Realism and Restraint Aren’t the Same Thing

Foreign policy realism and foreign policy restraint are not the same thing. Sometimes realism translates into restraint, but sometimes it does not. It all depends on how we as a country define and prioritize our national security interests, which in turn depends on the nature of the foreign threats to those interests. It is quite often a case-by-case determination. Grand strategies and doctrines can help us formulate foreign policy, but overtime interests and priorities can change, rendering those grand strategies and doctrines less relevant, if not obsolete.

Moreover, foreign policy realism requires that we balance our commitments and resources. In his 1943 book U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, written in the midst of the Second World War, Walter Lippmann explained it well:

[I]n foreign relations . . . a policy has been formed only when Commitments and power have been brought into balance… Without the controlling principle that the nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes, its commitments related to its resources and its resources adequate to its commitments, it is impossible to think at all about foreign affairs.

Lippmann emphasized that in balancing the nation’s commitments and power it is necessary to maintain a “comfortable surplus of power in reserve.”

The outcome of the Second World War, with much of Europe and Asia prostrate from the economic and physical devastation brought by the war and a victorious Soviet Union threatening to dominate Eurasia, caused the United States to formulate the policy of containment. Lippmann explained that “the strategic defenses of the United States … extend across both oceans and to all the trans-oceanic lands from which an attack by sea or by air can be launched.” Our security perimeter, Lippmann continued, “extend[s] to the coast line of Europe, Africa, and Asia.”

Lippmann was a foreign policy realist who later criticized the Truman administration for the expansive commitments of the Truman Doctrine and an approach to containment that failed to distinguish between vital and peripheral interests. Later Lippmann became a vocal critic of the Americanization of the Vietnam War, which expended vast human and material resources for what was at best a peripheral interest of the United States. The “price of a military victory in the Vietnamese war, he wrote, is higher than American vital interests can justify.” The United States, he continued, must get “rid of the globalism which would not only entangle us everywhere but is based on the totally vain notion that if we do not set the world in order, no matter what the price, we cannot live in the world safely.” Lippmann believed in containing Soviet power, but he believed that containment should be implemented selectively and only when our vital interests were involved.

James Burnham was also a foreign policy realist who took an unsentimental approach to U.S. interests in the world. He recognized that the Soviet Union posed an existential threat to the United States in a Cold War that was both ideological and geopolitical. Burnham wrote that a passive foreign policy of restraint was insufficient to successfully meet the Soviet challenge. In Containment or Liberation?, Burnham proposed a political-subversive approach to undermine Soviet power — an approach later implemented by the Reagan administration in the 1980s. That approach won the Cold War without firing a shot.

Foreign policy realism excludes from consideration sentiment or sympathy, and in some instances morality, from foreign policy decisions. History is full of atrocities and injustices, but realism instructs us to avoid trying to right every wrong in the world, to reverse every injustice, to punish every wrongdoer. It rejects such notions as “responsibility to protect” that was promoted by some in the Obama administration. It rejects utopian schemes to “make the world safe for democracy,” while acting at times to make the world safe for the United States. Realism also rejects placing the advancement of global human rights at the center of our foreign policy — the Carter administration’s disastrous foreign policy should have ended such crusades.

President George H. W. Bush was a foreign policy realist who recognized the important interest of the United States in preventing Iraq from seizing the oil fields of Saudi Arabia in 1991. Bush 41 acted in accordance with U.S. interests by forcibly ejecting Iraqi forces from Kuwait, but also by refusing to go to Baghdad to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. Bush 41 recognized that although Hussein’s regime was awful to its people, it provided stability in Iraq and contributed to the overall balance of power in the Middle East — after all, we supported Saddam in Iraq’s war with Iran in the 1980s for just those reasons.

Unfortunately, George W. Bush abandoned his father’s realism by launching a global crusade to end “tyranny” and promote democracy throughout the world. Bush 43 signed on to the neoconservative dream of ending evil, which was the subject of a book by Bush advisers David Frum and Richard Perle.

President Trump is also a foreign policy realist who has acted to revive the Monroe Doctrine by using force in Venezuela and diplomacy in Panama and Greenland. He has also used air and naval power to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons — something that every U.S. president since 1979 has said is in America’s national security interest. Trump has also exhibited restraint in the conflict with Iran, using economic sanctions and a naval blockade instead of launching a ground war. He is also implementing the military pivot to Asia that Presidents Obama and Biden mostly just talked about, while simultaneously seeking to avoid a shooting war with China. And he has tried to use diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine before it expands to other parts of Europe.

Some on the MAGA right have criticized Trump for abandoning an America First foreign policy, but America First has never meant America Only. Realism is not isolationism. Trump, like George H. W. Bush, has mixed action with restraint in accordance with U.S. interests. That’s what realism is all about.

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