Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World (Irving Kristol Lecture)

In this essay, delivered as the Irving Kristol Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute in February 2004, Charles Krauthammer examines four contending schools of American foreign policy: isolationism, liberal internationalism, realism, and democratic globalism. After analyzing the sources and merits of each school, he concludes that a variant of realism and democratic globalism, which he calls democratic realism, is best suited to America's position of preeminent power and the challenges of confronting and subduing Arab-Islamic fanaticism. We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity_meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.