The 19th century ended, as we all know, not in 1900 but 14 years later, when Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo — and the world promptly went mad. In a similar way, the 20th century did not end until this very year, when, among other things, President Barack Obama implied that he would not rule out talking with more moderate elements of the Taliban. What Henry Luce called “the American century” is over.

Obama’s apparent willingness to divide the Taliban into awful and less awful is just the latest sign that a sterile but necessary realism has settled over American foreign policy. In recent days alone, the Obama administration has indicated that it is willing — for the moment — to hold its tongue regarding China’s voluminous human rights abuses and has hit the “reset button” on relations with Moscow, Vladimir Putin’s neo-Stalinist fits notwithstanding. As for Israel’s insistence on expanding West Bank settlements, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced it as “unhelpful” — a whisper of a rebuke that, in the transcript, should have been rendered in italics.

The Obama administration is talking to the Syrians. It is willing to talk to the Iranians. It will parley with the North Koreans. It has kicked the wheels off the “axis of evil” and has, in general, shied from the lofty language of the Bush years, especially all that stuff about wars on terrorism and spreading democracy. This is an administration to bring a lump to the throat of Brent Scowcroft, the arch realist, who has never mistaken foreign policy for missionary work, even though they both usually take place abroad.

... contd.