Many Americans are sick of expedience - your "real world" - at the expense of the ideal. We have the capacity to avoid compromising what is best to end up with something we can live with.
BTW, Patton wanted to use the leftover Germans to fight the Russians and MacArthur wanted to nuke Beijing. Imagine the millions of lives that would have been saved had we taken their initiative instead of deciding we could live with the Communist threat.
We live in the present. We import 60% of our oil. Yes, we need to be energy independent, but that is going to take a long time and our political leadership has proven to be impotent. We can't even exploit our own natural resources because of environmental concerns.
Many Americans are sick of expedience - your "real world" - at the expense of the ideal. We have the capacity to avoid compromising what is best to end up with something we can live with.
That is all well and good. But who is going to bell the cat? Capacity represents potential, but until we realize that potential, we must exist the best way we can. We are in a competition for oil, which is experiencing rising demand due to the rising affluence of the Chinese and others and a world population that increases annually by 57 million, which is the equivalent of adding a new Italy every year.