Liberal Order

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.

The world still requires order, and that still requires sacrifice. Many now believe we can have world order, peace, stability, and prosperity on the cheap. We can coast merely on soft power (Democrats) or by promoting national interests (Republicans) without the hard work and heavy lifting required to actually maintain that order, whether through diplomacy or hard power.

The foreign policies of Teddy Roosevelt and his distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt represent an intersection between two different Protestant worldviews.

The purpose of a National Security Strategy (NSS) is to explain how each administration views the security challenges facing the United States—and how it plans to address them. Love it or hate it, President Donald Trump’s NSS does this with often-blunt language and an unapologetic defense of the “America First” approach that shaped his campaign and his first year in office.

While realists and liberal internationalists typically argue about whether the goal of foreign policy should be to achieve pragmatic objectives or to support our fundamental beliefs about the value of human lives, adherents to either school likely would agree that working to end the scourge of the North Korean slave trade meets the threshold for action.

In light of its actions in 2016, there should be no question as to whether Vladimir Putin’s Russia is or can be a friend.

Is the liberal democratic order that has provided stability, prosperity, and freedom across the globe for the better part of 70 years in peril? Is America witnessing a slow fade of its core values, or is the country at a tipping point that will lead to a renewal of the spirit of liberty?

Nigel Hamilton’s Commander in Chief reveals Franklin Roosevelt formulated at a very early phase a clear vision for how a liberal international order should look post-World War II.

For America, a foreign policy defined purely by self-interest and without foreign aid has the effect of undermining America’s interests.