Why Kissinger Should Support Obama

McCain’s description of himself as a “realistic idealist” hardly clarifies how the tension between the two traditions—evident in the baroque inconsistencies of his speeches—would manifest itself in the White House.

Neither does his roster of advisers, equally divided between neoconservatives and assertive nationalists, such as Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Randy Scheunemann, and realists, such as Brent Scowcroft, George Shultz, and Kissinger himself.

By contrast, Obama presents himself as a post-ideological foreign-policy figure. The signature themes of his book, The Audacity of Hope, are not so much hope and change as reasonableness and balance. Unlike Bush and McCain, Obama does not dwell on the roles that good and evil play in the affairs of humankind.

His pragmatism was apparent in his famous 2002 speech against the invasion of Iraq, which was not the standard liberal critique but a nuanced argument against “a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”

However, Obama would not be a Kissingerian realist, either. He has worn that mantle in recent months, stating he prefers “foreign-policy realism” to “ideology,” advocating a “clear-eyed view of how the world works” and “tough, thoughtful, realistic diplomacy,” and calling upon not only traditional Democratic foreign-policy heroes such as Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt but also George Kennan and George H.W. Bush. Fareed Zakaria dubbed Obama a “cool conservative” next to McCain’s “exuberant idealist.”

But to be a realist, you need to have ice in your veins, and it’s not clear Obama does—or that any Democratic administration would display the kind of steely devotion to national interests above all other considerations that the term implies.

An Obama administration would be staffed by Democrats and animated partly by Democratic values such as a commitment to human rights; it would be influenced not only by foreign-policy professionals but by Congress, labor unions, activists, and the “netroots” – the movement that so passionately opposed Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and that would maintain a constant pressure on Obama’s left flank.

In fact, given Obama’s characterization of genocide as “a stain on our souls,” it is possible that humanitarian intervention would be a theme of his presidency. Many of the people around the candidate, including Susan Rice, Tony Lake and Samantha Power, have strong views on the topic. Certainly Obama’s secretary of state would not say coolly, as James Baker did in 1991 of the Balkan wars, “We don’t have a dog in that fight.”