... Lest there be any confusion about the inclinations of the former general [Brent Scowcroft] with whom so many "progressive" voices have found common cause, his approach to foreign policy resembles that of a man who, on seeing an elderly woman being bludgeoned on the sidewalk, crosses to the other side of the street. This is the man, after all, who toasted the architects of the Tiananmen Square massacre not six months after they perpetrated it. Who found it "painful to watch Yeltsin rip the Soviet Union brick by brick away from Gorbachev." Who counseled sitting on the sidelines as Saddam Hussein massacred the very Shia his administration had encouraged to rise up. Who says that "some people really don't want to be free." And who rightly calls himself "a cynic about human nature."

Cynicism, alas, is enjoying a vogue in the party of Woodrow Wilson. "Just as Scowcroft is doing," Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen points out, "it is the Democrats who often speak the language of realism that seems downright uncaring." That language first emerged last year during the presidential campaign, when John Kerry lectured on the futility of tending "to see other people in the context of our history, our own hopes, our own aspirations." Democracy promotion, he said, would have to take a backseat to "general stability in the Middle East." After all, Kerry said, in an echo of Jeane Kirkpatrick's famous argument that the United States shouldn't push too hard to democratize "friendly" dictatorships, "You have to put your priorities first." Kerry adviser Richard Holbrooke chimed in, mocking President Bush's aspiration "to change the world" and his "sloppy neo-Wilsonianism."

Wilson, indeed, has become enemy number one among liberals. Lampooning Bush's commitment to mounting "a massive democratic revolution throughout the Arab world," Gary Hart scoffs, "The extravagance, not to say arrogance, of this epic undertaking is sufficiently breathtaking in its hubris to make Woodrow Wilson blush." The complaint here isn't with the Bush team's execution of its project to export democracy. It is with the idea itself. "It is perhaps a seduction peculiar to liberalism, which wants to believe the best about human nature," Matthew Yglesias and Sam Rosenfeld write in the liberal American Prospect, "to ignore the tragic character of much of the world--and to reflexively interpret the failures of an ambitious social-engineering endeavor as evidence of bad technocratic management rather than mistaken premises." And if it was wooly-headed idealism that sucked us into Iraq, only hard-headed realism can get us out. In insisting on an immediate withdrawal, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes that "the question isn't whether things will be ugly after American forces leave Iraq. They probably will."

If that kind of hard-bitten worldview sounds familiar, then it should. After Vietnam, as now, liberals reacted against the activism and ideological content of American foreign policy by retreating into realism. What America really needed, Arthur Schlesinger argued in the 1980s, was "a prudent balance-of-power foreign policy confined to vital interests of the United States." None of this, indeed, comes as anything new. Every time America goes to war, it unearths a contradiction at the heart of American liberalism. The contradiction pits the liberal ideal that discourages impinging on the autonomy of others against the liberal ideal that no people ought to be governed without their consent--and that liberals ought therefore to support the democratic aspirations of foreign peoples. The tension between the two manifests itself in every war, with liberals who heeded Hans Morgenthau's admonition to mind our own business arguing that we have no right to violate the sovereignty of a Yugoslavia or an Iraq, while the descendants of Woodrow Wilson argue that to do otherwise would amount to a betrayal of liberalism....