A soldier at rest in the desert (shutterstock.com).Conservative Nationalism and American Statecraft
The Rise of Economic Illiberalism as Foreign Policy
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND: The headquarters of the World Trade Organization (EQRoy, shutterstock.com). Decline and Fall of China?
American Heresies and the Betrayal of the National Interest: A Conversation with Walter McDougall
Walter McDougall Responds: Woodrow Wilson as Seen through the Lenses of Bourne, Clausewitz, and Lodge
In response to: The Madness of Saint Woodrow: Or, What If the United States Had Stayed out of the Great War?
April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson declares to Congress that America would “make the world itself at last free.”My congratulations to Richard Reinsch for selecting this outstanding panel and thanks to the commentators for their fair and insightful reviews. All of them have addressed the topic for the standpoint of their particular expertise – church history in Richard Gamble’s case, grand strategy in Karl Walling’s case, and constitutional theory in Paul Carrese’s case – and all of them have considerably enriched my counter-factual thesis on what might have happened if the United States had stayed out of the Great War. Did each of them know the identities of the others? I wonder because of Gamble’s prescient remark about…
More Responses
In asking us to consider alternative histories of American responses to the Great War, Walter McDougall provides a splendid model of what the strategic theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, called “critical analysis.” Said the famous Prussian war college professor, it is not enough to complain that the results of a particular strategic decision were bad. One…
Not only was Wilson what Bourne called a “state idealist,” but he talked about imperial war in way that enhanced the mysticism of the modern state.
Walter McDougall’s trenchant Liberty Forum essay on Saint Woodrow and the Great War is as much concerned with the present and future of American foreign policy or grand strategy as with the past. The closing reference to Donald Trump warns the current administration and its supporters to sustain their focus on U.S. national interest as the…
“Don’t do stupid stuff”: A Conversation with Mark Moyar about President Obama’s Foreign Policy
Reagan’s Legacy in a World Transformed: A Conversation with Paul Kengor
Is America in Retreat? A Conversation with Bret Stephens
This edition of Liberty Law Talk discusses with the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens his recent book, America in Retreat. Stephens argues that an America which declines to engage globally with its military is accepting a false promise of peace at the expense of rising disorder. The introduction chapter is entitled “The World’s Policeman” where Stephens quotes President Barack Obama’s proclamation in a 2013 speech: “We should not be the world’s policeman.” Similarly, Rand Paul states that “America’s mission should always be to keep the peace, not police the world.” “This book,” says Stephens, “is my response to that argument.” Our conversation focuses on…
Ike’s Mystique
At the height of the Iran Contra scandal in Washington, “Saturday Night Live” had a funny skit about Ronald Reagan. It showed the President’s folksy, out-to-lunch personality to be a façade. Behind closed doors, he was a worker bee, driving younger staff members to exhaustion. Liberals could only entertain such a possibility fictionally. To them, Reagan was a lazy leader, “sleepwalking through history.”
Liberal avoidance of such a possibility tracked back to Dwight David Eisenhower’s 1953-1961 administration. To the liberals of that era, he was a disconnected President, more interested in his golf game than in leading the nation. Worse, he lacked political courage, specifically with regard to halting a rampaging Joe McCarthy.
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