Right Vision, Wrong Policy -- and a Mideast Price to Pay

President Bush lost more than a midterm election and a cantankerous defense secretary last week. He also abandoned any lingering chance of remaking U.S. foreign policy into a radical force for democratic change in the Middle East and elsewhere.

He had to. The American electorate showed emphatically that it had lost faith in his party and his promises. Bush's refreshing generic denunciations of foreign dictators -- including those who played ball with Washington -- could not make up for his failure to produce positive visible results to support the rhetoric. He needed an immediate firebreak, and so he named Bob Gates to replace Don Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.

History's seemingly unlimited store of irony now makes Bush 43 the evident instrument of the resurgence of the "realist" school of foreign policy so beloved of Bush 41 and so regularly scorned by this president -- until he turned to it for salvation in Iraq and elsewhere.

Many will revel in this turn, and there is rough familial justice at work: Only the incompetence and discord of the past three years could cause reasonable people to welcome back with applause policymakers who failed to anticipate and then opposed the breakup of the Soviet Union; who were not realistic enough to see, much less prevent, the Balkans from plunging into flames; and who "coddled dictators from Beijing to Baghdad," as the Democrats once accurately described the handiwork of Brent Scowcroft, Bob Gates and Jim Baker under Bush 41.

So hold the champagne and cheers for the return of "realism," a word that has even less meaning than most of the labels that politicians, journalists and academics attach to schools of foreign policy. It is too often a euphemism for cynicism, for playing for time and for passing up big opportunities that carry high risks and potentially great rewards. Bush 43 took such a risk in Iraq and now pays the price for failing to develop anything resembling a Plan B.

Replacing Rumsfeld's abrasiveness and his now-aborted designs for military transformation with the safe hands and bureaucratic blandness of Gates, an ex-CIA chief formed by the Cold War, may give the White House a chance to get control of an interagency process that went off the rails in Iraq. One of Rumsfeld's last internal victories was to block an effort by Josh Bolten, Bush's chief of staff, to bring Gen. David Petraeus into the White House to coordinate Iraq policy.

But the problems of Iraq are so deep today that improved policy coordination in Washington will not fix them. That will become even clearer in mid-December when the Iraq Study Group headed by Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton is due to deliver its findings and recommendations and, in the process, provide Bush with a second firebreak from rising opposition to the war.

Baker is, in fact, the smartest political operator Washington has seen in the past three decades. So he is too clever to put much stock in abstractions such as "realism" or "Wilsonian" democracy. The clearest foreign policy achievements of the Bush 41 administration turned on Baker's relentless dealmaking, from the Madrid Middle East peace conference to German reunification and management of the consequences of the Soviet collapse in Eastern Europe.

But even Baker will have to struggle to keep the faux realism of conventional thinking on the Middle East from making the study group's report instantly irrelevant. There was a time when let's-pretend policies -- championing regional or international peace conferences doomed to go nowhere, or naming special U.S. envoys to give Arab rulers a bone to toss to their publics -- usefully bought time, even though they were anything but realistic for the long term.

For better and for worse, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran's quest for nuclear weapons, and the bloody breakdown of Israel's occupation of the Palestinians have accelerated a profound radicalization of the Middle East that had already been unleashed by the pressures of globalization. Trying to get back to the 1990s is another bridge to nowhere.

Baker-Hamilton will certainly recommend that the United States urgently develop the regional and international structures to guide change that Bush has neglected, and the president must act on that advice.

But Bush's going on the defensive does not mean that the radical positive changes he had hoped for cannot come about on their own, even if on a different timetable and with much greater costs than he ever imagined. True realism lies in recognizing that his diagnosis of a crumbling order in the Middle East was sound, even if his prescriptions were not. jimhoagland@washpost.com