Is America in Retreat? A Conversation with Bret Stephens

[Valin]

LibertyLawTalk :

Richard Reinsch, Bret Stephens

Mar. 18 2015

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:36 — 44.5MB)

 

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 the foreign policy choices that America should make by considering the factors that must be weighed and analyzed to make those decisions. Here, we disagree on foreign policy and strategy. If we believe, as Stephens argues, that “No great power can treat foreign policy as a spectator sport and hope to remain a great power,” then what, exactly, will that require? What are the ends that we seek, and what are the means at our disposal for pursuing a particular course? Why is a certain regional or national disorder in a part of the world America’s problem to remedy? How is that determination made?

 

(Snip)

 

 

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“America’s mission should always be to keep the peace, not police the world.”

Rand Paul

 

Has anyone pointed out to Rand (and the libertarian/isolationist wing of the Conservative Movement) that you're not going to get the former without the latter?

 

H/T Power Line Do yourself a favor.

[Valin]

America in retreat

Scott Johnson

July 10, 2015

 

Bret Stephens is the Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist and editorial board member of the Wall Street Journal. We interviewed him about America In Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disaster in the Power Line podcast that we posted here.

 

Bret spoke at the David Horowitz Freedom Center Texas retreat last month, giving a presentation based on his book. Bret argues that Obama’s foreign policy proceeds from a standard-issue leftism that can be traced back to Obama’s days as a college student. As he makes his case, he also makes several worthy recommendations for future reading. As with Stanley Kurtz’s compelling presentation on the Alinsky factor in the cases of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, this is worth your time.