Matt Yglesias: Over the years, I've heard a number of different members of your team
refer to your kind of philosophy in foreign affairs as realism. Is that a term you would use?
Barack Obama: You know, traditionally, a lot of American foreign policy has been divided
into the realist camp and the idealist camp and so if you're an idealist you're like Woodrow
Wilson and you're out there with the League of Nations and imagining everybody holding
hands and singing Kumbaya.
And if you're a realist, then you're supporting dictators who happen to be our friends.
And I just don't think that describes what a smart foreign policy should be.
What I do think what is accurate in describing my foreign policy is
we don't have military solutions to every problem in the 21st century. The biggest
challenge that we have right now is disorder.
Ending two wars was important, not because I was under any illusions that that
would mean we wouldn't have any terrorist threat. It does mean, though, that by not
having 180,000 people in Iraq and Afghanistan, it frees us up to be able to send a team to prevent Ebola.
To double down on our investments in things like cyber security. To look at the new threats
and opportunities that are out there.
And that's in no way a concession to this idea that America is withdrawing or there's
not much we can do. It's just a realistic assessment of how the world works.
Matt Yglesias: You seemed to resist the realist label earlier, but when you talked about your goals in the Middle East,
you seemed very concerned about disorder. And you didn't mention anything
like democracy or human rights and the countries you talked about partnering with, it's places
like Egypt where they came to power in a military coup, Saudi Arabia, with public beheadings,
Bahrain, where during the Arab Spring they were beating nonviolent demonstrators and
repressing that violently, do you have any concerns about those sort of long term sustainability
of those kind of partnerships?
This is a perfect example, Matt, of where the division between realism and idealism
kind of breaks down.
I am a firm believer that particularly in this modern internet age, the capacity of
the old-style authoritarian government to sustain itself just is gonna continue to weaken.
But in those conversations, I'm also going to acknowledge that for a country that say
has no experience in democracy or has no functioning civil society or where the most organized
factions are, you know, religious sects, that progress is going to be happening
in steps as opposed to in one big leap.
Tthe goal of any good foreign policy is having a vision and aspirations
and ideals, but also recognizing the world as it is, where it is, and figuring out how
do you tack to the point where things are better than they were before.
That doesn't mean perfect. It just means it's better.