When the former American ambassador Charles “Chas” Freeman last week decided not to accept his appointment as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, many people, particularly in the Middle East, put this down to the workings of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. Mr Freeman, in a departing salvo, substantiated that interpretation. However, his Arab defenders paid little attention to the ambassador’s observations of how the Chinese authorities dealt with the Tiananmen “incident” (Mr Freeman’s words) in 1989, and what this said about how political “realists” like him approach American policy in the Arab world.

In comments on the Chinese government’s repression of the student protests posted to an e-mail list in 2006, Mr Freeman argued that the government’s error was to have wasted too much time before clearing Tiananmen Square. The ambassador wrote, “I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be. Such folk, whether they represent a veterans’ ‘Bonus Army’ or a ‘student uprising’ on behalf of ‘the goddess of democracy’ should expect to be displaced with dispatch [sic] from the ground they occupy.”

Political realists like Mr Freeman pride themselves on being able to dispassionately assess national interests, and pursue them with relative amorality, so that the advancement of values and human rights are important only in their impact on reasons of state. That explains his affixing quotation marks around the words “goddess of democracy” in his e-mail, a way of ridiculing the symbol held up at the time by students, whose “propaganda” demanding a more open Chinese system was distasteful for having disrupted “the normal functions of government”.

Oddly, the ambassador’s smugness prompted his supporters to maintain that he was ideal to head the National Intelligence Council, because he could “think outside the box”. In fact the template of his foreign policy judgments remains not only squarely “inside the box”, it is also dated and in some ways reactionary. For whether Mr Freeman likes it or not, in the past decade and a half, concepts like democracy, liberal internationalism, human rights and humanitarian intervention have become mainstays of foreign policy thinking, even when they are hypocritically implemented.

This raises a broader question of how American realists should tackle the Middle East. For over half a century, Mr Freeman was very much a by-product of the mainstream view in Washington that it was not up to the United States to concern itself with the internal conduct of its Arab allies. If a leader useful to Washington repressed his own people, then that was his business. The attitude was grim, certainly, and the US had dozens of useless programmes to bolster Arab civil society and democracy to mitigate any criticism of its selfishness, but realpolitik authorised it.

Where the realist paradigm broke down, however, was when the region’s despots, to enhance their standing at home, broke out of their borders and destabilised the region. That is what Saddam Hussein did in 1989, for example, when he invaded Kuwait. The administration of George HW Bush decided to reverse the assault, denying Iraq any supremacy over US allies in the Gulf, above all Saudi Arabia, where Mr Freeman happened to then be serving. Yet Mr Bush could not persuasively justify his decision to deploy American soldiers on the grounds of defending US national interests – for no one wanted to shed blood for oil – so he explained that the US was establishing a “new world order”. As we might recall, that only lasted until the old order returned when the US looked the other way as the Baathists crushed the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings.

That textbook illustration of realistic amorality came just before the arrival of the Clinton administration, which presided over a substantial change in the vernacular of international relations. The new American president was no liberal internationalist, and in places such as Rwanda, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Bill Clinton showed that he could be as craven or indifferent as the realists. However, there were two wars that the president, for domestic reasons, could not avoid, those in Bosnia and Kosovo; and in order to validate American involvement in them, Mr Clinton had to publicly embrace principles of humanitarian intervention.

This time, the principles stuck better. Success in the Balkans, but also the lingering guilt over the apathy in Rwanda, showed that more aggressive humanitarianism could pay off. The subsequent trial of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, seemed a further nail in the realist coffin. Leaders could now be held accountable for domestic abuses, laying a new, if shifting, foundation for international legal standards of behaviour.

With George W Bush, this trend continued, albeit haphazardly, particularly in the Middle East. His administration removed Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, ending the most sinister of dictatorships and installing a pluralist order on its ruins. In Lebanon, the US played an essential role in sponsoring the first United Nations investigation ever of a political murder, when the Security Council set up a commission in 2005 to look into the assassination of Rafiq Hariri. And when hundreds of thousands of people occupied the heart of Beirut for weeks, demanding a Syrian withdrawal, Mr Bush did not urge the authorities to clear Martyrs Square because this impaired the normal functions of government.

Mr Bush’s detractors accused him of duplicity, but they missed the point. It has become increasingly difficult for leaders of Western democracies to avoid mentioning human rights and democracy in rationalising their overseas behaviour. Political realism will not die. States won’t suddenly become moral Leviathans. However, the stripped down realism of a Mr Freeman, without an ounce of human sympathy or humour, is a thing of the past – as he himself, and much to our relief, has become.