If you can promote democratic ideals while enhancing your power and protecting your core national interests, fine and dandy, but foreign policy shouldn't be driven by ideals. Stability, some would argue, is a better bet for promoting such ideals anyway. They stuck with Gorbachev as their preferred Russian leader far longer than was warranted by his international stature or his influence and popularity within the then-Soviet Union. What the two schools have in common, of course, is a thoroughgoing conviction that superior, educated and cosmopolitan folk like themselves should be running the world. You can't trust mere elected officials to have a broader view, and you certainly can't place any confidence in the Great Unwashed common people to have any insight worth listening to on foreign policy.
Foreign policy is viewed as the realm of an enlightened elite.
Members of this elite might disagree among themselves, often quite vigorously, on general philosophy or particular policies in particular contexts. At the same time, and especially since World War II and the breakup of older European overseas empires, we have seen a proliferation of smaller states. These organizations almost always have a centralizing impact, at least insofar as they concentrate power in the hands of a floating pool of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, Geneva, New York, or elsewhere. I n East Timor this tension can be seen, almost as in a test case. Indonesia was ruled by the Dutch, East Timor by the Portuguese.