Facing Reality

Toward a conservative foreign policy

A NY consideration of a conservative approach to foreign policy must begin with the reality that there are serious divisions among conservatives on it. The most familiar division is that between neoconservatives and realists. But both schools divide further into smaller factions. Charles Krauthammer, for instance, has identified a split between democratic globalists and democratic realists within the broad neoconservative camp. (Distinction: Democratic realists would be the more choosy about where and when to intervene.) Realists come in both liberal and conservative versions. There is a third school of “assertive nationalists” who favor more intervention than realists but for narrower national purposes than the democracy-promotion of neoconservatives. A fourth school, whose program is sketched out in Francis Fukuyama’s recent book America at the Crossroads, would promote democracy but rely on NGOs and civil-society mechanisms rather than upon armies and intervention to do so. Buchananite noninterventionists constitute a fifth school. And there are the extremes of tenderness and toughness in the conservative camp represented respectively by the Cato Institute and NR’s own John “Rubble Don’t Cause Trouble” Derbyshire.

About the Author

John O’Sullivan

John O’Sullivan is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

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Toward a conservative foreign policy

A NY consideration of a conservative approach to foreign policy must begin with the reality that there are serious divisions among conservatives on it. The most familiar division is that between neoconservatives and realists. But both schools divide further into smaller factions. Charles Krauthammer, for instance, has identified a split between democratic globalists and democratic realists within the broad neoconservative camp. (Distinction: Democratic realists would be the more choosy about where and when to intervene.) Realists come in both liberal and conservative versions. There is a third school of “assertive nationalists” who favor more intervention than realists but for narrower national purposes than the democracy-promotion of neoconservatives. A fourth school, whose program is sketched out in Francis Fukuyama’s recent book America at the Crossroads, would promote democracy but rely on NGOs and civil-society mechanisms rather than upon armies and intervention to do so. Buchananite noninterventionists constitute a fifth school. And there are the extremes of tenderness and toughness in the conservative camp represented respectively by the Cato Institute and NR’s own John “Rubble Don’t Cause Trouble” Derbyshire.