Leader's Talk: Analysis: Robert the Realist

Robert Gates, MSNBC, March 2009 (Video)
(On the Middle East, Southeast Asian developments, Russia)

Analysis by Patrick Hogan. March 10, 2009
(Creative Commons photo, Ohmygov.com)

As a candidate, President Barack Obama was oftentimes perceived as peddling an overly idealistic foreign policy. Take, for example, his argument in favor of unconditional negotiations with “rogue” nations like North Korea or Iran, a stance derided by the McCain campaign and others as dangerously naïve.

Yet realism --the idea that states conduct their foreign policy in order to achieve greater power and security with minimal moral or ethical motivations-- plays a larger role than is sometimes appreciated in the current White House's thinking. This is evidenced in several ways, the least of which isn't President Obama's choice of the very realist Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense. In a recent interview of Gates by David Gregory on NBC’s Meet the Press, one can witness the early days of a realist Obama foreign policy, and a move away from the neoconservative idealism of former President George W. Bush.

It has become cliché to refer to the war in Iraq as the archetypal neoconservative, idealist venture, and a realist turn in foreign policy by the Obama administration will likely mean Iraq will no longer be at the center of the United States' Middle East policy. The president recently committed to a firm 19-month timetable for withdrawal of all combat troops from the country, and when asked if the president might halt that withdrawal in the face of changing circumstances in Iraq, Gates responded: “he always retains the flexibility to change a plan or adjust it, if he thinks it’s in the national security [interests] of the United States.”

So Washington's new focus will be Afghanistan, a war that many realists, as opposed to their opinions on the Iraq war, were widely supportive of from the start. Many felt a real duty to shut down a terrorist safe-haven and thus better secure America from outside threats. Gates himself called Afghanistan “the greatest military challenge” facing the United States, although he also cautioned against the idea that major gains will be made in the country in the short-term.

Iran on the other hand is one nation about which both the Bush and Obama administrations can be said to have shared a realist approach (insofar as both administrations treated Iran as a threat to American security). Gates acknowledged this in his interview, saying: “I don’t think either the last administration or the current one have been distracted from the current problem of Iran and its nuclear program.” The difference may be, however, in the approaches taken in dealing with this threat.

The question, as Defense Secretary Gates puts it, then becomes “how do you get the Iranians to walk away from a nuclear weapons program”? As a chair of the Council on Foreign Relations’ 2004 Iran Task Force, Gates recommended a more open engagement with the country. Stymied in this goal by George W. Bush, Gates has now found a partner in President Obama, who shares his logic that a pacified, engaged Iran may calm tensions in the region writ large (including in Afghanistan).

With the new administration seeking greater engagement with Tehran (Secretary of State Clinton's appointment of Dennis Ross as special adviser on Iran is an example), the neoconservative, regime-change rhetoric of the Bush years has been replaced, for the time being, with a realist approach that seeks to merely to maximize security, without seeking to topple Tehran's leadership.

How long will this realist marriage last?

Gates came into the job with expectations that he would assist President Obama in his foreign policy transition for about a year, then leave the Pentagon. Although there seems to be symmetry between both men’s international outlook, Gates responded to a question about his departure by saying that carrying on to the end of Obama’s first term “would be a challenge.”

More humorously, when asked about the differences of working for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Gates simply replied: “that sounds like the subject of a good book.”

One thing is certain, both realists and idealists will be looking forward to reading it.