Stephen Walt has an excellent albeit incomplete piece in Foreign Policy magazine that raises an important question: What accounts for the lack of anti-interventionist voices in the "mainstream" media?

Walt uses the term "realist" as a synonym for anti-interventionist, in part because Foreign Policy is a quasi-academic journal, and in part because Walt is one of the leading advocates of the realist school, i.e. the school that sees foreign policy as a function of states vying for power in a world where good intentions don't account for much. "Realism," of course, is a very broad label, one that includes figures as disparate as Henry Kissinger, on the one hand, and, Andrew Bacevich on the other. In short, it is not so much a stance as a methodology – a way of looking at the world from which one can derive a variety of different policy conclusions. Given this caveat, however, one can say that the realist school is inherently more cautious than its rivals – liberal internationalism and neoconservatism – when it comes to intervening in foreign conflicts.