When Barack Obama nominated former Senator Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense, I assume that he knew what he was getting into. The debate over Hagel’s nomination won’t be about whether he is qualified to run the Pentagon and to negotiate budgets with Congress, but about Hagel’s views on Israel and Iran. Initially, some of Hagel’s critics charged that he was an anti-Semite. But these charges rightfully met with derision . Hagel’s principal critics in the Senate have adopted a different line: this his views are “out of the mainstream.”

“Quite frankly,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham says, “Chuck Hagel is out of the mainstream on most issues regarding foreign policy.” Citing Hagel’s views on Iran, Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn said he wouldn’t vote for him “because he’s certainly outside of the national security mainstream.” William Kristol’s Emergency Committee on Israel says Hagel’s views place him “well outside the American mainstream.” But in Washington, one politician’s mainstream is another politician’s creek. Hagel represents a distinct foreign policy that has prominent adherents in Washington’s foreign policy community and that can’t be dismissed as marginal or fringe by a few rightwing Republicans.

Hagel came by his views through reading—he is largely self-educated—and through reflection on his own experience in Vietnam. But by the onset of the Iraq War in 2003, he had arrived at similar conclusions to a group of former foreign policy officials that included Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Lee Hamilton, and Thomas Pickering. He has worked with them on reports and commissions, and all of them have endorsed his nomination. And they are just the most prominent names. A large, similarly inclined and well-attended discussion group, begun in the wake of the Iraq war by Washingtonians John Henry and C. Boyden Gray and composed partly of former officials, has been meeting for a decade.

These foreign policy officials are sometimes described as “realists.” And Hagel has described his own views as “principled realism.” But their kind of realism is really different from the academic realism of Kenneth Waltz, which focuses only on power relations between states, or even the Cold War realism of Henry Kissinger or Jeane Kirkpatrick, which condoned anti-communist autocracies. Hagel and the ex-officials understand realism to mean a “realistic”—as opposed to “reckless”—foreign policy. They don’t reject the idea that the world would be better if dictatorships became democracies, but they are very cautious about how the United States could bring that about.