Kerry Casts Himself as Solid Realist and Bush as Dreamy Idealist

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.

“Sometimes we are dealt a set of cards that don’t allow us [to] do everything we want to do at once,” Kerry said.

This is a very different note than Kerry struck when he began his presidential campaign. In a January 2003 speech, he stressed his commitment to democratizing the Middle East through measures such as increased aid for reformers and tying trade benefits to economic and social reform. “We must place increased focus on the development of democratic values and human rights as the keys to long-term security,” he declared.

Kerry has never repudiated those ideas, but he hasn’t mentioned them much lately, either. The result has been to leave the Woodrow Wilson-like flourishes about making the world safe for democracy almost entirely to Bush, who has amplified those themes as the inability to find weapons of mass destruction clouded his original rationale for invading Iraq.

In practice, the argument between Bush and Kerry is more about priorities than goals.

Kerry aides insist he is as committed as Bush to democratizing the Middle East over the long run. But Kerry has always been dubious of Bush’s contention that forcibly deposing Saddam Hussein would trigger a democratic domino effect across the region. And now, Kerry is suggesting the push for political reform, even by other means, must be balanced against other imperatives.

In this shift, Kerry is tilting away from one Democratic tradition -- Wilsonian idealism. But he is excavating another -- the realism of the post-World War II foreign policy “Wise Men” such as Dean Acheson and George Kennan. These thinkers, and presidents such as Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy whom they influenced, were as determined to balance America’s commitments with its capacities as they were to contain the spread of communism.

“Basically, Kerry is coming back to liberal realism,” says James Chace, an Acheson biographer and author of a recent article on the Wise Men’s legacy. “These men ... they were very tough-minded, all of them. They were against day dreaming; they were against sentimentality.”

With these emerging arguments, Kerry is appealing to a country that may be worn out with great causes after Iraq has turned out so much more costly and complex than it initially appeared. Yet he is walking a thin line. American foreign policy has always attracted the most popular support when it reflects American values. And most experts agree that without fundamental reform the Middle East will continue to incubate radicalism.

The debate between Bush and Kerry could be settling into grooves familiar from the early days of the Cold War. In a speech at the Truman Library last week, Kerry praised “the wise and patient path” that Truman and the Wise Men set “to win the Cold War without a Third World War.”

The Wise Men husbanded military strength but pressed the Cold War mostly through nonmilitary means. Increasingly, Kerry is suggesting that forceful but measured approach will be his model in the war on terrorism.

Bush wants to combat Islamic terrorism with a more aggressive “forward strategy of freedom,” symbolized by the Iraq invasion. In that, he recalls the Republicans immediately after World War II who rejected containment for a “rollback” of communism.

How much risk should America bear in the name of security? The choice this fall could be just as consequential as the decisions an earlier generation made half a century ago.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past columns at latimes.com/brownstein.