Timothy Naftali of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum delivered the fifth of the 2007-2008 Bradley Lectures on January 14. Edited excerpts follow. A video and text of the lecture is available at www.aei.org/event1552/.

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, George Bush's realist tendencies began to have world-historical consequences. The record is quite clear that George Bush is responsible for making a unified Germany within NATO the goal of U.S. foreign policy in the wake of the collapse of the East German police state. He was the first in his administration to believe that objective possible. And it would be one of the greatest U.S. foreign policy accomplishments of the second half of the twentieth century.

In December 1989, Bush told Mikhail Gorbachev that despite its formal position, the United States would treat Lithuania as an internal matter. . . . The Bush administration swallowed hard and decided that the future of European security depended on keeping Gorbachev in charge of Soviet policy long enough to effect the unification of Germany and a pullback of Soviet troops from Europe. In May 1990, Gorbachev committed one of the great about-faces in international diplomacy. When Bush asked him whether he agreed that the Germans had a right to decide for themselves whether or not to join NATO, Gorbachev said that he agreed. In June, NATO admitted observers from the Warsaw Pact for the first time. And in July 1990, the Soviets fully embraced what had seemed impossible only months earlier: Eastern Germany in NATO.

Those of us who recall 1990-91 sensed an inevitability about it all. But in retrospect, there was nothing inevitable about the possibility that Gorbachev's conservative opponents would lose and Bush, Helmut Kohl, and the German people would win.

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A similarly grudging acceptance of realities can be seen in Bush's aims in the Persian Gulf War. I am convinced that George Bush had two war aims: first, getting Iraq out of Kuwait was his public goal, and second, getting Saddam out of the presidential palace in Baghdad was his private goal. He was convinced--and his advisers and moderate Arabs in the region believed this--that Saddam Hussein would not survive the war in power.

Bush's realism was never more reluctant than in his handling of his second war aim once the shooting began. There is no evidence that Bush's war council, the Gang of Eight, ever considered marching to Baghdad. Although they all hoped for regime change in 1991, what they were looking for was a military coup d'état led by a pliant Sunni general. When the Shia and the Kurdish uprisings began, British intelligence pressed for U.S. covert action. The Bush administration debated the matter but concluded that Iraq was destined to be an autocracy. Having just seen U.S. Marines die at the hands of Hezbollah due to the Reagan administration's pointless policy in Lebanon, Bush agreed with his advisers that Iraq would be an even worse tangle than Lebanon. So, while he publicly cheered the success of his policy, Bush was privately disappointed. He had wanted Saddam out, but the costs of doing so were too high and the consequences too unpredictable to make the decision wise.

So far as the world knew, the United States had completely succeeded in the Gulf War. Our country left the Gulf War with more soft power than it had had since the liberation of France began in 1944. The United States was considered an honest broker by Arab and Israeli alike; the emergent democracies of the post-Soviet empire rushed to imitate us. The cost was the containment of Saddam, but to the Bush 41 team, that was a small price to pay. As subsequent events have shown, it was.

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Like our greatest foreign policy presidents, Bush understood that limits do exist. He understood that legitimacy and coalitions could be force multipliers. This is not dewy-eyed idealism. This is the hard-headed realism that led Harry Truman, George Marshall, and Dean Acheson to create NATO; that convinced John F. Kennedy not to use force and to involve the Organization of American States in the blockade during the Cuban missile crisis; that led to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's triangular diplomacy in the 1970s and Ronald Reagan and George Shultz's pocketing of gains in 1987-88.

Americans are generally reluctant realists. Making choices based on assessments of power and recognizing limits is difficult for leaders of a country with a revolutionary heritage, an exceptionalist streak, and boundless optimism bred in the bone. The foreign policy leader who applied realism with the most gusto, Kissinger, saw himself more as the product of the European tradition of statecraft than of what some have called our "soulcraft." The elder George Bush did not relish saying "wait" to the Lithuanians in 1990 or "no" to the Iraqi Shia. He was not happy that Saddam had defied predictions and stayed in power. But when push came to shove, he made decisions based on larger considerations of national interest within a broader strategic calculus that tied ends to means. Most great American realists are reluctant, but that does not make them any less great when they are presidents.