You shouldn’t throw stones if you live in a glass house, and if you got a glass jaw, you should watch your mouth

Bret Stephens, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

For a president who came into office literally selling the Audacity of Hope — not just for Americans but for all mankind — his Iran policy can so far be summed up as the timidity of “realism.” That’s realism as a theory of international relations that prescribes a foreign policy based on ostensibly rational calculations of the national interest and assumes that other nations act in similarly rational fashion. [...]

What did all this achieve? Iran’s nuclear programs are accelerating. It is testing ballistic missiles of increasing range and sophistication. Its support for terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah is unabated. Ahmadinejad stole an election in broad daylight. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei blessed the result. British Embassy staff are under siege. A campaign of mass arrests and intimidation is underway and a young woman named Neda Soltan was shot in the heart simply for choosing none of the above.

Oh, and Iran still accuses the U.S. of “meddling.”

Now Mr. Obama is promising more of the same, plus the equivalent of a group hug for the demonstrators. Is this supposed to be “realism”?

To answer Stephens directly, yes, this is supposed to be realism.  Granted, the events in Iran are incredibly compelling, but as President Obama has repeatedly stressed over the past several weeks, they fall far outside of our purview.  In this case at least, it seems that the Obama administration has accepted as a matter of principle the apparently outlandish idea that the internal affairs of another nation are simply none of our business.  Stephens assails this as the “timidity of realism” (and then goes on to outline the conclusions that a more “sensible” realist – or a neoconservative – would reach),  but that’s because he doesn’t seem to understand the limits of American influence.  Take Stephens’ concluding sentences for instance:

Maybe ordinary Iranians welcome Mr. Obama’s solicitude. What they need is Mr. Obama’s spine. If that means “democracy promotion” and tough talk about “regime change,” well, it wouldn’t be the first time this president has made his predecessor’s policy his own.

Neoconservatives, like Stephens, have this curious (and incredibly arrogant) habit of completely disregarding the stated wishes of the people they wish to “save.”  Ordinary Iranians have been quite clear about what they need – noninterference from the United States – and my guess is that they have a far better understanding of their situation than Stephens does.  Again, Stephens’ mistake – and this is common to neoconservatives – is in taking an extremely optimistic and frankly magical view of the efficacy of American influence.  It simply doesn’t occur to Stephens that the United States could harm the efforts of Iranian reformers by actively siding with them.  Indeed, the fact that Stephens can endorse the previous administration’s approach to Iran in the face of overwhelming evidence of its failure is indicative of this perceptual flaw.  President Bush’s threats of regime change did little to discourage the Iranian government from pursuing nuclear weapons, and indeed, may have even provided the means through which Tehran could whip up nationalist sentiment in the service of building domestic support for a nuclear weapons program.

A careful realist approach might not be as flashy and psychologically satisfying as idealistic denunciations of a tyrannical regime, but  that’s okay, because the goal of foreign policy isn’t to make yourself feel better, it’s to advance the interests of your country.  And judging from the broad sweep of American foreign policy history since the Second World War, I think it’s safe to say that a realist approach has served us pretty damn well.