Obama abroad: Democratic realism

„Something important has happened to President Obama’s foreign policy. For some time after he took office, he only rarely spoke out for human rights or used the word »democracy«. In the wake of the George W. Bush years, he was focused on rebuilding alliances and moving toward both a more measured and prudent use of American power. It was an approach much closer to the old-fashioned realism practiced by the first President Bush.

Overall, it was a change for the better. But for a while, it seemed that the administration decided that because the second President Bush used democracy promotion as a rationale for a mistaken war in Iraq, too much democracy talk might be a bad thing. This was the wrong conclusion. Those who think of themselves as progressives should never avoid their obligations to democracy — even if there are both prudential and moral limits to America’s capacity to impose it on others.

This is evolving, as Clinton’s excellent week brought home. Like the elder Bush, Obama remains a foreign policy realist, but the Arab Spring may have encouraged him to speak ever more forcefully about democracy and human rights. The intervention in Libya — careful, limited, but effective — was a signal moment.”