Is Mitt Romney a Neocon, A Realist, Or Both?

Jonathan Rauch, a contributor to the National Journal and author of several books, weighed in on foreign policy debates in the Sunday New York Times to defend realism. Realism, he noted, is a lonely credo. He thinks it is finding more of a home among Democrats than Republicans. Rauch lamented the fact that the GOP has, by and large abjured realism in favor of neoconservative triumphalism about the greatness of America. As Rauch sees it,

Despite getting terrible press and having more or less no explicit defenders on the American political scene today (prediction: not one Republican presidential candidate will embrace the term “realist”), realism remains the indispensable foreign-policy doctrine — or, really, attitude, since it is not doctrinaire. Without it, nothing else works.