That seems to be the reaction of the great Dan Drezner over at the Washington Post. Ole Dan feels he just has to chuckle at the consternation of his “realist” colleagues, who find that you should be careful what you wish for, a problem, Dan tells us, for all foreign policy mavens.
This [the consternation expressed over Trump’s “we’re gettin’ outta Syria ASAP” tweets by everyone with a brain] reminds me of an exchange I had this year with a prominent realist scholar who shall remain nameless. I asked this person why they weren’t happier with the Trump administration, since the president seemed to be pursuing or talking up goals that realists like: forcing allies to do more, disentangling from the Middle East, pursuing a mercantilist trade policy, etc. This prominent realist then went on a rant about how Trump was doing everything incompetently and therefore was not really a realist.
Convenient for Dan that he should find a “prominent realist”/straw man whose basic tenets were “forcing allies to do more, disentangling from the Middle East, pursuing a mercantilist trade policy, etc.”, since I, as a self-identified “realist”, don’t believe that we should force our allies to do more or pursue a mercantilist policy, and also don’t believe that Donald Trump is disentangling from the Middle East, since he has “doubled down” on President Obama’s already abysmal backing of Saudi Arabia’s brutal and disastrous war in Yemen (but at least they’re buying lots of weapons!) and has embarked on a bizarre and compulsive collision course with Iran.
Furthermore, the post conveniently leaves the actual views of the great Dan Drezner shrouded from public view. While Dan gets a good chuckle over the neocons who supported George Bush’s invasion of Iraq even though they thought the invasion force should have been larger (if that’s what they actually thought), did Dan feel we should have invaded with a larger force, or rather should not have invaded at all? He also snickers at Obama’s “liberal internationalist” supporters who were stuck with their man’s policies in Libya and Syria, though Dan doesn’t even bother to say what it was they would have preferred or what he would have preferred.
The notion that Trump is a “realist” at all strikes me as, uh, pretty unreal, and the notion that he is the "best" the realists are going to get even more so, though it’s certainly convenient once more for Mr. Drezner, who somehow doesn't like realists very much, though exactly how they offend him isn't all that clear. Well, you know what they say about the politics of the academic world—the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small—though, in fact, it's not the stakes that are so small, but the world. But it’s all Dan has.
Afterwords
For some "facts" (probably) about the Syrian situation, try Wesley Morgan at Politico and Heather Hurlburt at New York magazine.
UPDATE
Actual "realist" Daniel Larison (aka "the Good Daniel") explains how grossly unrealistic, not to say disastrous Donald Trump's foreign policy has been.
