"it seems likely that the Wilsonian project that the U.S. foreign policy establishment has long embraced will get a shot in the arm"

Professor Walt makes a common error here. Wilson believe in no such thing as democracy for non-White people. He believed, as was common at the time, particularly in your own institution of Harvard that White people were literally infected with at Teutonic Gene that made self governance a trait that they exclusively possessed.

I don't know how Wilson gets this credit, especially when discussing the Middle East when he never considered those people were worthy of self-governance. He was perhaps a shade less repugnant than some of his contemporaries, but the term "Wilsonian" is totally misapplied here.

"3. Isn't it odd that Professor Walt, a realist, would embrace realism's opposite, Wilsonianism"

Your error rate is pretty low but I do not think Walt is embracing Wilsonianism here.

Non-democratic countries are by definition not liberal and the West doesn't generally attempt FIRC against other liberal states. Liberal thought is a relativity recent development that is still evolving. To say that Thomas Jefferson wasn't a "liberal" because he had slaves is a silly argument. Jefferson was the epitome of liberal in the 18th century. Wilson, just because he was a racist, didn't mean he wasn't a flaming liberal in 1920. Liberalism implies certain things: people are equal, have rights, can own and use property, government is a contract between free people and should be limited. Most societies and cultures in the history of the world were not liberal. But liberal ideas are very seductive to people who don't live in liberal societies because they don't have any of the above. And societies who adopt liberal tenets generally outproduce the essentially slave societies they are competing against. Liberal societies are successful and, while there are serious problems with the above, they are the best of the horrible alternatives. Realism works, but only to a point. When societies are infected with the liberal virus they slowly and inevitably turn because most people, and people are needed to run a modern society, like to own stuff and be treated like people and not slaves. States that run on the purely realist model will fail, in the 21st century, and we can either help with the infection or we can wait and watch as those nations go through the bloody transformation themselves. But there is no telling what those future nations will think of us if we sit idly on the sidelines. And what will we think of ourselves as we watch millions die for the freedoms we now possess? And for those who think the US "earned" their liberty by themselves they need to seriously review their Revolutionary War history. If it wasn't for the French we would still be speaking English.

PS. Zionism is the most evil thing known to mankind! How dare Jews consider themselves a people after being told they are foreign nationals worldwide for 2000 years!

I still don't understand what we "won" here, or how Libya qualifies as a success *for the US.* I think all this triumphalism emanating from the liberal interventionists comes from an inability to acknowledge a difference between success for the Libya rebels (who undoubtedly did succeed) and success for the US. So we achieved our war aims (overthrow Qaddafi, apparently, even though we began the war by explicitly ruling that out as a war aim), but how did those war aims benefit us? As Walt said in an earlier post, Libya is an unimportant country--who rules it and in what matter never particularly mattered to the US, and they still don't. It was worth it because we got rid of Qaddafi? First of all, I don't recall Clinton, or Bush the Younger, or Obama, or basically anyone at all ever even mentioning Qaddafi in any context prior to February of this year, and now suddenly he's this great monster who must be destroyed at all costs? The intervention was worthwhile because we "avenged" a handful of terrorist attacks that took place over 20 years ago? I see why overthrowing Qaddafi is good for Libya, but how is it good for the US? At best we're told some vague boilerplate about how it will generate "goodwill" toward us, or how it will unleash economic growth (again, how does economic growth in Libya affect the US, except through that fantastical "goodwill" again?), or that democracies never go to war with each other (although, when was Libya ever a prospect to go to war against the US?). If anything, Libya ought to have destroyed the notion that "feelings," whether goodwill or malice, play much of any role in IP. The Libyans hated our guts right until the moment at which they thought our actions might benefit them, at which point they turned on a dime to thinking well of us. Feelings, therefore, are manifestly a *product* of a political situation, not the political situation a product of the feelings. Ugh, I give up.

Kaplan’s world view is essentially Machiavellian which doubtless explains his popularity in certain corridors. Neither realism nor idealism stands up on its own. They are not opposites but component elements of our make up and the words themselves simply identify the fact that we function subjectively and objectively, we feel and we think It is only possible in theory to act without feeling or act without thinking (although FPREALIST’s effusions above might seem to contradict the latter). It is the historian’s task to determine the ratios involved in bringing about those events that have taken place and therefore can no longer be known, only believed with varying degrees of reasonable doubt, or none, and that is what Kaplan is doing.

Since the war, thousands have died and massive amount of infrastructure has been destroyed. Considering that Libya is made up of tribes there is a good possibility of ethnic conflict coming in home projects once the dust settles. For the average citizen of libya it will take months if not years to return to the standard of living he/she has enjoyed before. How is this win for them?