Michael Cohen has an interesting piece on the newfound Republican realism of the GOP presidential contenders:
Libya gave the Republican wannabes a chance to go even further in a realist direction. When asked whether the war there was in the "vital national interest of the United States," Michele Bachmann said, "No, I don't believe so." She was seconded by Herman Cain and to a lesser extent by Newt Gingrich, though in fairness he seemingly has had more positions on Libya than he now has campaign staff. Had former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman been at the debate he likely would have been speaking in similar terms, as he has been the one GOP candidate to offer the greatest skepticism of Obama's military campaigns in Libya and Afghanistan, citing spiraling costs and the lack of national interest.
[...]
But the debate's emphasis on vital national interests rather than an assertive defense of U.S. values suggests that Republican presidential candidates may be testing the winds on foreign policy and feeling the onrush of a realist moment.
I'm somewhat skeptical about this. I think this kind of talk emerges whenever a president from the other party suffers political fallout for ongoing conflicts. As Cohen notes, "candidate Bush" mostly ran on a "modest" foreign policy and eschewed nation building, before deciding to do it in two countries. But that was after eight years of President Bill Clinton intervening, with mixed success, in East Africa and the Balkans. Likewise Obama was all about avoiding unnecessary conflicts, saying that the U.S. shouldn't be engaging in "dumb wars" against despots even if they were brutal unless it was in the security interests of the United States.
There's an element of highly convenient partisanship in each of these examples, where gestures toward foreign policy realism offer an opportunity to criticize their predecessors' military interventions. But then they get in office and change their minds. And maybe that's because regardless of what the candidates say, the foreign policy establishment in the GOP is still mostly neoconservative, while in the Democratic Party it's still mostly made up of liberal internationalists, and these are the people presidents from either party end up taking advice from.
