Just because you've mastered the art of "foreign policy" talk doesn't mean you know what you're talking about. One thing I've noticed about over-reaching discussions of foreign affairs - and I mean serious journals as much as blogs - is that vague air of unreality that hangs about them. It's as if the writers aren't talking about real places where real people live, but about abstract entities - "Iran" as a concept, not "Iran" the complicated real-world place where inconvenient facts pile up to interfere with your theory-making.

Nothing proves this more than the persistent myth that American foreign policy is forever torn between two philosophies: "idealism" and "realism." Nothing in American history supports the view that these are our only two options, or even that they are particularly different options. Yet year after year, scholars and pundits and politicians alike continue to pontificate on the epic struggle between the starry-eyed idealists and cold, reasoning realists who dictate which countries we are to bomb this year, and which countries we are to merely enact punishing embargoes against.

Just look at this review, in the New York Times, of a new biography of George Kennan, the State Department hack whose notorious 8,000 word 1946 telegram gave the Washington oligarchs ammunition to start the Cold War. The reviewer, James Traub, bends over backwards to praise Kennan. He is possessed of an "extraordinarily fine-grained and exacting sensibility," "a penetrating and lucid intellect," with "the great Protestant virtues" deeply ingrained in him, and yet full of "humility." He also writes "magisterial prose" on the level of Hemingway. The review closes by praising his "courage" and "the greatness of his character." When the biographer, an even bigger fan, claims that Kennan is "a better writer and a better thinker" than Henry Adams, Traub allows only that it "may be true."

So it comes as something of a shock, near the end, to learn this:

Kennan made no secret of his low regard for the wisdom of the common man, and thus for the practice of a so-called democratic, as opposed to a professional, foreign policy. But Lukacs also notes that in the late ’30s — as Hitler’s Germany rose to power — Kennan began writing a book proposing that America adopt a more authoritarian model of government in which both immigration and suffrage would be curtailed. Kennan could not bring himself to despise Germany before, during or after the war. . . . The predicament of ordinary people seems not to have moved him much.

It can't be much of a coincidence that the universally admired "architect of the Cold War," who ushered in an era that saw free politics smashed and honest citizens deprived of their jobs for daring to disagree with the oligarchs' foreign policy, that saw anti-communism elevated to the level of a state religion, that paved the road for Senator McCarthy's demagogy, "could not bring himself to despise" Nazi Germany. Like the Washington insiders of the 1930s who clamored for a "Mussolini" to step in and take charge, he thought we could even have learned a thing or two from them. Such is the stuff of "realism"!

As Traub has it, it was disagreement with the "realist" policy represented by Kennan - and, later, Henry Kissinger, that has led so many to support President Bush's "policy of democracy promotion." This leads Traub to a truly stunning conclusion, though he presents it as if it were a well-known fact:

Many of the president’s harshest detractors accept the legitimacy of this mission . . . even if they doubt the methods. Wilsonian idealism, as Kissinger himself once recognized, is America’s default foreign policy. Kennan’s “realism” — the policy of prudence and self-restraint — is the path usually not taken.

The fact is that Americans knew nothing of "Wilsonian idealism" until Wilson himself forced it on them. Americans had been cheerfully minding their own business since the birth of the republic. But as Walter Karp ruefully observed: "Nothing in America's political experience as a nation had prepared Americans for Woodrow Wilson." It was no coincidence, either, that Wilson's triumph over his fellow Americans expressed itself not just in dragging them off to Europe to fight in a war they had no stake in save "making the world safe for democracy," but also in destroying democracy at home. Anyone overheard criticizing the war, or even the president, was liable to wind up in prison. By the time Wilson went off to Europe to help his fellow conquerors carve up the defeated nations, democracy had been crushed in America. All that was left to America's silenced, bullied, embittered citizens was to kick Wilson's successor out of office by one of the largest landslides in history.

Thus two great moments in American foreign policy, one led by "idealists," the other by "realists." Consider that when President Bush decided to declare war on Iraq, he was praised for being both a realist and an idealist, wisely acting on behalf of America's "interests" and nobly setting out to save an oppressed people from a dictator. It was a foreign policy pundit's dream come true.

Now that the war has turned into an ignoble occupation, pundits and politicians call for a healthy dose of "realism" to save us from Bush's reckless idealism. Good old Henry Kissinger never would've gotten us into this mess! It's hard to imagine a more bankrupt, pathetic pretense.