Liberalism

Paul Miller: I don’t want bureaucrats in Washington, DC, to develop a blueprint of the correct form of national culture we’re supposed to identify with. Any effort to do so will inevitably, and justifiably, backfire.

A consolidating liberal empire faces an inevitable difference of interests with maritime great powers and nation-states. But it lacks either will or capability to enforce a new order.

Kirkpatrick has since passed from the scene, but her influence lives on, as evidenced in Robert Kagan’s exhaustive essay “The Strongmen Strike Back.”

Robert Kagan is correct that there are political movements that oppose neoliberal and neoconservative universalism. Authoritarianism is one of them. So, too, is Tocquevillian liberalism.

Despite his extravagant claim that liberalism alone can anchor any decent human life, Robert Kagan does not tell us what liberalism is in his Washington Post article.

Robert Kagan seems unwilling to consider that there might be something to learn from these “authoritarians.” If he did, he might paradoxically find an ally in the cause of preserving and securing liberal democracy and the rules-based order it helped build.

Dr. Hellyer is a nonresident Senior Fellow at the RH Centre for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council in DC and Senior Associate Fellow in International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

We need a return to a sober Christian Realism that appreciates our fallenness, the fallenness of the world, and our limits in shaping world events.

We were mostly right about his hateful rhetoric, fundamental dishonesty, trade wars, admiration for foreign dictators, and wild inconsistency. But we overestimated Trump’s competence and work ethic. His ability to bring material harm to the United States has been limited by how little he works and how little he knows about the presidency.