The World as it is: Does Reality Count?

[PosterChild]

Obama, The Realist

More than five years into Obama’s presidency, the single word that best sums up his foreign policy is “realist”—in some cases, as one former adviser told me, “hard-nosed,” even “cold” realist.

Much can be explained by what might seem the most unlikely source—his truly seminal years as a community organizer in Chicago, working for an outfit modeled explicitly on the principles of Saul Alinsky....

Alinsky stressed this as his No. 1 rule: “As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. … That means working in the system. … We will start with the system because there is no other place to start from except political lunacy"

....This realism—starting with the world as it is, in order to make effective changes—runs as a near-constant thread through Obama’s presidency. He articulated this view early on, in a speech that, several aides say, he worked on the longest and wrote almost entirely on his own—his Dec. 10, 2009, Nobel Peace Prize lecture in Oslo...

“The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace,” Obama said at one point. The global security of the post-World War II era, he added, was achieved not just by peace treaties, but by “the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.” To acknowledge the occasional necessity for force, he went on, isn’t an act of cynicism but “a recognition of history, the imperfection of man and the limits of reason”—the world as it is.