The Price of Idealism

Leslie Gelb has a great line in his book Power Rules: "Without vision, men die. With vision, more men die."

Over to you, Jonah Goldberg:

One of the worst things about the Republican party has always been its Kissingerian realpolitik, the “it’s just business” approach to world affairs that amounted to a willful blindness to our ideals beyond our own borders. The Democratic party may not have always gotten the policies right, but it had a firm grasp of the principle.

In the 1990s, liberals championed “nation building,” and many conservatives chuckled at the naïveté of it. Then came Iraq, and Republicans out of necessity embraced what liberals once believed out of conviction. The result? Liberals ran from their principles, found their inner Kissingers and championed a cold realism whose chill emanated from the corpse of their ideals.

Oh my. So, conversely, the Republican party of 2003 found their inner-nation builders and championed a warm military adventure in Iraq whose heat radiated from the actual corpses of thousands of dead Americans and tens of thousands of dead Iraqis.

But realism is bad.