Nation-Building Exposes GOP's House Divided

[Quetzal]

Nation-Building Exposes GOP's House Divided

Jacob Heilbrunn of The Los Angeles Times shows how the neoconservatives' dream of exporting democracy clashes with the traditional Republican view of a foreign policy grounded in "realism."

From The Los Angeles Times, March 21, 2004

The longer the U.S. struggles to impose order in postwar Iraq, the harsher the indictments of the Bush administration's foreign policy are becoming. "Acquiring additional burdens by engaging in new wars of liberation is the last thing the United States needs," declared one Bush critic in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs. "The principal problem is the mistaken belief that democracy is a talisman for all the world's ills, and that the United States has a responsibility to promote democratic government wherever in the world it is lacking."

Sound like a Democratic pundit bashing Bush for partisan gain? Nope. The jab came from Dimitri K. Simes, president of the predominantly Republican Nixon Center and co-publisher of the National Interest magazine. And he is not alone in calling on the administration to reclaim the party's pre-Reagan heritage - to abandon its moralistic, Wilsonian, neoconservative dream of exporting democracy, in favor of a more limited and realistic foreign policy.

The most profound foreign affairs ideological divide in the 2004 election might not be so much between liberals and conservatives as it will be among conservatives themselves. A growing number of so-called "realists," who feel that U.S. foreign policy should be shaped by a narrowly defined national interest rather than by a broad desire to promote global democracy and human rights, have gotten increasingly vociferous in warning about the perils of adventurism abroad.

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http://www.realisticforeignpolicy.org/content/view/24/2/