For all of you keeping score at home, Neocon Central has now decided that being a Wilsonian is a bad thing. When they were running the show at 1600 Penn, global democracy was a noble and necessary pursuit. Those who questioned its plausibility were defeatists—unpatriotic ingrowns refusing to acknowledge America’s exceptional status.

But at the first hint that Barack Obama isn’t keen to stoke the fires of conflict on their behalf, the War Party has labeled him unrealistic. Robert Kagan writes in the Washington Post: “President Obama likes to see himself as a pragmatist, but in foreign policy he is proving to be a supreme idealist of the Woodrow Wilson variety.”

In this case, “idealist” doesn’t refer to the naïve conceit that because we claimed benevolence—Elections! Women’s rights!—the world would embrace our version of creative destruction, even as we murdered, maimed, and drove millions from their homes. It has nothing to do with mad visions of locals throwing flowers and naming public squares after George W. Bush.

No, Obama is idealistic for assuming that the world might be dealt with by means other than invasion.

Kagan is correct when he says of the infant Obama Doctrine, “let us not call it realism.” The Cairo speech did suggest that, as George Will put it on This Week: “Harmony is the natural condition between nations and if we can just break through the misunderstandings, things will go swimmingly.”

But this doesn’t mean that neocons have taken up residence in the reality-based community either. The notion that anyone, anywhere who isn’t enamored of our Bill of Rights harbors jihadist sympathies is as delusional as the expectation that peace will break if we apologize enough.

Filed under: Foreign policy, Iraq