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01 Nov 2008 05:42 pm

Realists On Either Side

The National Interest, traditionally a conservative realist policy magazine, offers a split decision on the election. Yglesias explains what this means. What it means, to my mind, is that serious foreign policy conservatives, who haven't drunk the entire neocon kool-aid (or mixed it with some traditional conservatism), understand that there's a very serious case for Obama in foreign affairs. Especially in the war on terror. I always saw neoconservatism as an important insight, if balanced with traditional conservative prudence, especially in disabusing us of the potential of Arab regimes to treat Israel with minimal respect. But when turned into a theology of sorts, and a doctrine, it has all the limits of any doctrine. It becomes resistant to reality, to events, to experience - to what we've learned on the ground in seven grueling years of failure. It is not a conservative impulse to double-down on such a theology. It's a conservative impulse to step back and review it and think again.

It's incredibly encouraging to find so many conservatives now getting there. Obama may not be the answer. But he sure is closer to it than McCain, and the neocon fanatics who surround him on foreign policy.

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