In August of 1991, when the Baltic states were about to break free from Moscow’s control and the Soviet Union itself seemed close to dissolution, Bush visited Ukraine. He used the occasion, however, to warn his Kiev audience about the dangers of “suicidal nationalism.” He was ridiculed for this speech—it was labelled the “Chicken Kiev” speech—and it did nothing to slow the Soviet republics’ momentum toward independence.

Natan Sharansky is now allied with the neoconservative camp, and he cites the Chicken Kiev speech as a typical instance of realist policymaking. A book that he wrote last year, “The Case for Democracy,” came to national attention when George W. Bush told the Washington Times, “If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy, read Natan Sharansky’s book ‘The Case for Democracy.’ . . . It’s a great book.”

Sharansky argues that the United States would best serve its own interests by choosing as allies only countries that grant their citizens broad freedoms, because only democracies are capable of living peacefully in the world. In Kiev, “America had missed a golden opportunity,” Sharansky wrote in a chapter criticizing the President’s father. George H. W. Bush’s Administration, he said, “was not the first nor will it be the last to try to stifle democracy for the sake of ‘stability.’ Stability is perhaps the most important word in the diplomat’s dictionary. In its name, autocrats are embraced, dictators are coddled and tyrants are courted.”

In September, Sharansky was in Washington at the invitation of Condoleezza Rice; he gave the closing speech at a State Department conference on democratization. “Can you believe it?” he said to me just before the session. “Rice gave the opening speech and I give the closing?” Of his complicated relations with the Bush family, he said, “A few days after my book comes out, I get a call from the White House. ‘The President wants to see you.’ So I go to the White House and I see my book on his desk. It is open to page 210. He is really reading it. And we talk about democracy. This President is very great on democracy. At the end of the conversation, I say, ‘Say hello to your mother and father.’ And he said, ‘My father?’ He looked very surprised I would say this.” Sharansky went on, “So I say to the President, ‘I like your father. He is very good to my wife when I am in prison.’ And President Bush says, ‘But what about Chicken Kiev?’ ” Sharansky smiled as he recounted this story. “The President looked around the room and said, ‘Who is responsible for that Chicken Kiev speech? Find out who wrote it. Who is responsible?’ Everyone laughed.” Sharansky paused, and looked at me intently. He had a broad grin. “I know who wrote Chicken Kiev speech,” he said. “It was Scowcroft!”

Scowcroft may have had a hand in the speech, but when I asked George H. W. Bush about it he answered as if it had been his own idea. “I got hammered on the Kiev speech by the right wing and some in the press, but in retrospect I think the Baltic countries understood that we were being cautious vis-à-vis the Soviet Union,” Bush said. “And their freedoms were established without a shot being fired.”

One day, I asked Scowcroft if he placed too much value on inaction. I had in mind the first Bush Administration’s record on Bosnia. Toward the end of Bush’s term, Yugoslavia was beginning to disintegrate. The Bush team was hesitant to intervene, or even to lift the arms embargo on the Bosnian Muslims, who were being murdered by Serbs. Lawrence Eagleburger, the acting Secretary of State, said at the time, “This tragedy is not something that can be settled from the outside, and it’s about damn well time that everybody understood that. Until the Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it.”

Scowcroft addressed the question with more delicacy than Eagleburger, but he didn’t disagree: there was only so much that the United States could do, he said. “I didn’t think it would break up,” he went on. “I didn’t think the hatred was so deep; I didn’t want to stir it up. I would have proposed that we go to the Yugoslavs and say, ‘It makes no sense for you to break up. Economically, you’re small as it is, but, if you’re going to break up, here are the rules. Here are the rules, and we’re going to insist on those rules.” The Bush Administration, in an echo of Chicken Kiev, was hoping, Scowcroft said, for Yugoslavia to stay together.

Richard Holbrooke, who negotiated the Bosnian peace accords on behalf of President Clinton, saw the Administration’s reluctance to take effective action in Yugoslavia as a failure of realism. “When the Cold War ended, the Bush people concluded that our strategic interests were not involved,” Holbrooke said. “And they turned their back on Yugoslavia just as it fell to its death. They said they determined that it had no strategic value, but, as it turns out, the Balkans still had strategic value and an overpowering humanitarian case as well.” A good foreign policy, Holbrooke believes, ought to “marry idealism and realism, effective American leadership and, if necessary, the use of force.”

The first Bush Administration did engage in one act of humanitarian interventionism, in Somalia, when it sent American troops to help feed starving civilians in Mogadishu. When I mentioned Somalia to Scowcroft as an example of idealism over national self-interest, he demurred, as if it were an accusation: a true realist does not employ the military for selfless humanitarian operations. The action in Somalia, Scowcroft said—at least in his view—was in America’s self-interest. “About four months before we went in, the President and I had a meeting with the U.N. Secretary-General, and he was saying that most of the world believes that the U.N. has become the instrument of Western powers. Here’s a chance to set that record straight. Here’s an underdeveloped state, a Muslim state, a black state, and here’s a chance to show the world that we are not acting in our self-interest.” In other words, the United States acted selflessly out of self-interest.

For Scowcroft, the principle is clear: by pragmatic standards, a humanitarian intervention without a strategic rationale is a mistake. And the experience in Somalia was a reminder that an intervention—even with the noblest motives—may end in humiliating failure. In part because of what happened in Somalia, the Clinton Administration did not intervene in Rwanda during a genocide in which an estimated eight hundred thousand people died. “A terrible situation—just tragic,” Scowcroft said of Rwanda. “But, before you intervene, you have to ask yourself, ‘If I go in, how do I get out?’ And you have to ask questions about the national interest.” Interventions have consequences, he argues, and Iraq is a case in point. “There are a lot of places in the world where injustice is taking place, and we can’t run around and fix all of them.”

Democrats like Holbrooke take issue with Republican realists. “Support for American values is part of our national-security interests, and it is realistic to support humanitarian and human-rights interventions,” Holbrooke said. Such Democrats differ from the Bush-style interventionists as well, particularly on the value of treaties and the importance of multilateral cooperation, although Holbrooke and Paul Wolfowitz have sounded very much alike at times; Wolfowitz, for instance, strongly supported a military option in Bosnia. “It’s important to realize how much can go wrong by doing nothing,” he said.

The experience in Iraq seems to have tempered the Administration’s impatience with coalition-building. There is more coöperation with America’s traditional allies and more willingness to work with other nations—with Europe in countering the nuclear ambitions of Iran, and with China in countering those of North Korea. The Administration, though, remains committed to the export of democracy, and is publicly optimistic about the future in Iraq. Wolfowitz, a leading proponent of the Iraq war, recently said, “Wilson thought you could take a map of Europe and say, ‘This is the way things are going to be.’ That was unrealistic, but the world has changed a lot in a hundred years. The fact is that people can look around and see the overwhelming success of representative government.”

For Scowcroft, the second Gulf war is a reminder of the unwelcome consequences of radical intervention, especially when it is attempted without sufficient understanding of America’s limitations or of the history of a region. “I believe in the fallibility of human nature,” Scowcroft told me. “We continually step on our best aspirations. We’re humans. Given a chance to screw up, we will.” ♦