I liked it a lot. Given the commentary on the left-wing blogosphere I thought I’d be reading some militaristic screed out of Starship Troopers. It instead strikes me as a measured re-evaluation of American foreign policy in light of the Bush years, with a healthy dose of realism and the important warning that “we must be on guard against overpromising and underdelivering.” If I were, focus-group style, to blurt out two words that should characterize our foreign policy, I might say “realistic” and “strong,” and those words are touchstones in the piece.

This passage on realism strikes me as about right:

Idealism should define our ultimate goals; realism must help us recognize the road we must travel to achieve them…
A realistic peace is not a peace to be achieved by embracing the “realist” school of foreign policy thought. That doctrine defines America’s interests too narrowly and avoids attempts to reform the international system according to our values. To rely solely on this type of realism would be to cede the advantage to our enemies in the complex war of ideas and ideals. It would also place too great a hope in the potential for diplomatic accommodation with hostile states. And it would exaggerate America’s weaknesses and downplay America’s strengths…
Still, the realist school offers some valuable insights, in particular its insistence on seeing the world as it is and on tempering our expectations of what American foreign policy can achieve. We cannot achieve peace by promising too much or indulging false hopes. This next decade can be a positive era for our country and the world so long as the next president realistically mobilizes the 9/11 generation for the momentous tasks ahead.

He avoids the excesses of both sides on diplomacy:

In recent years, diplomacy has received a bad name, because of two opposing perspectives. One side denigrates diplomacy because it believes that negotiation is inseparable from accommodation and almost indistinguishable from surrender. The other seemingly believes that diplomacy can solve nearly all problems, even those involving people dedicated to our destruction. When such efforts fail, as they inevitably do, diplomacy itself is blamed, rather than the flawed approach that led to their failure.
America has been most successful as a world leader when it has used strength and diplomacy hand in hand.

He appreciates how hard it is to promote democracy:

America has a clear interest in helping to establish good governance throughout the world. Democracy is a noble ideal, and promoting it abroad is the right long-term goal of U.S. policy. But democracy cannot be achieved rapidly or sustained unless it is built on sound legal, institutional, and cultural foundations. It can only work if people have a reasonable degree of safety and security. Elections are necessary but not sufficient to establish genuine democracy.

The piece sags as it surveys the world; it’s hard to say much interesting quickly about India, China, Russia, etc. I would defer to John O’Sullivan and others over whether it makes sense to expand NATO to any state that wants to join and meets certain standards. I’m also not sure about the details of how he wants to reform the State department and to create a Stabilization and Reconstruction Corps, but those certainly are the kind of initiatives we should be pursuing. Finally, there is only so much a Foreign Affairs article can tell us about a president’s foreign policy, as events and the on-the-spot reaction to them mean so much, as we learned with Condi’s essay prior to the Bush administration. But I consider Rudy on the right track here.