Response to "What is Progressive Realism" ["But the article was essentially about describing the differences between schools of thought while obviously giving evidence the author thought supported a different school than has predominated and was making a case for trying something different"]

Robert Wright in the 2nd paragraph makes "realist" a synonym for Kissinger's cynical "realpolitik", thus loading any "realist" with the baggage of Kissinger's policies in Vietnam, turning a blind eye to disaster in Indonesia, et al. A rather tawdry piece of smear and false equivalency. (To be clear, the level of human carnage in SE Asia and the expulsion of Commusts from Indonesia was huge - incomparable to the tolls we've seen in Mideast conflicts the last 20 years.)

But Wright pulls this off with a "Maybe McFaul had Kissinger in mind when he lamented the 'deaths and horrific repression' that past realists...." - or maybe McFaul didn't, and it's just Wright's fervent imagination leaping to smear by most distant association.

Wright leaves out McFaul's key sentence, "Realism is an ideology that produced millions of deaths & horrific repression over the centuries." - an expression that might include Mao's "to make an omelette you have to break a few eggs", efforts to "civilize" "backwards people" around the world, accommodate slavery in a new Constitution, Bismarck's approach to Europe & treaties, et al. Certainly not honed in on 1 particular Secretary of State from our Nixon years.

If this is Wright's "evidence" in "supporting a different school" (i.e. his version of "realists" before he trashes modern "progressive idealists", especially Biden appointees), he's off to a bad start. Note, the whole of McFaul's tweet:

It's obvious by paragraph #6 that the real target of this is to bash the choices of Blinken and Sullivan (and Obama in general) as blinkered idealists with blood on their hands. You'd think Neville Chamberlain would come up as such an idealist before 2 apparatchiks within a much more limited alliance, failed or not.
As this piece progresses, we'll see that it's not really introducing a new framework, but using a purported framework to beat the old dead horse with once again. Let's take this framework 1 by 1: