There’s an interesting discussion right now on Foreign Policy about the future of realism and the Republican Party. Daniel Drezner kicks things off with this post, to which Will Inboden responds:

[T]he debates within Republican circles that I recall from inside and that I have found most interesting outside tend to be fairly pragmatic — what works, what doesn’t work, what has been tried, what has the best chance of being sustainable. A quick way to drive those debates into a ditch would be to insist on invoking the kind of talmudic parsing that is so common in academic debates: “I am sorry, you cannot hold those two policy positions because the first is a tenet of offensive neo-realism and the second is a tenet of defensive neo-realism.” The clash of paradigms may be a useful way to catalogue vast quantities of academic research for graduate and undergraduate pedagogy, but I can’t think of many cases when it was a useful way to navigate a policy debate.

I think Inboden is conflating two different things here: realism as an academic theory, and realism as a policy position. The former is a description of how the world world works; the latter is a plan for dealing with that world, which can usually be reduced to a single piece of advice: protect the national interest. This sounds fairly banal on the surface - surely all foreign policy types imagine themselves to be serving the national interest? - but much like the idea of “limited government”, the primacy of the “national interest” in foreign policy is an appealing concept that often causes people to baulk when applied in practice.

For instance, imagine we knew with confidence that the best way for the United States to advance its interests would be to sell out Georgia to the Russians and Taiwan to the Chinese, prop up dictators in Pakistan and Somalia, dash the national aspirations of the Kurds to please Turkey, and force Israel to make painful concessions to its enemies. Even if we knew with metaphysical certainty that these policies would work, they would still be extremely controversial (not least within Republican circles), which suggests that foreign policy debates can not be reduced to questions of tactics and non-ideological policy choices. Certain ideological questions still loom large in international relations, and while the Republican Party need not respond by unequivocally embracing realism, it will do itself no favours if it does not at least grapple with the realist critique of the status quo in American foreign policy.