In presidential campaigns, it's common for Republican candidates to portray Democrats as naive, dreamy and utopian in their approach to foreign affairs.
Democrats see the world as they would like it to be, not how it is. They dissipate America's strength on idealistic causes unrelated to core national interests. They confuse foreign policy with social work.
To one degree or another, every Republican presidential candidate since the 1970s has employed those arguments. They were a central element of the case George W. Bush made against Al Gore and the Clinton administration.
And now these same arguments are moving to the forefront of John F. Kerry's case against President Bush.
Inverting the usual debate between the parties, Kerry is increasingly arguing that Bush has committed America to unrealistic goals and unsustainable costs through his crusade to democratize the Middle East.
Kerry is presenting himself as the flinty realist who will be less ideological and more practical than Bush, more skeptical of what he calls "foreign adventures" and more disciplined in establishing achievable goals for America in an imperfect world. Unstated but implied is that he would be more cautious than Bush about entangling the U.S. in another grand but grueling cause like the invasion of Iraq.
"Beware of the presidential candidate who just sort of says with a big paintbrush we're going to make everything all right over night," Kerry said in a revealing recent interview with the Washington Post.
Kerry still says that the president has isolated America from traditional allies, complicating the war against terrorism and compelling the U.S. to bear too much of the burden in Iraq. Kerry insists as well that Bush has over-emphasized military power, while downplaying America's economic and diplomatic tools.
But Kerry lately has focused his attacks more on Bush's competence than his ideology in foreign policy. And as part of that thrust, Kerry is suggesting that Bush, in his zeal to remake the Islamic world, is pursuing the ideal at the expense of the essential.
Kerry first hinted at such reasoning this spring, when he said the U.S. goal should be "a stable Iraq ... whether or not that's a full democracy." In the Post interview, Kerry moved further when he argued that for now, encouraging democracy in countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan should take a back seat to ensuring cooperation against terrorism and promoting better relations with Israel.
