Political Theory

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

That Robert Kagan’s recent essay, “The Strongmen Strike Back,” has sparked controversy is an unfortunate commentary on our public understanding…

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.

In the ceaseless struggle between civilization and barbarism, America has tipped the scales toward civilization, toward freedom and justice. In many ways, it has organized its national life—its economic, military, and moral resources—toward this end. Are we still up to the task?

Though Mead’s talk was focused on bipartisanship in American foreign policy, he had news for the audience: American foreign policy has rarely ever stopped “at the water’s edge.”

Americans fought a revolution over the exercise of absolute power. We should think long and hard about resurrecting absolutist tendencies in the modern presidency and how we can put the genie back in the bottle.

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.