Jesse Taylor points out that back in 2009, David Brooks wrote that "These are the realistic choices for America’s Afghanistan policy — all out or all in, surrender the place to the Taliban or do armed nation-building," while today he concludes that "Perhaps we don’t know enough, can’t plan enough, can’t implement effectively enough to coordinate nation building with national security objectives."
I think the context is important here--see back in 2009 Republicans were attacking the president for being too weak to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Today, Republicans are attacking the president for getting involved in too many foreign conflicts. So Brooks, whose particular flavor of conservative ideology tends to see wars as the preferred remedy for America's declining values, suddenly starts talking like a foreign policy realist.
As I've written before, I don't see anything that suggests this is more than a temporary, partisan phenomenon. Jonathan Bernstein has a good take on how to predict whether or not this kind of shift is real:
In general, however, the thing to pay attention to, the thing that is probably most predictable from the campaign, is the set of foreign policy advisers that a candidate is likely to listen to once in office. If in fact it's the case that Republican elites are still as interventionist as ever, then that suggests that, indeed, any winning GOP nominee will wind up following policies similar to those of George W. Bush. Of course, one can also point to differences within Bush's administration, and I do think that the president's personal feelings and temperament probably matter in some cases, but still: personnel are a good indication of policy.
That's exactly what Eli Lake did when, looking at Obama's foreign policy advisers during the campaign, Lake concluded that Obama would be far more aggressive in matters of counterterrorism and foreign policy than the conservative caricatures of him suggested.
The campaign rhetoric of Republicans has changed, but their foreign policy brain-trust hasn't. Given the deep bench of experienced conservative foreign policy hands who spent the the aughts defending and implementing Bush's "Freedom Agenda," it's difficult to imagine a set of circumstances in which this moment of realist rhetoric actually augurs a real change in how Republicans approach foreign policy.
