FDR's children.

• Author: Gvosdev, Nikolas K.

Dennis Ross, Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 384 pp., $26.00.

Amitai Etzioni, Security First: For a Muscular; Moral Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 336 pp., $27.00.

Nina Hachigian and Mona Sutphen, The Next American Century: How the U.S. Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 368 pp., $26.00.

NEARLY ALL of the 2008 presidential candidates--both Democrats and Republicans--have made some version of "restoring America's global leadership" a key foreign-policy priority. Dennis Ross, Amitai Etzioni, Nina Hachigian and Mona Sutphen have plenty of advice to offer--and their recommendations seem to parallel those often heard from "Republican realists." But aren't these authors on the other side of the aisle? The Washington Post identifies Dennis Ross as a foreign-policy advisor for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama; Amitai Etzioni is a long-standing member of the progressive community (and served in the Carter White House); Nina Hachigian and Mona Sutphen were part of the Clinton foreign-policy apparatus (and Hachigian is now based at the Center for American Progress).

But why should this approach to U.S. foreign policy be considered outside the mainstream of the Democratic Party? After all, one of the defining figures for the Democrats in the modern era-Franklin D. Roosevelt--would feel quite comfortable with the proposals laid out here. Paul Starobin, in his 2006 National Journal essay on foreign-policy realism, identified FDR as the "most cunning (and successful) realist ever to occupy the White House"--this, the president who co-authored the Atlantic Charter, with its vision of a world at peace, defined by free states. But FDR balanced his idealism-his hopes for a globe defined by his Four Freedoms--with a realistic assessment of what could be achieved in a given space of time. Unlike those British idealists who in 1940 called for war against both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (under the assumption that both were totalitarian dictatorships), Roosevelt worked in stages--allying with the Soviet Union to ensure the liberation of Western Europe in 1945 and laying conditions for the eventual spread of freedom elsewhere. Susan Butler, who produced an edited volume of FDR's correspondence with Stalin, observed, "Roosevelt wanted to win the war; he wanted to win the peace that followed." Ross, Etzioni, Hachigian and Sutphen are the heirs of FDR's vision and approach.

Ross takes his service in two administrations (those of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton) to produce a series of case...