In this month’s Standpoint, during the course of a long, rambling article John Bolton takes Obama to task for “rejecting American exceptionalism” and ‘sounding like a European’. On one level, this is barely-concealed code for ‘weak’, ‘effeminate’ and 'ineffectual', intended to conjure up images of appeasement and indecision in the face of evil, but at a deeper, philosophical level Bolton is objecting to the grand tradition of American realism, wrongly believing that this places him squarely within the mainstream and Obama somehow at odds with it. Quite how someone with such a flimsy grasp on the history and philosophy of American foreign policy can have risen to such a position of influence is beyond me, although ‘influence’ is perhaps the wrong word. He is certainly indulged by editors of magazines such as Standpoint and his arguments do resonate with large numbers of Americans, but as serious foreign policy analysis his argument is not worth a row of beans.Quite apart from the woeful lack of historical awareness and understanding at its core, at root, it rests on a set of crude dichotomies that simply fail to capture the full subtlety and range of thinking in the American realist tradition. Regular readers of this blog will know that I take a robustly realist line on these questions and so, as a way of pointing up some of the weaknesses in Bolton’s argument, I thought it might be useful just to map some of the main contours of American realism so as to distinguish it sharply from Bolton’s caricature.
If there is a core commitment in the realist tradition of American foreign policy, it is to the idea of the Kantian peace and to democracy as a constituent element of it. This is America's enduring orientation. It is her organising principle, her idée fixe. In truth, it is the cornerstone of all the great American foreign policy traditions, from the most messianic interventionism right the way through to isolationism. The central question thrown up by this core set of beliefs is whether America should be exemplar or crusader - whether it could best ensure its security by promoting its values abroad, that is, by seeking to remake the world in its image, or rather by serving as ’exemplar' - the city upon a hill. This is a question of means, rather than ends. On the core commitment to democracy, all Americans are agreed. The important point for our purposes is that the realist version of this doctrine, in sharp contrast to some of the more messianic formulations, is not predicated on the idea of America as a uniquely virtuous power and does not lapse into the narrow solipsism of the argument from exceptionalism, but rather on an analysis of the international system.
It is a theory of foreign policy behaviour, not a eulogy to the American character. For it, the benefits of democracy are to be measured in terms of its rationalising effect upon state behaviour. Crucially, America's position in the world is due not to providence, but rather to a combination of her capabilities and her geographical isolation. For realists, the singularity of the American experience is grounded in more objective factors and the American story more prosaic than the traditional argument from exceptionalism allows. This more sober analysis allows them to retain their commitment to the democracy agenda whilst avoiding what Henry Kissinger called the kind of ‘freewheeling’ interventionism that has historically led her to assume levels of risk wholly unwarranted by her national interests or by any rational long-term strategic objective. Substituting moral absolutes for strategic judgement, as John Bolton would have us do, is a fast lane to strategic overextension and moral and psychological exhaustion. The historical record is quite clear on this point, but American conservatism seems institutionally incapable of grasping it. 
The problem is that we are no longer trained to think geostrategically. The great 20th century ideologies crowded out the kind of sober geopolitical analysis of the 19th century. The great European traditions of realpolitik and raison d’etat having given way to the passions and the furies of the 20th century, to the transformative diplomacies of Wilsonianism and revolutionary communism, we became used to thinking in terms of Manichean struggles between good and evil, accustomed to parsing strategy through the filter of one of the great ideological systems. The most urgent task for American foreign policy is to recover this earlier tradition, transcend the sterile debate about American exceptionalism, eschew the sort of moral, philosophical and religious categories at the centre of Bolton’s analysis in favour of geopolitical ones and view America not as sui generis, but rather as a great power like any other. This is an analysis America’s earliest Presidents and foreign policy thinkers broadly shared. The early Presidents studiously avoided foreign entanglements, preferring to maintain a studied neutrality on the big foreign policy issues of the day and famously warning against going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. And so, far from Obama being the first “post-American president”, in truth he is returning to what is her oldest and most enduring tradition. Bolton, of course, does not want to hear this argument, because it underlines the case for a diplomacy that acknowledges limits. And Bolton is not a man to accept limits. But in this, he is the one that stands outside of the mainstream, not Obama.