RUTH WEDGWOOD: Realism And The American Republic.

In the crude violence of the contemporary international scene—with Russia running rampant in Ukraine and rattling its saber toward the Baltic states, with Muslims and Christians facing slaughter by ISIS in the Levant, and with thousands of African migrants boarding overloaded scows to cross the Mediterranean in a perilous search for work—it may seem harsh to hold an American President to a moral standard of foreign policy any higher than “realism.”
But the moral aspirations of the American republic—even as framed by the current incumbent of the White House—permit a review of our foreign policy performance that is a bit more critical.

By that measure, the current report card is not inspiring. Preoccupied by issues of criminal justice, civil rights, and medical care at home, and flummoxed abroad, we seem to have forgotten the broader ideals of internationalism that animated the founders. John Quincy Adams warned the new republic against venturing abroad seeking monsters to slay—but that was at a time when monsters were more easily thwarted and avoided, and when sailing ships from Europe took thirty days to arrive in North America. It was a time, as Adams’ near contemporary, President James Monroe opined, when the New World could be declared as a hemisphere peculiarly unavailable to autocratic powers. In a world now circled by air in 48 hours, with an international commerce that brings tens of thousands of container ships to American seaports, problems have no protective distance. There is no cordon sanitaire to protect the American homeland from chaos elsewhere.

Nor does a thin-lipped “‘realism’ about American foreign policy warrant any different posture about moral catastrophe abroad. . . . Yet we often pull our punches, supposing that reticence will serve as aptly as speech or action. One example tainted the beginning of this Administration, when the White House failed to support the pro-democracy demonstrators in Iran, and did not venture beyond soft-spoken remonstrance at the wanton shooting of an innocent young woman named Neda Agha-Soltan during the 2009 protests against the mullahs near Tehran’s Azadi Square. Our interest in curbing Iran’s nuclear program by negotiation also has muffled the human rights complaints that should be aimed at Tehran for its execution of dissidents of every stripe, including Christians, still hung high from the gantry arms of construction cranes. So, too, in China, our quarrels with the regime’s violent persecution of political dissidents and Christians—as well as the arbitrary use of detention and hard labor to eliminate rivals of the commercial elite—were raised only in a measured and demure voice during Mr. Obama’s first visit to the capital city of Beijing.

I believe we should call things what they are.