least for a short while.

Wolfowitz carefully avoids any mention of the words "regime change," but he fails to note that many of his close intellectual and political allies are obsessed with regime change against some of the more problematic nations in the world today. They use "democracy promotion" interchangeably with "regime change"--whereas Wolfowitz more cautiously calls not for revolutions but incremental evolutions. I'm in agreement with Wolfowitz that incremental change that is encouraged is far better than political change driven by force. Wolfowitz supports the human rights work of the State Department and endorses the use of the presidential bully pulpit to express support for those working and fighting for democracy in nations run by authoritarians and despots. I think most hybrid realists also understand the importance of the global human rights agenda--but believe that agenda must be comingled and copresent with the other facets of the respective relationship.

One of the issues I wish Wolfowitz had raised but regrettably neglected is the importance of America demonstrating by example the kind of democracy we hope others aspire to. His American Enterprise Institute colleague and former vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, applauds CIA officers who choked prisoners, faked executions before detainees, and threatened to kill children as strategies of coercion. We saw the reactions to 9/11 and the buildup to the Iraq war lead to a national-security pathology in the United States in which core democratic values were undermined. We held not just prisoners in Guantanamo but thousands of others in Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and other facilities in a manner completely at odds with our beliefs about universal human rights. We tortured--and our government spied on a massive scale on American citizens.

This kind of example is something that authoritarian governments salivate at--and true democrats abroad revile.

Wolfowitz writes:

When all opposition is suppressed, the forces of change go underground and that is where radicalism thrives. Jailing a democratic reformer like Ayman Noor in Egypt is not a way to fight extremism.

He is absolutely right--but this same maxim holds for America's hand in perpetuating other grievances and also checking the forces of reform--particularly in the Israel/Palestine conflict, which Wolfowitz acknowledges may actually be the greatest driver of anti-Americanism today in the Middle East.

Wolfowitz sounds as if he might be ready to find some common ground with the community of hybrid realists that, like him, want to see the world move toward a community of nations that act responsibly on the international stage and that move toward political templates that allow the growth of healthy civil institutions and promote self-determination and even democracy abroad. His statement about Israel and its messy, unresolved state of affairs with the Arab world is not consistent with the Bill Kristol-led neoconservative position--and this is heartening.

But for Wolfowitz's new school of "democratic realism" to attract followers, he should come to terms with and understand the perspectives of the real realists in Washington policy circles today that differ significantly from the textbook classic realists he used as a foil. There will be differences still between these clusters of varying realist hybrids--but Wolfowitz needs to understand that the fundamental critique that folks like me make about the values militants and idealists is that they fail to think about the consequences of actions in sustaining national power.

Many foreign-policy idealists are driven by emotion and sentiment first--and rationality and calculated priority-setting last.

And in my view, while I know that Wolfowitz is one of the few in the George W. Bush administration that did have a coherent, internally logical strategy that he felt would work in knocking out Saddam Hussein, his colleagues allowed raw emotion, reaction, and swagger to cloud their judgments in a matter of war and peace. Wolfowitz himself miscalculated about the aftermath of the war and the occupation--and set into motion a set of events that haven't strengthened America's hand but rather awakened and animated Iran's pretensions as a great regional power, sparking paranoia and concern among Sunni Arab states and Israel--at a point when U.S. power is, because of Iraq and Afghanistan, in question.

Wolfowitz's essay is sensibly drafted and intelligent. There is significant insight in the piece--but not enough introspection. Wolfowitz's brand of foreign policy may work better in certain times--at times of a state's overwhelming hegemonic dominance in world affairs--but may be quite inappropriate and ineffective when that same state's power has sagged and is limping, needing reinvention and clear accomplishment.

Today is the time of realists of a variety of sorts--mostly because of the realities that Wolfowitz and his Bush administration colleagues unleashed in the world.