Jeane Kirkpatrick’s Realism: Still Relevant After 40 Years

By Joseph Duggan May 3rd, 2019

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” an astute critique of what was then the United States foreign policy establishment’s outlook. On reading the essay, anti-establishment Republican Ronald Reagan invited the Georgetown University political science professor and lifelong Democrat to become a senior foreign policy advisor to his 1980 campaign for president.

As she observed, the prevailing worldview among both liberal Democrats and establishment Republicans was that “events are manifestations of deep historical forces which cannot be controlled and that the best any government can do is to serve as a ‘midwife’ to history, helping events to move where they are already headed.”

This perspective on contemporary events, Kirkpatrick wrote, “is optimistic in the sense that it foresees continuing human progress; deterministic in the sense that it perceives events as fixed by processes over which persons and policies can have but little influence; moralistic in the sense that it perceives history and U.S. policy as having moral ends; cosmopolitan in the sense that it attempts to view the world not from the perspective of American interests or intentions but from the perspective of the modernizing nation.”

She took aim at the Jimmy Carter Administration and Washington establishment’s “moralism, which renders it especially vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy” and its “predilection for policies that violate the strategic and economic interests of the United States.”............To Read More....