It’s time to rein in America’s crusading zeal and move toward a policy of restraint. We’re suffering from a bad case of foreign-policy overextension, and the only cure is taking a step back to reexamine our global role.
Classifications such as interventionist and isolationist, hawk and dove, realist and idealist, and multilateralist and unilateralist do not make much sense in the absence of the Cold War's defining conditions.
Voters will struggle to find a credible candidate from either of the two major parties willing to make the case for less military intervention. Robert Kagan and Ivo Daalder are satisfied with this. Most Americans should not be.
Anti-interventionists allege our leaders traded a strong, austere republic for a weak and sprawling empire predicated on a military might that could not match our own ambitions. This narrative negates real threats and real victories.
America has at times oriented itself to the East, at others to the West. But what we have always had is a sense of our manifest destiny. And now the ideals of California—nihilism with a suntan—seem to be our primary ideological export.
