This past October after Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Adviser under George H.W. Bush, vented his frustration with the current Administration's foreign policy in an interview with The New Yorker, the liberal blogosphere anointed him a hero. "Scowcroft is a poet," gushed one blogger on Daily Kos, which trumpeted the news under the heading "Scowcroft's Scathing Critique of the Iraq Debacle." "Wow," cooed another. "Amen," wrote a third.

Some of what Scowcroft said about his former boss's son was indeed scathing. Scowcroft's admirers in cyberspace, though, were curiously silent about other, less savory aspects of his career. In 1989, several months after the Tiananmen Square massacre, for example, Scowcroft was dispatched to China to smooth over relations with Beijing, which he did by toasting his Chinese hosts at a banquet. He was Henry Kissinger's deputy back when the Nixon Administration was prolonging the Vietnam War. Like Kissinger, Scowcroft is a self-proclaimed realist for whom moral considerations pale next to strategic concerns.

This is not a school of thought that has traditionally mustered sympathy on the left. In the 1980s realists were among the people who argued that the United States should maintain cozy ties with apartheid South Africa if it suited our strategic interests. They had no objection, in principle, to forging alliances with dictators in countries like Indonesia and Chile. They scoffed at human rights advocates who demanded that foreign policy hew to certain ethical principles, a perspective realists tend to dismiss as naïve, since diplomacy is, at root, a Machiavellian struggle for power in a cutthroat world.

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