Word: realists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...visits to the White House earlier this week highlighted the key dilemma facing President Bush as he contemplates changes to his Iraq policy: One guest was former Secretary of State James Baker and the rest of the Iraq Study Group, which together with much of the "realist" establishment in U.S. foreign policy is urging the Administration to recognize that a dialogue with Iran (and Syria) is an essential component of any successful strategy to stabilize Iraq. Bush's other visitor was Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, whose main purpose at the White House appeared to be pressing the President...
...current Bush Administration did the reverse in 2003 by using realist rhetoric about security interests (remember those WMD?) to cloak what was, more broadly, a neo-Wilsonian mission of spreading democracy. The two primary realists in the Bush court, Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft, were the most prominent castoffs by the end of the first term. And Condoleezza Rice, for years a sophisticated realist thinker in the mold of her mentor Scowcroft, underwent a post-9/11 conversion to the belief that there was no longer a useful distinction between democracy-crusading idealism and national-security realism...
...impending report of Baker's bipartisan Iraq Study Group heralds the return of the realists, many of whom worked under Bush the Elder, the most competent foreign policy realist ever to serve as President. Their inner circle huddled last month in Newport News, Va., at the christening of the aircraft carrier named after the former President. They discussed the need for a change to a more pragmatic approach. The cadre included Scowcroft, Baker, Powell and Lawrence Eagleburger (now in Baker's study group) as well as their soft-spoken and clear-minded longtime colleague Robert Gates, who has now been...
...tension between the realist and idealist approach has long split the Republican Party between traditional conservatives and neocons. That will play itself out in the campaign of John McCain. On one shoulder, he has his close friends from the realist camp, such as Kissinger, Powell and Robert Zoellick. Perched on the other shoulder are more crusading neocons and "national greatness" theorists led by William Kristol, whose father Irving helped provide the intellectual underpinnings for a morality-based foreign policy a generation...
...Reagan Administration. When Gates finally left government, he wrote a bland, ruffle-no-feathers memoir. He never talked out of school about the Bushes. He never took on the CIA in public or offended the rank and file. Gates is a company man, a loyal civil servant, a realist. Reducing him to a Bush family retainer misses his real character...