Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser under both Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, died on Thursday. He was a great American. He served in the Air Force, taught, and worked in a variety of mostly defense-related posts as he advanced through the bureaucracy. Daniel DePetris is right that when it came to actually running things, Scowcroft set the standard. He welcomed internal debate, acted as a neutral arbiter, and gave the president a range of options.
Many eulogizers celebrated Scowcroft’s realism. “With Scowcroft now gone, foreign policy realists have lost their beloved dean,” DePetris wrote. He lauds the realist school of thought that Scowcroft embraced, “constantly on guard against hubris showing its ugly face and cognizant of America’s strengths as well as its limitations.”
