Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Ideas / The real world
IT'S NOT HARD THESE days to find a magazine full of articles contending that the United States under George W. Bush has shattered important alliances, launched an ill-advised imperial project, and pursued a reckless, unnecessary war. But lately, such claims don't just fill left-leaning publications like The Nation. They also animate this summer's issue of The National Interest, a conservative foreign affairs quarterly whose contributors argue that the United States underestimates European power and risks overstretching its economic resources abroad.
In fact, a deep foreign policy rift has opened within the Republican party. On one side are the aggressive, idealistic hawks who advocated the war in Iraq and talk of a democracy domino effect in the Middle East. On the other are pragmatic realists who disdain Bush's foreign policy not because they think it's immoral but because they think it's imprudent.