Can the GOP return to its realist roots on foreign policy?

Actually there is a strong precedent for this in the Republican Party. Dwight Eisenhower ran as a Republican realist who tempered the isolationism of Robert Taft as well as the crackpot, conspiracy-mongering anti-communism of Joseph McCarthy. Richard Nixon was a tough-minded, traditional Republican nationalist whose opening to Communist China had an internationalist basis, as well as a long-range humanitarian effect in East Asia. Ronald Reagan spoke the Wilsonian language of moral rearmament, so central to the philosophy of neoconservatives, even as he took care to put bureaucratic governance in the hands of traditional nationalists and realists. George HW Bush was a traditional nationalist and realist who, nevertheless, pleased neoconservatives by demanding that all of Germany come under NATO’s umbrella at the end of the Cold War and by forcibly ejecting Iraqi troops from Kuwait (even if neoconservatives were disappointed that he did not topple Saddam Hussein).

Only such a presidential aspirant, whom different subcultures of the party respect, has a chance to win the next election. For as much as Republicans may furiously deny it, Obama continues to execute a credible foreign policy that, while rarely daring or innovative, is realist in the traditional sense, even as it has cautiously avoided military quagmires — something the last Republican president, George W. Bush, did not do. Obama’s attempt at a rapprochement with Iran fits well within American realist tradition and is popular among the public besides. Moreover, the presumed front-runner among the Democrats, Hillary Clinton, has already proved her realist bona fides as secretary of state, however cautious and lackluster her term at Foggy Bottom may have been.