The Conservative Realism of Obama's Foreign Policy

Neoconservatism has its roots in the left. Its signature foreign policy event - the invasion in Iraq - is grounded in liberalism, not conservatism. The idea that you can quickly and easily remake the world in America's image and spread freedom and democracy is the sort of enormously idealistic and interventionist thinking that you would expect from a "bleeding-heart liberal". Obama favors the traditional conservatism most recently exemplified by George H. W. Bush. Fareed Zakaria:

Obama talks admiringly of men like Dean Acheson, George Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr, all of whom were imbued with a sense of the limits of idealism and American power to transform the world. "In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative," wrote Larissa MacFarquhar in her profile of him for The New Yorker. "There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It's not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good."